The Crime of Curiosity
The author conflates two things. The right to biohack at home and Youtube&#x27;s alleged obligation to let him broadcast his material.<p>The first one is okay, as long as we&#x27;re not talking about experiments that may be dangerous to the public. (which he seems to categorically reject for some reason, while home made bioterrorism is a real threat), the second one just doesn&#x27;t follow at all.<p>Youtube has no realistic way to tell whether someone producing home-made science on youtube is a phd ex-nasa biohacker who follows best practices or just a complete quack who tries to sell dangerous fake remedies to vulnerable people. In practice the incentive to promote the latter probably far outweighs the former in number given the huge, generic audience on Youtube.<p>77% of the Youtube audience in the US are 17-25 years old, it&#x27;s not some niche forum for engineers and the notion that they can read scientific papers and weed out legitimate science created at home from misinformation is absurd. The correct platform for something like this is a separate forum or community where enthusiasts meet with some barrier to entry, not the mass media.<p>I immediately question the motive of someone who promotes individual science or &#x27;hacking&#x27; and seeks the largest mass media audience. I think the motive is much more straight forward. The author has a company that sells genetic engineering kits to people and by banning him from Youtube that impacts him financially. I personally think Biohacking and eccentric science is cool, but the appropriate audience for the kind of things he did, like treat himself with CRISPR or replace his entire microbiome to treat IBS is probably a community more self-selected than HN, not Youtube, which is mainstream television for young adults.