8 ms·

I think a lots of people end up having a reaction like "well they're trying their best! what else are they going to do!? it's basically an impossible problem!"

by joelg 7y ago

I think a lots of people end up having a reaction like "well they're trying their best! what else are they going to do!? it's basically an impossible problem!" to things like this and other recent youtube headlines. That reaction betrays an assumption that YouTube must exist at its current scale in its current form, just because... it does already. And I think that assumption is dead wrong: we're bumping up on all kinds of emergent phenomenon (conspiracies, runaway recommendations) and issues (copyright, borderline child porn) that cannot be solved, and we shouldn't let Google give us their best-effort compromise. If you can't address these kinds of problems in your product, don't fucking build it.

aabhay 7y ago
There’s an interesting meta-phenomenon here. I call it automation handcuffs. A platform grows massively due to radically eliminating the policy and bureaucracy infrastructure that others have (YouTube vs typical content distro channels). That same platform is now so big that it has to add back in that bureaucracy and policy that it lacked. However, it’s now so big that it must use automation to solve these problems or else go bankrupt hiring people. In the end, society gets a half-measure. The platform is too big to legalize. The existing players are too small to compete. Users are forced to accept substandard experiences.
- jay_kyburz 7y ago
  If government wasn't broken, users would have have the power to say we don't want these substandard things in our society.
  - xyzzyz 7y ago
    Users are very happy with YouTube experience, and are unlikely to support new regulations which would degrade it: in fact, they'd rather support opposite. It's the small content creators that aren't happy with YouTube quasi-copyright private regulatory regime, but they don't have political power to do actually do anything about.
    - nerdponx 7y ago
      What regulation do you have in mind that would degrade the Youtube user experience?
      - xyzzyz 7y ago
        Anything that would require significantly increasing human review would result in significant reduction of the amount of content on the platform, for example.
        nerdponx 7y ago
        Is that true? Imagine if DMCA appeals required a human review on channels above a certain size, for example.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- _bxg1 7y ago
  > it’s now so big that it must use automation to solve these problems or else go bankrupt hiring people This is what Google and Facebook would like us to believe, but I'm not convinced. What it really comes down to is that they'd very much like to stay in the realm of automation, especially Google who are notorious for keeping humans out of the loop at any cost. See the long history of problems with their automated "developer relations" on Android. And the problem is that the disincentives for continuing to fail at these halfway-automated tasks are simply not strong enough to force their hand. So they can just keep "doing their best" with automation, even though automation itself is far from the best they could do.
  - LeifCarrotson 7y ago
    Here, let me reword it: > it’s now so big that it must use automation to solve these problems or else swim in slightly shallower pools full of money hiring people
  - minhazm 7y ago
    How else can they actually operate the platform without automation? Android app store submissions weren't even within several orders of magnitude to the scale of YouTube & Facebook videos. I think something like 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube. How do you propose people review that in real time? Just to keep up in real time you need (300*60) 18000 people watching the videos and not falling behind, which means you likely need at least 5x that number.
    - ksml 7y ago
      I don't think they need to screen all content in real time, but they certainly could use more people in reviewing flagged content and resolving disputes. This seems to be where all the major complaints -- it's just so hard to get a sane resolution when you are a corner case and the algorithm has decided against you.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      I didn't say without any automation. I'm saying that when these unreasonable cases come up, and people appeal, there often isn't even a human brought in at that stage (or at least, not one who's given enough bandwidth to legitimately investigate the situation). Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324 Cases like this, and the OP, are common-sense to any human being. Google doesn't especially want them to be resolved in this nonsensical way, they just don't care enough to direct the necessary resources to make sure a human touch is applied to them.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  go bankrupt How many people would they really have to hire? YouTube alone made $5 billion in 3 months' ad revenue: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
