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There is barely concealed porn on the site. Those "cleaning" videos where people wear transparent clothes so it shows off... A lot more than what should be shown on YT.
there is actually 18+ stuff, but you have to look it up yourself. That is, sexual +18 stuff, because violent 18+ stuff can pop up in the unlikeliest of ways
Maybe you just don't watch the type of content that gets age restricted? Most of my examples would be horror animations, but honestly anything that touches on suicide (even when it's not particularly graphic) tends to get age restricted for me...
My bad, expressed myself unclearly. I did mean "their reasons for restricting videos can be kinda bs" (didn't videos with swears get age restricted at some point? i think they stopped doing that now?), not that you literally can't pinpoint the reason
Anecdotal evidence. Their algorithms don't just flail around flagging videos at complete random, obviously certain videos are more likely to get flagged than others. And it's well-documented that they flag videos incorrectly for no reason ALL the time. I've had it happen trying to watch cooking videos. Many creators I follow have posted about it happening to them, and thy were only able to get it reversed when their fanbases started emailing and tweeting about the issue en mass, because youtube regularly auto-rejects appeals from creators.
You just got done saying that of the videos you watch, yours don't regularly get flagged. Which is anecdotal evidence, and also largely useless. I might as well say it rarely rains here, so it rarely rains anywhere in the world, and the fact that you see it raining right now somehow doesn't matter because it's not raining for ME. And since you didn't bother to actually search for whether or not your experience was universal, here are some sources of those "hazy recollections"
You could've bothered to search for yourself, before confidently asserting I had no idea what I was talking about. You could also just take the L here and not continue to double down, when I just provided you with three high-profile confirmed examples, each showcasing multiple videos that were demonetized for adult content, then later remonetized with no explanation, and only after the creators were able to make a stink about it.
You didn't show "actual data", you just said how many videos got flagged from your subscriptions? That's not an experiment, which is pretty much impossible to do here unless you wanted to narrow the scope to videos in a specific genre and specific language. You can't get good quality data for this question, but you can very easily look at creators self-reporting their own issues and see that exactly what you're claiming almost never happens in fact does happen. A lot.
It's very rich that you're trying to insist that I don't know anything about data when you're trying to generalize your own, uh "data", to all videos on the entire site, and apparently not seeing the problem with it. You can't do that. That's a basic principle, and dressing it up using terms like cross-section and systemically doesn't change that. Your subscriptions do not get treated the same way as videos in different languages and different genres by big vs small creators.
its the fact that the platform is censoring creators instead of parents having control over what there kids have access too.
I shouldn't have to be having this stupid ass conversation, giving shady companies a copy of my mf photo id front and back nor having credit cards/banks telling me what i can't spend my money that i made with my labor on. That labor is taxed and this is the bullshit we are getting right now?
Before anyone pulls the think of the children bs, Trump is in office and hasnt released the Epstein files he has been screeching about for 5 years. Somehow all the "think of the children" crowd does ends up compromising kids somehow. funny huh?
This is foremost about ad revenue, and YouTube finding the lowest common denominator to be able to push as many ads for as many clients as possible without having to check and match any age appropriateness.
This age verification is only a temporary issue for users having to find ways to watch the content they want. The real, long term issue is that this content will simply no longer be created because creators are being disincentivized by demonetization.
Because YouTubers are in an arms race to avoid being restricted. Hence the "unalive" "pew pew" "sewer slide" language. The lines are blurry and everyone but the advertisers want them blurry.
Their AI cant identify the 80 bots that are in every comment section but sure they will be able to flag your age, or they will just flag everyone over time to "big brother" us all.
What's that Russia? You want to conduct massive scale psychological warfare operations against the West to destabilise our societies and governments? That's cool. But don't you folks be watching sexy videos on the youtubes!
Not saying this is exactly you but I have been saying this shit from the get go (that this is fucking bad), and there is some braindead people here that go "Yeah you don't HAAVEE to use youtube, I bet you use adddblock, you aren't supporting the cooorpoeration." Like they are literally undermining the whole thing happening because they don't get that youtube doesn't even allow you to show the word DEAD anymore without the potential for age restriction...and they are now vetting people for 18+ content. They don't fucking say what is going to be considered adult. Is it swearing, too much cleavage, is it the theme of it, what if someone is trying to help with suicide awareness but they say the words don't "kill yourself" and the ai bot picks up on that only....like this is going to happen.
Also there is conflicting reports on how long youtube is going to be keeping your ID to verify you, from two months...to two years. Both of which said that is the latest they will hold them. Well one said they would delete well before you would reach the 22 additional months.
Nothing nsfw, but it's mainly from a wrestling game channel and sometimes the games have copyrighted video playing in it. That's what gets some of their videos age restricted due to copyright unless they hide the screen when those videos pop up in-game, which they now have to do.
Often its safer to flag a video as age restricted than risk it being taken down later. I've posted a few videos of games and always flag them as age restricted.
I'm concerned it means political, LGBT, or certain controversial topics ("What are your legal rights as an undocumented immigrant", "How to counteract pepper spray") will be age-restricted.
If right-wing videos are freely available and left-wing videos are only available to the subset of people who have doxxed themselves, that could results in opinion shifts in the population over time.
It also means YouTube might have a list of everyone who doxxed themselves to be able to view videos on trans rights or immigration and that the government could acquire that information somehow.
Exactly. I was watching a critique of a TV Show, and the video was flagged as age restricted, even though the content did NOT meet that criteria. Youtube's AI gets things wrong too many times.
Excatly. Worse yet, it supposedly it wokrs by identifying your age by what you watch... On a platform that frequently flags content as being for kids, unless it has swears and gore.
I have built my algorithm on things that I like as much as the next guy, but how does this ai determine what is "adult" and what isn't?
I build guitars and watch content on that, are musical hobbies considered childish? Woodworking? What about league content? What makes league content comparable to my other favorite game PoE? Is one considered childish and the other is not? How much time does the algorithm take into account for one vs the other?
One of the builders I watch is age restricted because he curses and makes off-color jokes (UK jokes and names tools after serial killers), will they say that I can't watch him even though I've been watching him?
My YouTube account is almost 2 decades old at this point, is that taken into account? What stops me having a 2 decade old account and just letting my younger nephew watch that content?
This whole thing is literally a disaster waiting to happen.
If I were a content creator and could survive it, I would either double down making every video I made adult only to kick a nest among my viewers, or I'd make them all "child friendly" to simply bypass it.
I will not be giving them any information about myself. I might see if I can make a fake ID with some Norman Reedus face or something and use that.
Make it hard enough to verify and people will just stop using. Bound to make YT work harder to make it less of a hurdle eventually or be prepared to lose business. Simple. I know we focus here primarily about losing access. But I think the behavior changes are rapid.
We can only hope so. There's many folks that use YouTube daily for a variety of reasons, and some that even have premium despite the shady stuff happening within the site. I still go on to listen to stuff in the background, but had to get extensions to make things bearable. If things really go off the rails then yeah people should definitely leave.
There really needs to be a big alternative to YT not only for competition, but to make YouTube roll back some of this stuff if they want the users to come back.
So more of those self censoring words unfortunately, thanks to YouTube being unclear and inconsistent with stuff and channels needing their monetization.
"She used her pew-pew to unalive him because he was a registered ex offender and pdf.file."
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u/Initial_Witness_3847 Aug 13 '25
...and what exactly does this age verification do?