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Comment by Mirioron | Hacker News Reader

The thing is that a lot of us saw this coming. Whenever people complain about how YouTube needs to remove X type of content, they also need to realize that if YouTube actually starts policing that type of content then there will be false positives. Since YouTube will do it algorithmically, the chance that there will be collateral damage is much higher and YouTube takes a long time to reverse decisions they've already made.

For example, YouTube doesn't want violent content. Just having the word "kill" in your title can get the content demonetized, even if the content is about a video game and properly categorized as such. It's been this way for years.

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The point is that they shouldn't do it algorithmically. They need to have guidelines for what type of content is acceptable, and hire people to enforce them.

Or both. Have a scanner, but also have a meaningful appeals process, and you don't have a demonitized gap just because you were falsely flagged.

How can you not have a demonitized gap? Advertisers aren't going to want to have they ads on content that hasn't been vetted.

Then the costs of YouTube probably balloon so high that it doesn't matter for creators whether their videos are demonetized or not, because they aren't going to earn anything from them.

We may be hitting the point where societal impact is great enough that people don't necessarily accept "We can't do that at scale" as an out.

Indeed. Given the vast wealth Google etc have accumulated its clear that actually, they could afford to do it, and still make good, but not astounding, profits.

The rationale “we can’t make as much money as we’d like to if we followed the law” just won’t wash.

> Given the vast wealth Google etc have accumulated its clear that actually, they could afford to do it, and still make good, but not astounding, profits.

Citation very much needed.

You need citation to prove that Google is rich?

They need a citation to prove that Google is rich enough. According to stats, they were getting 400 hours of new video every minute - and that was back in 2015, it's probably at least 600 nowadays, as more people have been getting online. How much would it cost, with all overheads, to review all that?

Also, content reviewers for Google and Facebook have straight up developed PTSD from the things they've seen, that has to be factored in as well.

That's a very naive approach to understand how company valuations work.

They also need to not censor so much that it's a publisher and maintain themselves as a platform legally.

The platform economics change in that case. Right now, anybody can upload content for free and it'll appear very quickly on the channel. If you increase the cost per video by mandating human oversight on videos, then YouTube will probably remove the ability for (most) people to upload videos for free.

I don't think that that's preferable for society.

Is what we have now preferable?

Imagine a YouTube that cost $10 to upload a video and $1 per comment. The quality of the content would be much higher and the hate speech would drop to zero. Wouldn’t that be preferable for society?

Global median per-capita daily income is $8. So I have to spend my whole day's income to upload a video?

You're effectively restricting speech to the rich, and the poor just have to sit there and listen. That would be sad and unnecessary.

So it would be like old terrestrial over the air television. No?

You can afford a camera, a laptop and a high speed connection, but not a token amount to cover moderating your upload? I don’t imagine this being a common scenario.

You can make videos on a computer that you can get for a few hundred dollars. That means you could make 20-30 videos for the same amount of money your equipment cost. That is a prohibitive scenario.

I create content for YouTube and if I had to pay $10 per video then I would never make another YouTube video again. It doesn't matter that there are thousands of people (and tends of thousands+ sometimes), because I simply couldn't afford to spend time and effort to make a video and then spend extra money to share it.

You could make the argument that perhaps society is better off if I don't create content, but there are at least some people that claim they enjoy it.

Imagine a YouTube that cost $10 to upload a video

Isn't that basically Vimeo's business model?

Why is the existence of YouTube specifically preferable to society? They're just a random company. No one has a right to their business model; if they can't figure out how to do make a video sharing site that doesn't harm people, they should go out of business to make space for someone who can. It's not like YouTube's particular implementation of video sharing is inherently better than Vimeo, PeerTube, or whatever else someone could come up with.

And how exactly is YouTube harming people? The topic at hand is about some people not having access to monetization on YouTube and your proposed solution is to shut down YouTube altogether?

More likely: YouTube will actually look for a way to achieve the same while offloading the costs to someone else. That should be very easy once two other parties are involved, as is the case with copyright stuff. I've never got a good argument against pushing both parties towards arbitration (selected by YT), with the looser picking up the tab.

Video classification by YT is a bit more tricky, since they themselves are one of the involved parties and thus any incentives put in place to improve the system would cost YT.

it does, if the profit motive is the only motive.

Google and company has no reason to not do the minimal acceptable amount. They aren't bound by morals, nor do they owe "society" anything. Shareholders also demand more and more profits, and so the result you see is the inevitable outcome, and it can't be any other way. Unless "society" wills it by voting in people who then make new laws to change the outcome.

Maybe the solution to that is decentralised services.

To use a historical example, it's easier to moderate an IRC channel of 100 people than an IRC network of 10,000.

Or better yet, unmoderated.

Usenet only fell apart because of the spam, and legal attacks by the RIAA and MPAA and BSA.

That would depend on your perspective and your own experiences, I expect.

I found the moderated sci.* and comp.* groups more pleasant for asking questions and giving answers. The alt.* hierarchy had its moments, but mostly it was an exercise in tolerance. Some groups were largely self-moderating, others had such a poor SNR that there was no point putting the time in.

The RIAA/MPAA/BSA raids were only really relevant if you were into pirating copyrighted material.

Evidenced by what? Violence continues to be at or near the lowest point since the mind 20th century. Not just in the US but globally. Economic growth is persisting despite governments uncooperative with the global economy in key countries (like the US). And the internet itself is doing a way better job of policing content today than it was in the 2000s. So why is the internet all of a sudden a problem today, despite key indicators showing that society isn't worse off?

Who decides societal impact then? Didn't we learn from Socrates that not even society can sanely decide that?

> For example, YouTube doesn't want violent content. Just having the word "kill" in your title can get the content demonetized, even if the content is about a video game and properly categorized as such. It's been this way for years.

I think that this actully is violent content - so this is actually an example where the algorithm worked fine (which does not contradict your argument that there exist false positives - they are just a lot more subtle).

This video [1] about how to do the Charleston dance got demonetized, and there only hypothesis is because it had "Charleston" in the title a mere year-and-a-bit after the Charleston church shooting.

That's not exactly subtle.

I understand there could be other reasons for being demonetised, but it's hard to see what it could be in a very very inoffensive video about how to do a vintage dance.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdgCq1IGmsY

Is it really violent content when you're dealing with space ships with no humans or animals on board?

> Is it really violent content when you're dealing with space ships with no humans or animals on board?

If you are referring to the game example given some posts above: "Killing" means that the respective object was alive before - a property that a space ship with no living beings onboard does not have. So the respective author named and labelled the video improperly.

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