  - themacguffinman 7y ago
    Revenue isn't profit, they don't have $5B to spend on human reviewers.
  - bzbarsky 7y ago
    To answer that first question: In August 2019, there were 500 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every minute according to <https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/> https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/>. It's probably more now (e.g. it was 300 hours in 2017), but let's go with that number. That's 720,000 hours per day. If you figure people work 8-hour days, that's 90,000 people. Assuming they never take vacations, don't get weekends off, and really do work 8-hour shifts with no breaks. None of which seems remotely plausible. If we assume 5-day workweeks, 6 hours of actual "productive" time per day, and 2 weeks annual vacation, closer to 175,000 people. YouTube revenue in the corresponding timeframe is somewhere between $9.5 billion and $14 billion. How much of that is profit and how much is already being spent on infrastructure costs and whatnot is unclear. But 175k people at $50k/year, say, is $8.75 billion/year. Which is getting pretty darn close to those total revenue numbers. Note that that's $50k expense to the employer (i.e. including benefits, employer-side taxes, office space, etc, etc, not just salaries), which is likely to be an underestimate if these people are in the US. There's the question of whether every minute of video needs to be watched by humans, of course. But at that point we're back into automation-land to some extent.
    - nerdponx 7y ago
      question of whether every minute of video needs to be watched by humans Not even close. We're talking a small % of videos that receive copyright takedown requests, which is already a small % of all videos uploaded.
jay_kyburz 7y ago
I agree, and say similar things when talking about holding social media responsible for the things posted by users. If you want to be a "carrier" you can't moderate anything. If you are going to moderate some things, you have to be responsible for all things. If your business can't work within those rules, then go out of business.
save_ferris 7y ago
1000% agree with this. It’s crazy how we as a society just accept this as the new status quo as if the world would fall apart if these services were scaled back or redesigned in such a way to reduce sharing and content proliferation on a mass scale. Sure, billion-dollar businesses have been built around these apps, but that alone shouldn’t justify their existence. Sadly, we’ve seen this before. Back in the 70’s, Ford sold the Pinto knowing that it would result in deaths due to the location of the gas tank. Basically, if they got rear-ended, the gas tank had a decent chance of exploding and killing the driver. Instead of issuing a recall, Ford surmised internally that it would be cheaper to settle with victims.[0] Unfortunately, social media companies have been so good at avoiding regulation, to the point that the people don’t have a real way to contest these kinds of practices. 0: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  The world would not fall apart if we make it impossible to have YouTube, or, for that matter, if we make it impossible for people to personally drive cars. This would, however, make billions of people, who currently derive great benefits from status quo, very unhappy. Billions of people use YouTube, and like it a lot. They like it much more than what was available before it, given how much time they spend on it now. They would be very unhappy if government decided that "this alone doesn't justify its existence". Why do you think the government back in 70s, government didn't just say "usefulness of cars doesn't justify their existence" and banned them?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - etrabroline 7y ago
    Internet video became possible because of broadband. google/yt did nothing magical or noteworthy, they just operate at a loss so no one can compete. Imagine GM sold cars at a loss, gaining 99% monopoly of your country, then put GPS trackers in all cars and sold everyone's whereabouts to the highest bidder and allowed a foreign government (the US) warrentless access. You're saying our only option is to stop driving cars. I disagree.
tmpz22 7y ago
Humanity built the pyramids. We went to the fucking moon. To say basic content moderation is impossible by "the best and brightest software engineers" is such a cop out. The real impossibility: "doing it while still optimizing for the greatest amount of ad revenue".
