Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

It's a misleading estimate because it doesn't define "user". In the case of YouTube, there are a billion users but only creators would require support.

Maybe there are 100,000 YouTube creators who get paid anything meaningful? (I have no idea, just guessing.) If 0.1% of them require support, that's 100 requests per day. Any moderately successful mom-and-pop SaaS gets that much.

There's no financial reason for Alphabet not to provide personal support to YouTube creators. They just don't want to.

View on HN

What you're suggesting is how it already works. Partnered creators all have access to a creator support email (with a 1 business day SLO). Top partnered creators (aka the "creators who get paid anything meaningful") will also have a partner manager they can contact for 1-1 advice/support/etc.

Great. So maybe the bar for support is set too high? Someone making $50 / month on YouTube is meaningless to Google but may spend an enormous amount of time on that content in the hope of a breakout. Those are probably the people whose mental health is most at risk.

It’s Alphabet’s community, they own it. Extending more support to dedicated members may not make direct business sense but it could be the right thing for long-term community health.

> ... for long-term community health

I understand words like books and bricks and apples, because these words have physical referents. I have no idea what "long-term community health" means.

What does that mean?

And why would anyone invest more in it than in barricades and highly weaponized security guards? (I'm not actually promoting an armed response to whatever a 'community' is, I'm just using it as a rhetorical foil to try to understand the pros and cons of investing in whatever a 'community' is)

A community is a group of people you interact with (and who interact with each other) regularly. Community health means the people are kind to each other, help each other, communicate with each other. If a community is not healthy, they don't talk to each other and view each other as enemies.

If you have barricades and highly weaponized armed guards, you don't have a community. You have a war.

> If you have barricades and highly weaponized armed guards, you don't have a community. You have a war.

Or a highly pacified citizenry? ("Move on citizen. It's after dark. go home.")

What role does Youtube have in making a kumbaya kind of experience?

>Or a highly pacified citizenry?

That's still a war, just a very one-sided war.

>What role does Youtube have in making a kumbaya kind of experience?

I'm assuming the question is "what reason does Youtube have", since their role is pretty clear: they control the platform. If they want people to keep using it, they have to keep those people happy. If they want to prevent a revolt, they have to keep people happy. Because unhappy, unstable people can turn violent. Keeping them happy won't necessarily stop all unstable people from turning violent, but you certainly do maximize that risk when you have some unstable people in your community and your community is already on the brink of a user revolt.

What's the percentage? If 80% o the peasants are revolting, and 80% of the content comes from the unrevolting peasants, do I care?

I'm not advocating that they should or should not care, but if one percent are revolting and 99% comes from the other, don't you think it is time to bring out the uzis?

> What role does Youtube have in making a kumbaya kind of experience?

Why would any corporation want its customers to be happy?

Some businesses certainly don't need to care. A restaurant in central Rome has an infinite supply of new tourists to feed, so they don't need to worry about whether anyone wants to come back. At the other end of the spectrum, a monopolist knows that customers have no choice and must come back regardless of how they're treated.

YouTube has elements of both: there's a near-infinite supply of hopeful Internet video stars, and they also have a near-monopoly on video viewership. They might still want to keep stakeholders happy because these issues tend to brew for a long time until they blow up into public consciousness. (Facebook's promiscuous spreading of user data was known ten years ago, but they only took action now. Damage control would have been easier earlier.)

That is a very short sided perspective. People will ask local tour guides for recommendations, and if they say you suck, you have lost business.

But how do you tell those dedicated users apart from all the bot accounts that post millions of hours of garbage backed by a computer voice narrator?

Bot accounts won’t be calling customer support.

Creators have these questions - "why is this seemingly harmless video demonetized?", "why are my videos not reaching the people who explicitly subscribed to me?" and support won't answer those. They blame the algos and point to you a vague list of guidelines.

>why are my videos not reaching the people who explicitly subscribed to me?

Ugh Facebook. I have a community page for my town with thousands of likes, and most posts only reach 10% of the people who explicitly followed my page. Even if I pay to boost a post, I'm lucky to hit 20%. I get a lot of complaints from people who missed an event because they never saw the (sometimes multiple) Facebook posts announcing it. I mean, they could have visited the website or subscribed to the newsletter, but still... they asked Facebook to kindly show them the posts from this page, and Facebook told them "no", because "algorithm".

computer says no.

> Partnered creators all have access to a creator support email (with a 1 business day SLO)

Does that still apply if they get summarily "de-partnered"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com