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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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.

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.

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

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.

This doesn't apply to your example, but for copyright, what is there to prevent a content stealer from spamming the appeals? You can ban or demonetize their account, but that's basically the status quo.

Also, YouTube doesn't want to settle disputes because that makes them liable to be sued if they happen to be wrong.

If you don't have your account verified, your videos have to be verified by an actual human - leading to week long queues to upload anything, meaning that naturally the amount of submitted videos will reduce. If you do get your account verified, your videos go live instantly(as they do now) but if they get flagged, a human has to watch them manually.

So basically, how PornHub works. They cannot risk not reviewing videos because the risk is so great, so they do. And they somehow manage to thrive in their space.

The ask is that they employ real humans to review disputed claims not watch every video uploaded.

At a globally generous $20/hr/person, 360,000k/hr, 24/7, that works out to about 3ish billion per year, maybe 5-6 with overhead. That's an upper bound for 100% review.

There are tons of levers to pull to reduce volume without reducing profit (e.g. replace "nyancat for 24h" with a loop option), and they don't have to review everything.

If we limit review to copyright claims only, the hourly cost may be higher per person, but the review volume would be much lower.

Not if you want the products to stay free.

And people really really do.

And for every hackernews poster (including myself) who says things like "I'll gladly pay X$/month for Gmail/Google/Facebook/Youtube just so that my data/privacy remained my own", there is a THOUSAND or more voices that would not.

With distributed hosting there is no need for youtube to monopolize video. They operate at a loss specifically in order to control discourse and collect data. If that were made illegal, alternatives would take over immediately.

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