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Comment by root_axis | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not

This point is often repeated during discussions on these topics but I believe this is an inaccurate characterization. YouTube is not "in charge of deciding what is credible" in the fashion that kind of phrasing suggests; they are moderating the content on their platform with respect to their business process and company values, those decisions are not a reflection of credibility. YouTube is a corporate product and we should not encourage the narrative that this product is the zenith of knowledge even though there are knowledgeable people who put content on YouTube.

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> they are moderating the content on their platform with respect to their business process and company values, those decisions are not a reflection of credibility. YouTube is a corporate product

This is such a tired argument. YouTube is ubiquitous - it is the primary (read: effectively only) platform for video hosting, which today comprises a large proportion of all information transfer between humans. Companies like Facebook and YouTube are central to social discourse, at least in the west. When a medium of communication is that ubiquitous, the fact that it is owned by a private company is not an excuse to throw up one's hands and say "Well, I guess they own it - they can censor what they want".

The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private.

> it is the primary (read: effectively only) platform

This is very obviously false based on countless examples, but you're baking in the assertion that exposure to the YouTube audience is a necessary criteria to be considered a video platform, yet you haven't justified that belief. YouTube's ubiquity is an accolade afforded to it by the public on a completely voluntarily basis that can be effortlessly revoked at any time. The reason it is not revoked is because it costs users nothing to use YouTube and for the overwhelming majority of its users YouTube is just a small and generally unimportant slice of their day akin to watching netflix or playing video games.

> The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private.

Why? I don't see the connection between the quantity of eyeballs freely gazing and the need for the owner to abdicate their editorial prerogatives. What is your justification for this? If the eyeballs have a problem with how those prerogatives are expressed they can look away to another website and they actually do that quite frequently.

There are a million options for video hosting.

You are performing some sleight of hand here - claiming they are the only way to share your view - when what you are really referring to is that they have the most viewers, and that they have tools for promoting content in front of that audience.

"I deserve access to an audience on their system" is a very weak claim compared to the (untrue) "they are the only place I can share my views."

Personally, I say kill the era of algorithmic search and recommendation. Then you'd have to convince people with compelling content to link out to you, not just be clickbait that plays well in the naive algorithmic feedback loops. Good luck!

More and more social interaction becomes intermediated. And especially during this time of quarantine. It's not as easy as convincing people. Because people are now all on ban-happy platforms. And these platforms synchronize their bans.

Let's say your video has some modicum of success on no-name-host.com. Suddenly facebook, youtube, reddit, discord all ban links to that host to reduce spread. They do this intentionally. They brag about it to politicians. They get rewarded for acting as a block... by the state.

It's a nice little proxy arrangement.

Access to an audience is part of speech IMO.

If most of the world's population was on one continent-sized piece of private property, and because it was private property the owners were allowed to censor whoever they wanted, "you can go talk freely on the almost empty island over there, maybe someone from the continent will come listen!" doesn't sound like free speech to me.

I agree that getting rid of algorithmic search/recommendation/promotion would be a big step forward, but platforms for speech of a certain massive size like Youtube/twitter/facebook/etc should also be heavily regulated and their ability to censor limited. They are, due to their overwhelming size, de-facto custodians of speech.

Youtube

Vimeo

Name the next five that are discoverable, host your videos for free, and can stream that to millions of people in a single day.

> ... discoverable, host your videos for free, and can stream that to millions of people in a single day

No one has an inalienable right to any of these features, let alone to all of them in a neat package. The organizations that invest ingenuity, capital and labor to create platforms with those features do have a right to set terms on how their platforms is used.

I don't get how the solution to what is seen as corporate authoritarianism (on private property) is asking for more authoritarianism (by the government) to force persons to host content they'd rather not.

TBF, these are more like entitlements than rights.

We’ve already covered discoverability: you have no right to an “audience”.

As far as being able to reach millions of people per day for free, why do you think that’s a right, exactly? The fact that the websites you listed are footing the bill for you doesn’t mean that serving content (i.e., bandwidth) in general is “free”.

I don't think there is a right, but don't act like there are a million equivalents to Youtube.

As a contrarian view, do our rights require it to be _cheap_? AWS + a domain name (`www.the-moon-really-is-made-of-cheese.com`) seems like something that is available to everyone.