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > Humanity built the pyramids. We went to the fucking moon. To say basic content moderation is impossible by "the best and brightest software engineers" is such a cop out. You can easily get everyone to agree on the answer to "is there a pyramid right here?" Try getting them to agree on "is this video valuable?"
- joshspankit 7y ago
  This is a very important distinction. YouTube Kids was the service where this really stunned me: How could it possibly make sense that a service designed specifically for children can’t be properly moderated? Even of they had one single employee manually reviewing the full content of all submitted videos, they would have 6-8 hours of safe content each day. With an automated quality check first, they could have had 6-8 hours of excellent safe content per day. Instead they created a service that damaged countless children. For the sake of ad revenue.
lunias 7y ago
Yeah, but I'd argue its larger than YouTube. I think copyright (for digital assets) is near impossible to enforce on the internet - it's akin to the war on drugs. And I don't think we should unbuild the internet. The new model seems to be: give away all digital content for free (marketing), build a trustworthy brand (to prevent any ol' copy cat from beating you), and sell a service / experience / physical item(s) associated with it. e.g. When someone uses your song in their YouTube video it should be seen as free advertising for your guitar lessons / live show / t-shirt company.
- Lapsa 7y ago
  It's not just songs. Do you want to identify as nothing more but a brand?
  - lunias 7y ago
    Agreed, it's all digital assets i.e. songs, movies, tv shows, books, etc. You can still sell physical assets e.g. vinyl, blu-rays, tickets to shows, hardbacks, etc. like people did prior to the internet, but the driving motivation of most consumers today seems to me to be convenience. Physical is rarely more convenient than digital for anyone these days. It's not about what I or anyone else "wants" IMO. It's about what is actually possible and then what's desirable for humanity considering the tradeoffs. Like the war on drugs, it can be stated all day how bad drugs are for society, but it's a moot point if you can't enforce a drug free policy. Psuedo-enforcement gives rise to much worse conditions and impacts on society through black markets, misallocation of funds to ineffective counter-measures, and inconsistent punishments. What are some examples of things you're thinking of that people identify as that are not just brands and how do you see them as distinct? I believe that freedom of information is more beneficial to society than any single individual's or company's claim to copyright. Will creativity suffer? Perhaps, but I don't think creative people can help but be creative (nor will people stop sharing it online). Creativity is not what's at stake; it's the established model of monetizing that creativity that is in jeopardy. I don't think it's crazy that the internet has changed things. I think it's crazy to not change along with it.
cortesoft 7y ago
So your take is that since Google sometimes removes content that is actually legal, the solution is... to remove all content? How is that in any way better than the current situation? Currently, there is a chance your video will be pulled from YouTube, and you might get your entire account banned... meaning a fraction of people don't get to use YouTube to host their videos. If instead, we just shut down YouTube, then.. everyone doesn't get to host on YouTube... I don't get how that is better
- rodgerd 7y ago
  > So your take is that since Google sometimes removes content that is actually legal, the solution is... to remove all content? No, their take is to refuse to allow socially harmful monopolies to exist just because they already do. The problem is that Google want YouTube to own everything to do with video, and don't want to take any responsibility for making that work at the scale they want to profit from. There's no good reason for YouTube to be there for hosting personal videos, music videos, education videos, vlogs, game streaming, and a bajillion other things. There's no good reason not to have more humans involved in assessing and tidying up when "the algorithm" fucks it up.
  - d1zzy 7y ago
