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YouTube Is Removing Some Nootropics Channels (vice.com)
According to Wikipedia, nootropics are drugs, supplements, and other substances that improve cognitive function, particularly executive functions, memory, creativity, or motivation, in healthy individuals. Many of them are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, and some have reported addiction and harm, as well as uncomfortable side effects. These concerns may be behind YouTube's recent decision to delete at least three nootropics channels over the past three days. Motherboard reports: The nootropics YouTubers don't know why YouTube penalized them. YouTube's community guidelines prohibit harmful or dangerous content, including "hard drug use," which seems like the most likely reason. [Ryan Michael Ballow, a YouTuber whose channel "Cortex Labs Nootropics" was deleted] believes it's either "pharmaceutical industry influence" or some other elements within YouTube's leadership decided to target nootropics specifically. "It's all extremely fishy, and demonstrates a continued censorship trend with YouTube," he said in an email. [Jonathan Roseland, another YouTube that recently had their channel "Limitless Mindset" deleted] guessed his channel got flagged because he made videos about kratom, an opioid-like substance that has been linked to deaths and is coming under increased government regulation. Other kratom videos have apparently been removed. But Ballow said he's never posted a video about kratom, and a search for "kratom" on YouTube pulls up countless results, including reviews. Similarly, searching for nootropics, magnesium, aniracetam, oxiracetam, and Modafinil showed no shortage of videos, including reviews.
It's hard to know why the channels were removed since YouTube declined to clarify specifics with the creators and did not respond to a request for comment. YouTube allows creators to appeal enforcement decisions, but Ballow's appeal was rejected. The rejection notice did not clearly state which guidelines were violated, but it pointed to another potential violation. YouTube "included a paragraph that states that if the sole purpose of your YouTube videos is to drive people off of the platform, said videos break the rules," Ballow said. He interpreted this to mean the fact that his videos directed viewers to other websites to buy products.
It's hard to know why the channels were removed since YouTube declined to clarify specifics with the creators and did not respond to a request for comment. YouTube allows creators to appeal enforcement decisions, but Ballow's appeal was rejected. The rejection notice did not clearly state which guidelines were violated, but it pointed to another potential violation. YouTube "included a paragraph that states that if the sole purpose of your YouTube videos is to drive people off of the platform, said videos break the rules," Ballow said. He interpreted this to mean the fact that his videos directed viewers to other websites to buy products.
YouTube removes videos without an explanation aside from an implied "because fuck you, that's why". News at 11.
YouTube rejects the appeal for reason given above. News is still at 11.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
This is why ad-supported media can never address the harms caused by the pharmaceutical industry and the very powerful pharmaceutical lobby in the US. All those advertising dollars influence the stories covered, the news promoted, and the videos allowed to be distributed on platforms.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
It can decide who it wants on its platform.
They don't owe you anything.
Maybe because YouTube has too much power, and not enough competition?
They were giving out medical advice without a license?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
What the fuck is happening to my country? Is no one above the influence of big pharma? The idea that they're taking these videos down because they're making false claims about any product is an absolute bullshit excuse. Search 'flamethrower diy' and you'll find heaps of videos that have much more severe ramifications than someone discussing nootropics would.
Is there a video platform that is less interested in censorship and jerking off corporate interests?
Just buy a domain (which I presume most of these people already have) and publish the videos there.
Those who are interested in that topic will certainly find them. Monetarization will be more difficult, but I'm sure the channels were made solely in the interest of science anyway. So nothing changed.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
The owners think of them as private spaces, but sell them to the public as public spaces. At some point they become de-facto monopolies or oligopolies (which see), and we end up having to create trust-busters, just like after the previous great depression.
davecb@spamcop.net
There's tremendous liability here. Telling people to try drug X without a medical license and the drug not coming through a properly regulated distribution channel likely leads viewers to buy it on the internet. No telling whether the drug contains what it says, perhaps just enough fentanyl to kill a rhinoceros. The danger is more in how the viewer might obtain the drug rather than the danger of the drug or advice itself. At least that's my take.
