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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

I don't sympathize with shooting up a company's headquarters at all, but I feel that this could have been avoided by forcing Youtube (and, for that matter, all other social networks!) to have a way to reach an actual human support.

In the end, this is one of the "externalities" that get forced upon society when the big companies decide to cut corners on support. Some will... take matters into their own hands. Be it by spraying racist tweets as graffiti in front of the Hamburg Twitter office or by running amok, when they feel desperate enough. Desperation, especially perceived desperation, drives people to really horrible decisions - and demonetizing all videos of someone who depends on YT income for life is certainly enough to seriously mess with people.

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I don't see a how you could come to a reasonable accommodation with someone who thinks, "You will let me do anything I want on your platform (with full benefits) or I'll shoot you."

This doesn't look like a support issue at all to me.

His point is if the person could have reached some kind of support they might never have ended up in such a desperate situation.

When I get really mistreated / fooled and can't reach any kind of human support and none of the "robotic" support options work - it's incredibly frustrating. Not to the point where I'd shoot someone, but I've definitely smashed my fist on a table once or twice.

I have been once in such point of frustration when I had not received prize for what I won in the competition and the person whom I was in contact with did not said that they can't pay me but just ignored my mail. And it was not even a huge amount, but it could be used for a semester in college.

Edit: I was emphasizing that I became irrationally frustrated, not that I didn't kill someone.

> Though I was not close to pick a gun.

You maybe not, but less mentally stable persons or those without any safety net? The US isn't known for good mental health care and also not for a safety net. Not everyone lives a privileged life.

It isn't so much that companies decide to cut corners on support, it's that at companies that operate at this scale (YT, FB, Twitter, etc ) the individual content-creator is a drop in the ocean. When she was de-monetized, it may have meant the world to her, but in YT's perspective it's not worth the time/effort to even have a conversation about it (say beforehand.)

Well, they made an economic tradeoff, and now people have been injured. As the famous comic says: "But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

The problem is not Youtube support ...

Yea. To even suggest this is Youtube supports fault is absurd.

You can blame everything on a lunatic and that is right thing, but it won't change anything.

But she said she talked to the support team...

I mean a support team that has actual freedoms to help the customer and is not forced to operate on a script that has only one option to tell the customer: You're screwed.

Or, even better: as here the case seems to be that the shooter depended on Youtube as income, why shouldn't she have the right to have her effective "firing" appealed in a proper court of law, like in Germany?

It's been alleged that her videos were genuinely controversial (vegan screed, animal violence depictions). How is a support team going to fix that?

And the right to sue for redress of grievances is covered in the first amendment, for goodness sake. She didn't exercise it.

How is "vegan screed" controversial

Animal violence is controversial. I added the vegan bit to clarify that she wasn't, I dunno, a dog fighting afficionado. Her content (which, again, I haven't seen!) was "controversial", it wasn't a straightforward ToS violation.

> And the right to sue for redress of grievances is covered in the first amendment, for goodness sake. She didn't exercise it.

Good luck trying to sue one of the most powerful companies in history. I wouldn't dream of this.

What are you talking about? If it's less than the local statutory limit (quick google tells me $7500 in California, likely around what this woman thinks she was owed) then you don't even need a lawyer. File a small claims suit, show up at court, and make your case before the judge.

Now, she probably wouldn't win, because there's no contract here and Google has no affirmative duty to host anyone's video in particular nor to pay them for it. But you can absolutely do it.

> But you can absolutely do it.

You can do it, but who has the resources (especially the motivation and willpower) to drag such a case through the various appeal instances, with the issue that if you do lose, you have to pay the opposite party's lawyer bills? No way in hell I'd risk loading up THAT debt risk.

Because youtube didn't employ her. She was never hired, and so can't be fired, in any sense of the word. If anyone thinks that they are working for Youtube, then they must be delusional.

Edit: I meant if anyone thinks they should depend on youtube ads for income, they are delusional.

If they actually are receiving their income from Youtube why are they delusional?

Youtube specifically states they dictate how much you will earn, and you have no negotiating power.

How does the law work in Germany? If youtube pulls ads from a German's videos, they can demand to get paid anyway?

Not if you're working on your own (though there may be a slim chance of getting damages replacements if the decision is proven to be malignant, but that's difficult as hell to do). If you are an employed creator, on the other hand, yes your employer has to pay you even if Youtube shuts down the monetization.

Exactly this safety net is what the "gig economy" tries to cut...

She was crazy. I don't think attempts to walk through her thought processes will bear fruit

Whenever something like this happens, people like to dismiss the situation by saying we can't possibly understand "crazy" people. It avoids having to consider the systemic reasons why something like this can happen.

I'd imagine a significant part of it is that we live a society where some people can have their livelihood yanked away from them, with no support structure to help them, leaving them desperate and angry.

Absolutely it makes sense. "That person shoot out random youtube employees therefore youtube should change its helpdesk" argument does not make sense. It makes as much sense as caving to any other form of terrorism.

Youtube and its employees are the victim here. Using this to put pressure on them in the "for the safety of your employees" way is incredibly distasteful.

> It makes as much sense as caving to any other form of terrorism.

Addressing the systemic reasons behind hostile actors does not mean "caving" to the actors themselves.

Should we let ISIS take over the Middle East and establish a fascist theocratic state? No, obviously not.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't carefully consider how the past decades of violent imperialist foreign policy might have played a significant part in the conditions that allowed ISIS to rise, and use that to inform our future policy.