    > No, their take is to refuse to allow socially harmful monopolies to exist just because they already do. How is youtube being the most popular video site (a monopoly I assume you're arguing there) socially harmful? And is that harm more than the benefits it brings? > The problem is that Google want YouTube to own everything to do with video, and don't want to take any responsibility for making that work at the scale they want to profit from. If it was very profitable and technically possible to build a similar system but better, we'd have that. The fact that instead the opposite is happening (consolidation) seems to suggest that whatever Youtube is doing is working, as a solution to this problem (large free third party video hosting site). > There's no good reason for YouTube to be there for hosting personal videos, music videos, education videos, vlogs, game streaming, and a bajillion other things. And you get to decide that for all the people that enjoy those clips and want to host them? > There's no good reason not to have more humans involved in assessing and tidying up when "the algorithm" fucks it up. Other than hurting the bottom line probably not. But the bottom line is what determines if something like this gets built. If it was sufficiently profitable and feasible to build alternatives that do a lot more human reviewing of all these videos then it would already be done so.
dsjoerg 7y ago
The problem isn't the scale of Youtube, it's the scale of the Internet. If Youtube didn't exist, we'd still have billions of people posting billions of videos, and who is going to take the time to police it all? Extending your argument about Youtube to the Internet & humanity, I think you're arguing that if we cannot address these kinds of problems in our Internet, then we shouldn't fucking build it. I disagree. I think we're better off with the Internet even though these moderation problems are unresolved.
snarf21 7y ago
I think the issue is that anything that is uploaded is freely searchable. I think they need to force everything into a channel structure. You apply for a channel and have to designate the content type, etc. and that requires humans BUT it also lets you earn from advertising so it is a hoop worth jumping through for most. It is also probably 90% of the views on YouTube today anyway. Search merely shows you a representative channel video and then you have to subscribe and opt-in to that kind of content. People will have to host random garbage somewhere else. I agree that upload anything, search anything, view anything can never be moderated or sustained.
ssivark 7y ago
> If you can't address these kinds of problems in your product, don't fucking build it. If they’re so intent on moving fast and breaking things in search of growth, the only way to introduce skin in the game is that old adage “you broke it -> you bought it”
Dahoon 7y ago
>borderline child porn I don't know what you are referring to but how can something be "borderline child porn"? It would think either it is or it isn't. Legal or illegal?
nemothekid 7y ago
>That reaction betrays an assumption that YouTube must exist at its current scale in its current form, just because... it does already. No, YouTube must exist at its current scale because a lot of people find it massively useful. Your argument is no different that saying we shouldn't have cars because some people get behind the wheel drunk. The argument you should be making is the impact of YouTube a net-negative on society or a net-positive and for YouTube specifically you'd have to convince me its a net-negative. In any case, copyright and borderline childporn are problems with the internet in general, but I don't see why you stop at dismantling YouTube instead of just turning the entire internet off.
d1zzy 7y ago
I completely disagree with that. I think that even with all the issues small content creators run into because of overzealous automated systems, Youtube's overall value to me has been tremendous across its lifetime. Every day I watch some new clip and learn something new. It's just not imaginable to look back before we had free third party video hosting, to me at least. Thing is, if Youtube wouldn't function for most people then it wouldn't get that many viewers then the ads wouldn't be paying as much then it wouldn't exist. But practice proves that it can exist, with lots of compromises being made err-ing on the side of the large copyright holders. Maybe it's possible to build alternative systems that work better, there's no law that says there can't be alternatives to Youtube so let's see if it happens. If not, that itself should be a strong enough signal that maybe the way Youtube is done may be one of the _few_ ways this can be done.
xen0 7y ago
I don't think this is a useful view. We, as a society, clearly want YouTube to exist. The fact that Youtube/Google's efforts and our current legal frameworks cause problems in edge cases doesn't mean we should just give up.
- krapp 7y ago
  We, as a society, clearly want streaming video hosts which allow free accounts and public uploads to exist. Youtube doesn't need to be (and isn't even) the only site to offer that. Also, Youtube didn't have a lot of these problems before getting acquired by Google, so they're not inherent to the nature of the platform. Youtube could still exist with different, less hostile policies.