He who forgets will be destined to remember. - EV
And if they don't want to host a video of a gay wedding that is fine too.
Oh wait...
Can we stop using this excuse about private companies can do what they want? Or can they do what they want as long as liberals say its ok? Fascism much?
You don't know what you had until it's gone. YouTube is now censoring their users' content at an alarming rate. People who just swear or even talk about sex jokingly see their channels demonetized at the least and deleted at worst. Free speech on the YouTube is limited now as they play thought police, judge, and executioner.
All this bullshit YouTube is doing to building towards their demise. If no competitor comes in then we are looking at full scale unions between YouTube's. This is peoples jobs and when YouTube can take away your years of hard work with a click and never offer an explanation they have way too much power. Much much more money flies though YouTube than Uber and the state of California was debating considering Uber drivers employees. It's only a matter of time before YouTube realizes by taking full control of their users they are going to be forced to call them employees as well.
If it was that easy, do you think Google would have forked out the billions they paid for YouTube ??
I have to assume the people who are vetting all these YouTube channels must be taking some of these nootropic supplements themselves. Who could stand doing that job otherwise?
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
I think we now know what happened to APK
> likely leads viewers to buy it on the internet.
Not just "the internet", but the videos had links to the publishers site, and instructed viewers to buy there. So plain old illegal drug advertising.
The person on YouTube may have been an advertising affiliate for the site, or may have owned it outright. I don't see much difference.
The use of nootropics by engineering types reminds me very much of the use of "supplements" by body builders. There actually are things that work -- in fact there's a remarkable amount of overlap in the things mental and physical jocks need to do to maximize performance. Get plenty of high quality sleep. Good diet. Daily exercise. Caffeine. In fact if you include coffee and tea, the use of nootropics is nearly universal among desk workers.
The marketing of nootropic products to mental jocks looking for an edge is remarkably similar to the snake oil marketing aimed at athletes. Take a substance where an (typically very minor) effect has been seen in a couple of studies and conflate evidence with proof. Now if you think about what the brain is, the idea that there is a single non-food molecule that will make it work better is pretty-far fetched. What exactly is this magical formula supposed to be doing in the brain? And by "exact", I mean which specific brain structures are being changed and how? The answer is, usually, nobody knows, but they have some promising studies, or sometimes just a single promising study.
Here's the thing about complex systems like the brain, or the troposphere for that matter: they are rich sources of contradictory evidence and statistical outliers. A single study or even a handful of studies is evidence, but it's not proof.
Now for bodybuilding there are two, or maybe three supplements that are safe and have evidence for useful effect, but I'd argue that there are unlikely to be any true nootropic compounds. That include caffeine. People use caffeine to offset the effects of inadequate sleep and meals heavy on refined carbohydrates that trigger insulin brain fogs. They also use caffeine to interfere with a natural brain function that promotes our survival: boredom. Boredom evolved so you don't waste too much time on things that aren't going to get you fed or laid in the near future -- a category of tasks that includes most desk work. So in a way, caffeine is actually an anti-nootropic.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There's tremendous liability here. Telling people to try drug X without a medical license [...]
This is argument by misdirection.
1) Google should bear no liability for what it's users say, and
2) Google should not be making legal decisions.
Once you go down the path of "it's the carriers' responsibility", it's really very easy to suppress all kinds of speech. Make one flashy arrest very public, and watch how the "chilling effect" causes all the carriers to clamp down on everything even remotely related, out of fear.
It's very, *very* clear that the current situation is untenable and unfair to the population.
The situation is now so bad that there is a grassroots movement calling for the breakup of the big players (google, facebook, twitter, and so on) on monopoly/antitrust grounds.
Google could be smart, recognize the growing trend, and go back to a "public commons" mode before that happens.
Or, they could continue to try to adjust public thought, try to "bring home" the election for their preferred candidates, and then get chopped up like so much cordwood.
