A YouTube creator has gone on the offensive after dealing with an more and more widespread drawback on the platform: moderation and enforcement that leaves creators confused by the logic and brief on their movies’ income potential.

The hassle facilities on a longtime YouTube video host whose content material is standard among the many retro-gaming devotees at Ars Technica’s workers. The creator, who goes by the net deal with “Summoning Salt,” chronicles the historical past of varied basic video games’ speedrunning world data. His hour-plus analyses show how completely different gamers strategy older video games and exploit numerous bugs. The video games in query are usually cartoony 2D fare as a substitute of violent or M-rated titles.

On Friday, Summoning Salt took to social media to assert that his newest 78-minute documentary about 1989’s Mega Man 2, which went dwell in mid-September, has been “age-restricted” by YouTube’s moderation system. Bizarrely, the video had been age-restricted roughly one week in the past, just for YouTube to relent to the creator’s enchantment and declare that the restriction had been positioned in error.

Thus, Summoning Salt was stunned to study on Friday that the video had been re-age-restricted—which he claims severely limits a creator’s means to monetize content material on YouTube. An age restriction flag works in opposition to content material creators in two methods: it limits the commercial pool that may run in pre-roll and mid-view breaks, and it primarily slams the door on YouTube’s advice algorithm, which could in any other case tease Summoning Salt’s content material to new viewers.

Remember, that is Mega Man 2 we’re speaking about

YouTube’s preliminary discover didn’t make clear what moderation flag Summoning Salt’s newest video—a video that paperwork the 18-year historical past of individuals enjoying and exploiting the NES sport Mega Man 2, embedded above—had triggered. His enchantment finally teased a solution from YouTube’s moderation workforce: “express language in sure components.” As Summoning Salt defined, the video features a three-second outburst of six F-words, taken straight from a Twitch streamer’s microphone throughout a passionate gameplay second.

Summoning Salt, a speedrunning-fluent creator, took his evaluation instruments to the microsecond stage and appeared for different unrestricted YouTube content material within the gaming class to see whether or not his video’s curses-per-capita proportion (0.16 p.c) had been exceeded. He instantly discovered an unrestricted instance from one other standard retro-minded channel, Angry Video Game Nerd, which had almost double the swears in a video one-twelfth as dense within the script. (It’s unclear what number of of AVGN’s movies, famously filled with curse phrases, are flagged with age restrictions.)

Ultimately, Summoning Salt factors to YouTube’s unclear suggestions to content material creators for content material like curse phrases. According to YouTube’s personal guidelines, the road between “average profanity” (allowed in YouTube’s unrestricted movies) and “robust profanity” comes right down to not solely particular phrase alternative but additionally frequency, and YouTube merely means that the road is crossed when reaching a threshold of “utilized in each sentence,” or having sure swear phrases seem in outstanding moments like the primary 30 seconds of a video or as textual content in a thumbnail.

Summoning Salt famous that the moderation workforce initially responded with a “full evaluation” in roughly 40 minutes, lower than the size of the entire video. Such a swift evaluation course of implied that an auto-moderation system used voice evaluation to chronicle the variety of swear phrases, and Summoning Salt informed Ars by way of e-mail that YouTube has instruments in place to auto-mute what it detects as offending content material—however that YouTube does not mechanically apply them within the case of age-restriction disputes, and utilizing built-in auto-mute instruments does not essentially undo the injury performed by any moderators’ age-gating. This leaves creators out of the income circuit as soon as YouTube raises such a flag. He additionally informed Ars that his movies have solely been restricted previously by YouTube because of copyright flags over included music, which he has zero subject with.