Popular 3D Print Channel ‘3D Print General’ Abruptly Removed from YouTube

Troubling news from YouTube: a popular 3D print channel has been abruptly deleted.

The channel in question is the “3D Print General”, hosted by Sean Aranda. The channel was quite popular, having an enormous number of subscribers. Aranda would post frequent videos of 3D printing techniques and often equipment and material reviews.

Aranda is also the author of “3D Printing Failures”, a book about troubleshooting 3D printing problems. That book, which is re-issued each year with an updated edition, is one of the most popular we’ve selected as our Book of the Week, receiving praise from readers.

Now, all of that is in question, as Aranda found out his channel has been removed from YouTube. Not just “suspended”, it’s been removed, with all of its content.

It’s even worse than that. Aranda explained that all of this suddenly happened:

• The channel 3D Print General has been removed
• Aranda’s personal YouTube channel has been removed (which he had been paying for)
• His father’s business account has been deleted (apparently Aranda ran an ad for it once)
• A friend’s account was also removed that had saved some deleted 3D Print General channel videos

That must be quite shocking, especially for someone who makes their living off of YouTube and associated traffic.

But there is more to the story.

It seems that Aranda was on YouTube’s radar for some time based on his publication of videos focusing indirectly on 3D printed weapons. Aranda had received a “strike” from YouTube about this in the past, so he removed all those videos (which then were re-published on the friend’s account as above.)

The trouble continued when he published a documentary on the history of 3D printed weapons, and it seems YouTube gave him a second strike at that point. Then, suddenly, it was all deleted.

It’s unclear whether Aranda will ever be able to return to YouTube, but it seems unlikely as their three-strike policy is quite rigid. As of this writing he is unable to contact YouTube.

Aranda has set up an alternate video channel on Rumble, a YouTube alternative, where he describes the situation in more detail:

It seems unlikely that Aranda will be able to recover all of his viewers on Rumble, which really doesn’t have the type of users he wants to address. Rumble is a platform that’s accumulating many who have been ejected from other platforms, making the audience there skewed towards politics, not tech matters.

For YouTube, managing video content is literally an impossible tasks. Aranda has not been able to get in contact with YouTube, and that’s not surprising: due to the scale of activities, the process is most likely entirely automated.

YouTube apparently receives 500 hours of video uploads EVERY MINUTE. It is impossible for all that to be reviewed manually, and they have some complex scanning system to filter out what they don’t like. But what are the parameters to that system? Is it even possible for them to be fair in all cases? I suspect there are lots of edge cases and it’s easily possible to fall on the wrong side. That could be the case here.

My guess is that YouTube surely noticed the re-appearance of the deleted videos on the second channel and the algorithm probably concluded that it was an attempt to keep the videos under another name. Doing so would be a standard way for those with “bad” videos to attempt to keep them online: just make another email address and do it again. It could be that YouTube viewed the second channel in that light. Once determined, it may have generated a third strike, and you’re out.

Meanwhile, the YouTube 3D print community is shaken, and I bet several might be reviewing their video content right now. Discussion ensued, including online chats, such as this one hour presentation from TH3D Studio:

I have no idea where this could go, but I do know that Aranda produced excellent 3D print content that will be missed. Hopefully he will be able to recover somehow.

Via Rumble and 3D Print General (Hat tip to Timothy)