by joelg 7y ago

aabhay 7y ago

There’s an interesting meta-phenomenon here. I call it automation handcuffs. A platform grows massively due to radically eliminating the policy and bureaucracy infrastructure that others have (YouTube vs typical content distro channels). That same platform is now so big that it has to add back in that bureaucracy and policy that it lacked. However, it’s now so big that it must use automation to solve these problems or else go bankrupt hiring people. In the end, society gets a half-measure. The platform is too big to legalize. The existing players are too small to compete. Users are forced to accept substandard experiences.

jay_kyburz 7y ago
If government wasn't broken, users would have have the power to say we don't want these substandard things in our society.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  Users are very happy with YouTube experience, and are unlikely to support new regulations which would degrade it: in fact, they'd rather support opposite. It's the small content creators that aren't happy with YouTube quasi-copyright private regulatory regime, but they don't have political power to do actually do anything about.
  - nerdponx 7y ago
    What regulation do you have in mind that would degrade the Youtube user experience?
    - xyzzyz 7y ago
      Anything that would require significantly increasing human review would result in significant reduction of the amount of content on the platform, for example.
      - nerdponx 7y ago
        Is that true? Imagine if DMCA appeals required a human review on channels above a certain size, for example.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
_bxg1 7y ago
> it’s now so big that it must use automation to solve these problems or else go bankrupt hiring people This is what Google and Facebook would like us to believe, but I'm not convinced. What it really comes down to is that they'd very much like to stay in the realm of automation, especially Google who are notorious for keeping humans out of the loop at any cost. See the long history of problems with their automated "developer relations" on Android. And the problem is that the disincentives for continuing to fail at these halfway-automated tasks are simply not strong enough to force their hand. So they can just keep "doing their best" with automation, even though automation itself is far from the best they could do.
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago
  Here, let me reword it: > it’s now so big that it must use automation to solve these problems or else swim in slightly shallower pools full of money hiring people
- minhazm 7y ago
  How else can they actually operate the platform without automation? Android app store submissions weren't even within several orders of magnitude to the scale of YouTube & Facebook videos. I think something like 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube. How do you propose people review that in real time? Just to keep up in real time you need (300*60) 18000 people watching the videos and not falling behind, which means you likely need at least 5x that number.
  - ksml 7y ago
    I don't think they need to screen all content in real time, but they certainly could use more people in reviewing flagged content and resolving disputes. This seems to be where all the major complaints -- it's just so hard to get a sane resolution when you are a corner case and the algorithm has decided against you.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    I didn't say without any automation. I'm saying that when these unreasonable cases come up, and people appeal, there often isn't even a human brought in at that stage (or at least, not one who's given enough bandwidth to legitimately investigate the situation). Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324 Cases like this, and the OP, are common-sense to any human being. Google doesn't especially want them to be resolved in this nonsensical way, they just don't care enough to direct the necessary resources to make sure a human touch is applied to them.
nerdponx 7y ago
go bankrupt How many people would they really have to hire? YouTube alone made $5 billion in 3 months' ad revenue: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
- themacguffinman 7y ago
  Revenue isn't profit, they don't have $5B to spend on human reviewers.
- bzbarsky 7y ago
  To answer that first question: In August 2019, there were 500 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every minute according to <https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/> https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/>. It's probably more now (e.g. it was 300 hours in 2017), but let's go with that number. That's 720,000 hours per day. If you figure people work 8-hour days, that's 90,000 people. Assuming they never take vacations, don't get weekends off, and really do work 8-hour shifts with no breaks. None of which seems remotely plausible. If we assume 5-day workweeks, 6 hours of actual "productive" time per day, and 2 weeks annual vacation, closer to 175,000 people. YouTube revenue in the corresponding timeframe is somewhere between $9.5 billion and $14 billion. How much of that is profit and how much is already being spent on infrastructure costs and whatnot is unclear. But 175k people at $50k/year, say, is $8.75 billion/year. Which is getting pretty darn close to those total revenue numbers. Note that that's $50k expense to the employer (i.e. including benefits, employer-side taxes, office space, etc, etc, not just salaries), which is likely to be an underestimate if these people are in the US. There's the question of whether every minute of video needs to be watched by humans, of course. But at that point we're back into automation-land to some extent.
  - nerdponx 7y ago
    question of whether every minute of video needs to be watched by humans Not even close. We're talking a small % of videos that receive copyright takedown requests, which is already a small % of all videos uploaded.

jay_kyburz 7y ago

I agree, and say similar things when talking about holding social media responsible for the things posted by users. If you want to be a "carrier" you can't moderate anything. If you are going to moderate some things, you have to be responsible for all things. If your business can't work within those rules, then go out of business.

save_ferris 7y ago

1000% agree with this. It’s crazy how we as a society just accept this as the new status quo as if the world would fall apart if these services were scaled back or redesigned in such a way to reduce sharing and content proliferation on a mass scale. Sure, billion-dollar businesses have been built around these apps, but that alone shouldn’t justify their existence. Sadly, we’ve seen this before. Back in the 70’s, Ford sold the Pinto knowing that it would result in deaths due to the location of the gas tank. Basically, if they got rear-ended, the gas tank had a decent chance of exploding and killing the driver. Instead of issuing a recall, Ford surmised internally that it would be cheaper to settle with victims.[0] Unfortunately, social media companies have been so good at avoiding regulation, to the point that the people don’t have a real way to contest these kinds of practices. 0: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/

xyzzyz 7y ago
The world would not fall apart if we make it impossible to have YouTube, or, for that matter, if we make it impossible for people to personally drive cars. This would, however, make billions of people, who currently derive great benefits from status quo, very unhappy. Billions of people use YouTube, and like it a lot. They like it much more than what was available before it, given how much time they spend on it now. They would be very unhappy if government decided that "this alone doesn't justify its existence". Why do you think the government back in 70s, government didn't just say "usefulness of cars doesn't justify their existence" and banned them?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- etrabroline 7y ago
  Internet video became possible because of broadband. google/yt did nothing magical or noteworthy, they just operate at a loss so no one can compete. Imagine GM sold cars at a loss, gaining 99% monopoly of your country, then put GPS trackers in all cars and sold everyone's whereabouts to the highest bidder and allowed a foreign government (the US) warrentless access. You're saying our only option is to stop driving cars. I disagree.