(OTOH, that would probably be good for the users. Google has turned decidedly evil over the past few years, and "not being evil" is a competitive advantage that the smaller pieces could use to compete against each other.)
We need to start moving to the distributed blockchain platforms as fast as possible. Check out steemit, busy.org, d.tube and the others coming around and on top of stuff like ipfs. Central platforms need to be phased. Im not saying current platforms are the way to go, but definitively, we need to empower distributed storage and services on blockchains transparent contracts, very much away of centralized palaces like alphabet's offers.
NO SIG
I don't quite understand why no one in the open source world has built a distributed youtube already.
We have the perfect peer to peer technology to distribute the videos.
Youtube comments is a feature no one really wants.
The indexing bits looks a bit more complicated, but that is what DHTs are for.
Recommendation, subscription can be built as an overlay service.
I am surprised we haven't seen that happen already.
To be fair you are mixing up Google and Facebook there, and Google is still far more liberal in terms of what it allows on YouTube. There are a lot of channels far more extreme than Diamond and Silk. It has to be said that SoundCloud is quite good too with hosting far right podcasts, although maybe because they get less attention.
But yes, commercial realities hit YouTube. They make money from ads, and advertisers are more discerning than they had hoped.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
what the first amendment says
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Since when is YouTube the same as congress?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
More than likely we need to move over to a torrent style video system and nas boxes with quick erase functions in case of raids. We will undoubtedly be labeled terrorists for wanting to watch non approved content.
I'm still waiting for the next gen torrents with anonymous cloud storage and with soloman tech and xor pieces such there is no content unless you have all the pieces. And pieces are shared among torrents of different content. It's all split across opaque cloud storage. (Imagine you xor a video of barney the dinosaur with a video on hacking an xbox.) In exchange for you donating storage and bandwidth you get to upvote content.
Careful. If that research is a few slick websites with results-are-not-typical testimonials this feeds the woo-verse that is filled with supplements, homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic and natural remedies all getting rich off $30 experiments while distracting people from what actually works.
If you are bored at work you should be trying to find a new job. There is nothing worse that hating your job because it makes you bored or is work you dislike.
If you continue in a job you dislike you will inevitably have an awful midlife crisis when you finally realize life is far to short to spend 80% of it doing a job you hate.
I'm always astonished that our current medical field requires knowledge of the mechanism of action before allowing a drug on the market.
First off your statement is factually false. There is NO requirement that we understand the mechanism of action of a drug before bringing it to market. But there is a HUGE benefit to understanding the mechanism of action first. If you don't know how a drug works then you are basically doing science by guess and check which is usually stupid, slow, and frequently counterproductive. If you don't know how it works then you can't predict what sort of effects and side effects it might have on the body. You can waste huge amounts of money, brains, and time trying to test treatments that have no chance of success because you don't understand the underlying mechanism of action. Science is based on understanding what is happening so you can make testable predictions. Without that information you are basically trusting to luck.
There are many drugs on the market for which we do not have a complete understanding of their mechanism of action. Most drugs aimed at treating mental disorders fall into this category. We don't actually know why many of them work, just that they do. There is NO legal requirement that we understand the mechanism of action prior to approving a drug. Furthermore drugs can be used for off label purposes by a physician.
I've come across treatments and potential cures that appear to work when based only on the evidence, yet can't be marketed because their mechanism of action is unknown.
No you haven't because that isn't a requirement by the FDA. What cures? What "evidence"? Stop making up strawmen to support your bogus claims.
Medical research has stagnated, for about the last 30 years.
Complete bullshit. Medical research has made astonishing gains in the last thirty years. You could only believe this if you have not bothered to look for actual facts or if you are making an argument from ignorance.
Well, the man more right than his neighbors is a majority of one. :)
I'll take your points one by one.
(1) Taurine and Tyrosine are both stimulants, and stimulants are the one class of substances that have strong evidence supporting them. However my point is that it's debatable whether they actually make your brain better. They unquestionably are useful in forcing your brain to do things it doesn't want to do.