By this logic, systemic reason behind "lovesick" teenager shooting former girlfriend is that girls sometimes stop dating boys. Girls should think again before rejecting boys. And black churches should think again about praying, because Dylan Roof had shoot them.

Neither Austin bomber nor Parkland shooter explained why they did it, but whatever they states reasons, the objects of their hate don't necessary have responsibility to obey their wishes.

So no, the "youtube can not demonetize videos" straightforward nonsense is not an analysis of systemic reasons behind this shooting.

>So no, the "youtube can not demonetize videos" straightforward nonsense is not an analysis of systemic reasons behind this shooting.

Indeed it is not, but that would be a very shallow reading of the systemic arguments made in this thread.

Elsewhere in the thread, quite openly: "Them cutting off a person off their income without any way of appeal caused the whole chain of events in the first place."

That is extreme, sure. But I have to work hard to not interpreted milder comments that way too. The straightforward reading is pretty much that. The youtube blaming and insinuations that youtube brought it in itself were pretty much prevalent when I commented.

> Youtube and its employees are the victim here.

No. The employees are the victim. Youtube? Not at all, save for a day of missed work. Them cutting off a person off their income without any way of appeal caused the whole chain of events in the first place.

Jess christ, I can't believe people here argue that with the straight face. Do you treat other mass shooters and terrorists the same? He shot the school therefore school caused it by not giving him everything he wanted? Seriously.

By this logic, if employer in right to work state fires someone and that someone shoots the workplace, employer caused the shooting.

> Do you treat other mass shooters and terrorists the same?

Of course not. But there is, more often than not, a common background between all these cases. Recognize and fix the system and prevent more suffering. Shootings are the ultimate outlet, so if you fix the system you automatically prevent loads of more suffering.

> By this logic, if employer in right to work state fires someone and that someone shoots the workplace, employer caused the shooting.

Yes (except for the rare case where an immediate firing is warranted, such as stealing from the employer, sexual harrassment or similar).

There is no obligation to exercise the "fired on the spot". You can as a boss always behave like a decent human being and show your employees at least a fucking basic level of respect. Or you can decide "uh we dont need XYZ any more, even if he's still productive, has worked years of overtime, shown dedication and has to support a family but if I fire him I can make 10k personal bonus that year"... but then I would not be surprised if you'd end up at the wrong end of a baseball bat or worse.

By the way I would advise you to read up on how most of the workers' rights we know today in civilized areas of the planet (right to unionize, strike, illegality of "at will employment", social security systems) have been achieved: through shitloads of blood. If your state still has legal "at will employment", the state is responsible for any avoidable suffering caused by this.

Yes, and the crazy people are the ones who, when desperate and angry, try to kill 3 innocent people and then themselves.

I don't understand the equivocation here. It seems a symptom of the broad inability in modern social thinking to pin any responsibility on individuals. While this stems from our desire to root out systematic issues, which is necessary and important, it should not be the only thing we care about.

In fact, a culture of individual responsibility actually can become a deep feature of our society if we take the time to engender it.

Talking about individual responsibility is not ignoring the systematic issues in society, because a lack of focus on individual responsibility is actually rooted in our culture and hence is a systemic issue in itself.

I would argue the opposite. We already have an intense culture of "individual responsibility" in many areas of society, and that's exactly the problem.

Because a culture that seeks to blame individuals for problems makes individuals extremely reluctant to actually accept responsibility for their decisions.

Consider how the airline industry investigates after a disaster: They investigate the circumstances leading to each bad decision, and then attempt to change the process such that it cannot happen again. This leads to individuals being forthcoming about their mistakes, and implements changes that actually solve the problem. This culture of focusing on systemic issues rather than individuals has made air travel extremely safe.

>Yes, and the crazy people are the ones who, when desperate and angry, try to kill 3 innocent people and then themselves.

That was crazy, but maybe not all parts of that machine were broken. If I genuinely had millions of views on my videos that gave me an income and was suddenly cut off, I would have felt being very wrongly treated as well.

Hate to break it to you, but no one is dead outside of the shooter currently.

You might want to take some of your individual responsibility and correct your statement.

Changed it, though "trying to kill 3 people" rather than "killed 3 people" are morally equivalent.

Everyone can be crazy if pushed in just the right way.

Sorry but this is ridiculous. Someone decided that to respond to having video de-monetized on a website was justification for trying to kill people. How on earth is it reasonable to start down the path of 'well if she had talked to tech support...'

Tier 1 support is now supposed to dissuade lunatics from murdering people? Are we supposed to construct our society around making sure that nothing, nowhere could possibly lead to a lunatic getting upset at some decision that could inconvenience them?

> at some decision that could inconvenience them?

Losing one's job is not just an "inconvenience". It is an inconvenience in a country with a social safety net. In a country like the US where job loss often enough means direct loss of health insurance and a place to live, losing a job can (and will) lead to homelessness and eventual death.

Where does it say that Youtube was the sole source of this woman's income? But let's say it was. People lose their jobs all the time and don't result to violence. It makes zero sense to assign blame to Youtube for the shooting even if them de-monetizing her took away her only source of income.

> People lose their jobs all the time and don't result to violence.

Oh, enough do. There's a reason why fired people get escorted by security.

Yeah you're right, and those people who got shot probably deserved it because they were probably racists or something.

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