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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

If YouTube can't protect its users, and the content people are posting is too distressing even for moderators, maybe YouTube shouldn't exist?

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Isn't a more reasonable solution that the users select content that they are comfortable with, or just leave the platform altogether? YouTube is mine and hundreds of millions of people's favorite site on the internet. If I see content I don't like, I go to other content.

What if you want to post videos and interact with a community, but every time you do you get brigaded by hundreds of harassers?

What if the filters intended to prevent hate speech end up harming the targets of that hate speech instead?

What if YouTube's algorithms push conspiracy theories and manifestos of domestic terrorists into people's feeds?

These are not "deal with it or leave" issues; these are existential crises that we must hold platforms accountable to solving.

If you mean legally, I disagree. If you mean that you boycott it, then that's obviously fine.

The users don't select content. The recommender algorithm does, and then it autoplays it.

If you really don't like it, don't go on the site. I don't go on almost every site there is. Do you think it is a morally defensible position that your sensibilities be foisted upon other people in such an extreme fashion that you would deny them access to a platform altogether? Don't you think it's at least worth exploring something akin to subreddits, where communities can be moderated to the tastes of the specific tolerances that represent the group?

If you don't like YouTube demonetizing videos, don't upload your videos to the site then. Personally I don't have a problem with people discussing or making videos of whatever they want to.

I don't like the fact that YouTube with the recommender and Autoplay is stochastic mind control. It's programmed to make people watch loads of YouTube, and the mechanism that it has discovered to do that is to nudge people to obsess over fringe things, causing them to watch videos about these things for hours per day.

Did you mean to suggest that I have a problem with YouTube demonetizing? If it bothered me enough so as to make the content I like inaccessible, leaving the site is exactly what I would do. That doesn't mean I think they shouldn't exist, or be able to do what they'd like.

Great solution that is not at all impractical in any way.

Listen. I love YouTube, other people love YouTube. For some reason, the people who don't love YouTube insist on asking YouTube go go away. Just go post your videos on YetAnotherTube where you manually run video review and all that shit.

Having to ask permission to exist? There are so many things wrong with that notion.

The obvious solution is to restrict who can use YouTube in some way that anti-correlates with posting awful stuff.

I don't know specifically, but there must be something.

Require verified ID for every uploader. Charge a token amount say $1 for every upload. Only accept uploads from countries with law enforcement that handles bad content and make it clear that law enforcement will be knocking on your door if you upload anything bad. Extend this to commenters.

This is just not a difficult problem, YouTube just doesn’t want to solve it

So not accepting content from the United States then? Bad content != illegal.

If they started with that YouTube wouldn't have gotten off the ground as people wouldn't go with the "unilaterally acts like they are being controlled by the Chinese Government" service.

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