(2) The notion that nootropics are far-fetched is simply an evaluation of plausibility -- similar to the notion that oxygen free speaker cables make your stereo sound better. If you could devise a double-blind study which showed people could hear the difference, then I'd be delighted to endorse your claims.
(3) Sure; not knowing how something works doesn't prove it can't work. But if you don't have proof that something works, shouldn't you at least have an argument for why it's a plausible that it might work? The evidence for most putative nootropics is that they have been shown promising for treating various forms of dementia. But a drug which helps with the cognitive side effects of Parkinson's isn't necessarily going to make a healthy person smarter. That's like claiming a non-amputee can run faster by strapping a wooden leg to his knee. So if you want to claim that drug makes ordinary people smarter you need either proof or at least show that the mechanism of action is relevant to healthy people.
Medical research: medical science stagnating for the last 30 years: tell that to someone who has cancer. This is simply the adult version of lack of object permanence; just because you aren't paying attention doesn't mean nothing is happening.
a) Reputation is a lousy guide to supplements because the whole industry runs on hype, hope, and moving onto the next thing when people discover that chromium picolinate can't really make the pounds "melt away". Given wishful thinking, it takes a long time to undo the hype, and by then you've gone through two or three next big things.
b) Studies are a lousy way for a layman to judge something is effective, which is why marketers love to cite them. You can prove almost anything by citing -- unchallenged -- carefully chosen studies because science produces spurious, one-off results all the time. The gold standard for evidence is a systematic review paper published in a high impact scientific journal. Point to one of those supporting a putative nootropic, and I'm there.
c) Recommendations by on-line doctors: Now I'm suspecting that you must be writing a parody.
d) testimonials: this is just point (a) reiterated.
e) Product maturity: this is actually a good piece of advice.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You should discuss why all these people rely on a service for income without any contractual guarantee.
The vast majority of people in any job are "at will" employees which means they have no contractual guarantee of continued employment. Ever give a tip to the waitstaff at a restaurant? There is no contractual guarantee there. Why should people using YouTube have guarantees? They knew what the deal was when they signed up. If the deal changes they can't pretend that they didn't know that was a possibility.
I'm not really against the concept of nootropics, I'm just against trusting marketers to solve your problems for you.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The difference between medicine and alternative medicine, is that medicine actually works.
Just sayin'
The Youtube whiners don't want a decentralized platform without gatekeepers. They want a centralized ad service that pays them for the ad impressions their videos can get.
Take away the ads, and you've taken away all the reasons anyone gives the slightest fuck about Youtube or their "censorship."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Careful. If that research is a few slick websites with results-are-not-typical testimonials this feeds the woo-verse that is filled with supplements, homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic and natural remedies all getting rich off $30 experiments while distracting people from what actually works.
If traditional medicine "actually worked", as you put it, people wouldn't need to desperately search for alternatives.
Just 'sayin...
What do we call alternative therapies that are shown to have efficacy?
Medicine.
A great example is acupuncture*, it was demonstrated to have efficacy that exceeded placebo and now many insurances cover it. My local physical therapist office even provides it.
*specifically sham acupuncture, turns out where you place the needles doesn't matter. Simply randomly placing them around the affected area was shown to reduce pain. Magical chakra points performed no better.
We can probably guess why the channel was removed. Some of the videos seemed to be making medical claims about the drugs, and the descriptions had links where you could buy them...
It might also have something to do with what happened to Google back in 2011 , where they settled a case with the US Department of Justice regarding advertisements for rogue online pharmacies, for $500m.
Followed by a shareholder lawsuit regarding the same issue, which they settled for something like $250m.
If traditional medicine "actually worked", as you put it, people wouldn't need to desperately search for alternatives.
Just 'sayin...
If you find a lump on your testicle, I highly recommend you show it to an oncologist rather than a witch-doctor. Even metastasized testicular cancer has a survival rate of 73% with modern treatments; early stage cancer survival rates are close to 100%.
On the other hand, if you have stage IV pancreatic cancer, by all means consult the witch doctor. At the very least he's got as good a shot as anyone at treating the existential dimension of what you're going through.