tmpz22 7y ago

Humanity built the pyramids. We went to the fucking moon. To say basic content moderation is impossible by "the best and brightest software engineers" is such a cop out. The real impossibility: "doing it while still optimizing for the greatest amount of ad revenue".

thaumasiotes 7y ago
> Humanity built the pyramids. We went to the fucking moon. To say basic content moderation is impossible by "the best and brightest software engineers" is such a cop out. You can easily get everyone to agree on the answer to "is there a pyramid right here?" Try getting them to agree on "is this video valuable?"
joshspankit 7y ago
This is a very important distinction. YouTube Kids was the service where this really stunned me: How could it possibly make sense that a service designed specifically for children can’t be properly moderated? Even of they had one single employee manually reviewing the full content of all submitted videos, they would have 6-8 hours of safe content each day. With an automated quality check first, they could have had 6-8 hours of excellent safe content per day. Instead they created a service that damaged countless children. For the sake of ad revenue.

lunias 7y ago

Yeah, but I'd argue its larger than YouTube. I think copyright (for digital assets) is near impossible to enforce on the internet - it's akin to the war on drugs. And I don't think we should unbuild the internet. The new model seems to be: give away all digital content for free (marketing), build a trustworthy brand (to prevent any ol' copy cat from beating you), and sell a service / experience / physical item(s) associated with it. e.g. When someone uses your song in their YouTube video it should be seen as free advertising for your guitar lessons / live show / t-shirt company.

Lapsa 7y ago
It's not just songs. Do you want to identify as nothing more but a brand?
- lunias 7y ago
  Agreed, it's all digital assets i.e. songs, movies, tv shows, books, etc. You can still sell physical assets e.g. vinyl, blu-rays, tickets to shows, hardbacks, etc. like people did prior to the internet, but the driving motivation of most consumers today seems to me to be convenience. Physical is rarely more convenient than digital for anyone these days. It's not about what I or anyone else "wants" IMO. It's about what is actually possible and then what's desirable for humanity considering the tradeoffs. Like the war on drugs, it can be stated all day how bad drugs are for society, but it's a moot point if you can't enforce a drug free policy. Psuedo-enforcement gives rise to much worse conditions and impacts on society through black markets, misallocation of funds to ineffective counter-measures, and inconsistent punishments. What are some examples of things you're thinking of that people identify as that are not just brands and how do you see them as distinct? I believe that freedom of information is more beneficial to society than any single individual's or company's claim to copyright. Will creativity suffer? Perhaps, but I don't think creative people can help but be creative (nor will people stop sharing it online). Creativity is not what's at stake; it's the established model of monetizing that creativity that is in jeopardy. I don't think it's crazy that the internet has changed things. I think it's crazy to not change along with it.

cortesoft 7y ago

So your take is that since Google sometimes removes content that is actually legal, the solution is... to remove all content? How is that in any way better than the current situation? Currently, there is a chance your video will be pulled from YouTube, and you might get your entire account banned... meaning a fraction of people don't get to use YouTube to host their videos. If instead, we just shut down YouTube, then.. everyone doesn't get to host on YouTube... I don't get how that is better