The fact that medicine acknowledges that it can't do everything is the reason it advances so rapidly. Witch-doctoring traditions also improve over time, to the point that healing traditions are well worth looking into for scientists, but what science does in years takes generations of trial and error.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There are 4 possible combination :
1- both medicine and alternative medicine work
2- only medicine works
3- only alternative medicine works
4- nothing work
"3" is extremely rare, and in the case of "1", doing nothing at all and letting your body recover may be all that's needed. The reason it simple: when alternative medicine work, it is studied and soon enough, if the risks aren't too great, it becomes medicine. Medicine is just alternative medicine that work.
The advantage alternative medicine has is that quite often, the human care is much better than what we have in hospitals or at the doctors office. While a doctor will just treat your disease like he does with the dozen people waiting in line behind you, your "alternative doctor" will take the time to teach you a healthy lifestyle (sleep well, eat well, exercise, ... the usual obvious stuff no one does). In fact the reason homeopathy was successful isn't because of the sugar pills, it is because Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy also imposed strict lifestyle rules to his patients, some of them like limiting smoking and drinking alcohol are scientifically tied to health improvement today.
That is only one of the many problems that drive people to supplements. As you elude to there are the promises from their marketing department that the supplement works. They can almost claim anything, literally snake oil. Meanwhile pharmaceuticals that are regulated to by the FDA must disclose side-effects and must have scientific data the supports their claims. This ends with a perception of supplements working when in reality its more deception.
But that's not the only issue, cost is another huge issue. Recently while I was getting a prescription filled I scoffed to the pharmacists at the price of the generic medication. He asked if I had a high deductible plan and then explained that if I never get close to hitting my deductible then it'd be cheaper to pay out-of-pocket and not process it through my insurance. It's was like a quarter of the cost. He basically said, "Yep, it's that's big a pain to deal with the insurance companies" He also recommend that I check websites like GoodRx.com to price shop across different pharmacies. What I found was the of the two medications I regularly take the price difference is huge between pharmacies. This is how screwed up the pharmaceutical market is.
Let me share a story to illustrate the dangers of these supplemental companies. A cousin of mine is a seller of essential oils. One day she noticed a mole on her husband that looked like it could be melanoma. Instead of taking him to a doctor she treated him with frankincense oil. After about 6 weeks the mole was gone and she called it a success.
When I told this to my dermatologists he explained that even when there is a suspicious mole, there's only about a 10% chance that it's melanoma. I think we can all agree that that 10% chance is not worth the risk and so they usually take it out as a precaution. He also pointed out that they could have had the mole removed for free at the local skin cancer fair they have every year.
He is healthy and we still disagree on if she did the right thing. This is why it's important give clinical research more credibility then your own observations.
So let's say someone does go the IndieWeb route to replace YouTube. What means would you recommend for a small-time video producer to sell preroll ad time and promote the videos to people who have watched videos with similar subject matter?
Try this and see if the symptoms go away is the best choice in many cases. The doctor *could* treat a minor injury that will heal itself with steroids, but it's not worth the risk.
Most things people complain are best left to get better on their own. Or they require interventions that people don't want to go along with. People don't want to restrict calories, they want a magic pill that makes the pounds melt away. There are drug treatments that will do that, but they're dangerous enough that gastric bypass surgery is a less radical choice.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
>and advertisers are more capricious than they had hoped
Like when a C-level sees the latest shiny and buys 1000 of them. All it takes is one email in the right place.
The hawkers know this well. For either of these topics. But I don't have enough inklings to guess if censorcreep around nootropic vids would be financially or politically driven.
It's difficult to define better. Evolution is slow, and our thinking choices might be better (which is why we evolved the big brains.) If need to get somewhere in my car, but I'm tired, the smart move is to take a good stimulant. We haven't evolved enough in the last 100 years to "know" it's bad to fall asleep at the wheel.