rodgerd 7y ago
> So your take is that since Google sometimes removes content that is actually legal, the solution is... to remove all content? No, their take is to refuse to allow socially harmful monopolies to exist just because they already do. The problem is that Google want YouTube to own everything to do with video, and don't want to take any responsibility for making that work at the scale they want to profit from. There's no good reason for YouTube to be there for hosting personal videos, music videos, education videos, vlogs, game streaming, and a bajillion other things. There's no good reason not to have more humans involved in assessing and tidying up when "the algorithm" fucks it up.
- d1zzy 7y ago
  > No, their take is to refuse to allow socially harmful monopolies to exist just because they already do. How is youtube being the most popular video site (a monopoly I assume you're arguing there) socially harmful? And is that harm more than the benefits it brings? > The problem is that Google want YouTube to own everything to do with video, and don't want to take any responsibility for making that work at the scale they want to profit from. If it was very profitable and technically possible to build a similar system but better, we'd have that. The fact that instead the opposite is happening (consolidation) seems to suggest that whatever Youtube is doing is working, as a solution to this problem (large free third party video hosting site). > There's no good reason for YouTube to be there for hosting personal videos, music videos, education videos, vlogs, game streaming, and a bajillion other things. And you get to decide that for all the people that enjoy those clips and want to host them? > There's no good reason not to have more humans involved in assessing and tidying up when "the algorithm" fucks it up. Other than hurting the bottom line probably not. But the bottom line is what determines if something like this gets built. If it was sufficiently profitable and feasible to build alternatives that do a lot more human reviewing of all these videos then it would already be done so.

dsjoerg 7y ago

The problem isn't the scale of Youtube, it's the scale of the Internet. If Youtube didn't exist, we'd still have billions of people posting billions of videos, and who is going to take the time to police it all? Extending your argument about Youtube to the Internet & humanity, I think you're arguing that if we cannot address these kinds of problems in our Internet, then we shouldn't fucking build it. I disagree. I think we're better off with the Internet even though these moderation problems are unresolved.

snarf21 7y ago

I think the issue is that anything that is uploaded is freely searchable. I think they need to force everything into a channel structure. You apply for a channel and have to designate the content type, etc. and that requires humans BUT it also lets you earn from advertising so it is a hoop worth jumping through for most. It is also probably 90% of the views on YouTube today anyway. Search merely shows you a representative channel video and then you have to subscribe and opt-in to that kind of content. People will have to host random garbage somewhere else. I agree that upload anything, search anything, view anything can never be moderated or sustained.

ssivark 7y ago

> If you can't address these kinds of problems in your product, don't fucking build it. If they’re so intent on moving fast and breaking things in search of growth, the only way to introduce skin in the game is that old adage “you broke it -> you bought it”

Dahoon 7y ago

>borderline child porn I don't know what you are referring to but how can something be "borderline child porn"? It would think either it is or it isn't. Legal or illegal?

nemothekid 7y ago

>That reaction betrays an assumption that YouTube must exist at its current scale in its current form, just because... it does already. No, YouTube must exist at its current scale because a lot of people find it massively useful. Your argument is no different that saying we shouldn't have cars because some people get behind the wheel drunk. The argument you should be making is the impact of YouTube a net-negative on society or a net-positive and for YouTube specifically you'd have to convince me its a net-negative. In any case, copyright and borderline childporn are problems with the internet in general, but I don't see why you stop at dismantling YouTube instead of just turning the entire internet off.

d1zzy 7y ago

I completely disagree with that. I think that even with all the issues small content creators run into because of overzealous automated systems, Youtube's overall value to me has been tremendous across its lifetime. Every day I watch some new clip and learn something new. It's just not imaginable to look back before we had free third party video hosting, to me at least. Thing is, if Youtube wouldn't function for most people then it wouldn't get that many viewers then the ads wouldn't be paying as much then it wouldn't exist. But practice proves that it can exist, with lots of compromises being made err-ing on the side of the large copyright holders. Maybe it's possible to build alternative systems that work better, there's no law that says there can't be alternatives to Youtube so let's see if it happens. If not, that itself should be a strong enough signal that maybe the way Youtube is done may be one of the _few_ ways this can be done.

xen0 7y ago

I don't think this is a useful view. We, as a society, clearly want YouTube to exist. The fact that Youtube/Google's efforts and our current legal frameworks cause problems in edge cases doesn't mean we should just give up.

krapp 7y ago
We, as a society, clearly want streaming video hosts which allow free accounts and public uploads to exist. Youtube doesn't need to be (and isn't even) the only site to offer that. Also, Youtube didn't have a lot of these problems before getting acquired by Google, so they're not inherent to the nature of the platform. Youtube could still exist with different, less hostile policies.