Chris Mesterharm
"(1) Taurine and Tyrosine are both stimulants, and stimulants are the one class of substances that have strong evidence supporting them. However my point is that it's debatable whether they actually make your brain better. They unquestionably are useful in forcing your brain to do things it doesn't want to do."
Sorry, I don't know the tags for quotes and the lack of an edit function means I don't know if this
worked so forgive me if this looks weird...
Here's my personal experience with Taurine and Tyrosine. Take it for what you will.. I've been doing heavy cardio for around 1.5 years now and I've experimented with different supplements to see the impact they have. Here's my experience:
All exercise is done on a revolving stair climber, at speed level '12' (out of 18) for 60 minutes 1. (Control test). No supplements, only drinking regular iced water.
Start off OK. After about 10 minutes, fatigue sets in and becomes progressively worse. Heart rate is ~130. Maintaining speed is a real chore and I find myself alternating between staying upright and resting on my elbows. Around the 40 minute mark, am able to maintain speed easier and stay upright. Heart rate is ~145. At the 50 minute mark, feel like I can go another 30 minutes relatively easily. Heart rate is ~150.
2. Drinking a can of Monster Zero (no sugar, no calories) that is high in Taurine and Caffeine
Take a big gulp of Monster around 2 minutes before starting the work out. After around 20 minutes, fatigue is starting to set in but I don't feel the need to rest on my elbows. Heart is rate is around ~135. At the 50 minute mark, I feel like I can keeping going easily. Heart rate is ~150. Continually sipping Monster throughout the workout.
3. Taking 2 Magnum Rocket Science pills with a gulp of iced water 20 minutes before workout. (Google it, available at Popeyes supplement stores). Contains caffeine and tyrosine.
Fatigue sets in around the 5 minutes mark. Heart rate at ~130. At 10 minutes, fatigue is all but gone. Heart rate at ~145. At the 50 minute mark, feel like I could probably go another hour. Heart rate at ~155. Continually sipping iced water throughout.
Bear in mind this is over the course of 1.5 years and I do cardio 5 days a week so the results are repeatable for me. Drinking plain water is definitely the hardest on the body, the fatigue hits hard and stays for longer. Monster is second best but if I want to burn maximum calories (according to my fitbit), the Rocket Science pills give the best result.
I have yet to feel any negative affects of the Rocket Science pills but I don't use them more than once a week. They do boost my heart rate a little higher and it takes maybe 30 minutes longer for my heart rate to get back to resting levels after a workout. My regular drink is a can of Monster during the workout.
I haven't tried any of these during a workday but I generally don't feel tired or bored so I don't need them. I don't even really need them for the workout but they do help in burning off calories.
When homeopathy et al troll intentionally confuses "actually works" with "just works".
Is it possible to rebuild usenet?
mfwright@batnet.com
There is a narcotic drug that has been out there awhile and it is plaguing our society, often used most by STEM types, and it causes; tremors, anxiety, irritability, sleep deprivation, over active bladder and racing thoughts among other things. It is so addictive that many cannot function without it and withdrawal symptoms are severe. We need to do something about trimethylxanthine before it is too late! Someone please think of the children!
It may be that many of the claims made about nootropic dietary supplements are fraudulent because the doses of the active ingredients in popular commercial brands are too small to have any effect: https://www.japha.org/article/...
My guess is that if anything has the effects that they claim, it'd be classified as a pharmaceutical and require extensive research and clinical trials to determine appropriate dosage levels, side-effects, longer-term health effects, etc..
Apparently, the evidence from preliminary studies so far hasn't been promising, i.e. no effect on adults. If you're a strict vegan, it might be advisable to take taurine supplements though - consult with a medical expert on the subject before taking the internet's word for it.
In other words, just another brand of snake oil. There's one born every minute.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
I bet that it was a seborrheic keratosis. Younger people can them, but it's mostly something you'll become familiar after you get into your 60's. https://www.mayoclinic.org/dis...
Often they just fall off on their own, and there won't be a scar.
Wanna see pics of mine?
Stimulants, every last one.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.