- It's not cheap - It's not easy

However, it's a platform of speech that is available to everyone, and if you want to scale to millions, one can add the same caching layers etc that FAANG can. We've seen this kind of thing when people were banned from twitter or whatever, and ended up migrating to other twitter-competitors. Newspapers are not required to post our opinions, and I don't think youtube is either.

> AWS + a domain name [for video hosting]

Have fun with that egress bill when your video goes viral.

"that's a good problem to have" doesn't really work when it bankrupts you/your company.

> This is such a tired argument. YouTube is ubiquitous - it is the primary (read: effectively only) platform for video hosting

Far from it. You can host your video anywhere you like, but you get the most eyeballs and revenue from YouTube, and that's based on user preference and not on some nefarious activity on their part. A lot of what makes them successful as a hosting platform is the same content curation that people like to complain about.

This whole argument has been repeated many, many times on HN. Can we stop letting this stuff devolve into generic honest discourse vs corporate nihilism debates? At least mention something about COVID so I know which thread I'm in.

> You can host your video anywhere you like, but you get the most eyeballs and revenue from YouTube, and that's based on user preference and not on some nefarious activity on their part.

Maybe not "nefarious" exactly. But YouTube does have a virtual monopoly. And that's arguably illegal in the US. Or at least, it exposes them to additional government oversight.

In what sense does YT have a monopoly?

In a sense that is a default go to platform for many people when searching for (video) content.

Being the most popular platform doesn’t make something a monopoly.

Instead of arguing about the semantics of "monopoly," it could be fun to ask "does YouTube have power that we as a self-governing people should regulate?"

I think it does. Others disagree. Sometimes it's an interesting discussion.

If there's no substantial competition, it's a monopoly. Intentionality isn't that important. It's about market power.

> A lot of what makes them successful as a hosting platform is the same content curation that people like to complain about.

I'm not sure about this. Besides removing obvious hate speech, which sort of content curation do you mean? I thought its success was due to everyone being able to upload and share video clips. I don't think curation was an important feature.

YouTube is perceived as a family-friendly, PG to PG-13 brand. It would be a very different, and much more niche, environment if it were a free-for-all of pornography, obscene language and graphic violence.

I agree, but notice that except for pornography, which I forgot to include, I covered all of the others (sort of) with "hate speech". Banning violence/insults/pornography/harassment is an obviously useful filter for a PG-13 site, but I don't think it qualifies as curation. To me curation implies something related to the selection of quality.

>I don't think curation was an important feature.

Maybe it wasn't in the beginning, but Youtube is a Google company now, and their entire business model is based on (mostly) algorithmic curation. The business model of every content creator depends upon catering to the preferences of that algorithm, and their success at doing so determines their value to advertisers. Entire genres of content have come into being and have been destroyed overnight because of the algorithm.

Youtube's success mostly comes from driving discovery of new content through recommended channels and videos.

That was my point, it wasn't in the beginning. YouTube's initial success wasn't caused by curation, which is the implication I was replying to.

I'm not sure the discovery/recommendation algorithm is the same as curation. It seems to me these are related but distinct fields.

what youtube decide the list of video when you go to www.youtube.com is the content curation. Its a very important feature.

> The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private.

That argument seems a slippery slope towards reverse privitization. Who determines what companies are allowed to censor? Who censors the censors? Companies censor content because they are primarily afraid of liability (legal, political, cultural). There are other video sites out there. Just because youtube is popular doesn't prevent people from hosting content on other platforms.

It’s not unprecedented to have different rules apply to private company passed a given reach.

We could see it the same way we see banks. Banks are private entities but tightly regulated and their activity is overseen by their operating country.

Applying a given set of restrictions and requiremnts to services used by more than 50% of the population for instance could be a thing.

In the US I know people would call bloody murder, but other countries could do with sensible rules of that kind.

One thing that really bothered me was how Australian ISPs handled censorship of the Christchurch shooting videos. They have started proactively blocking not just websites that hosted it, but also those that linked to it - even forums, where it was posted by the users, and the moderators have a general hands-off policy.

It was strictly private censorship at the time - Australia didn't pass legislation to censor it yet. But it was coordinated across the entire industry - basically all ISPs used the same list, so the customers had no choice.

It was also completely non-transparent - the blacklist was secret, and they wouldn't even confirm or deny whether any given website doesn't open because it's on that blacklist.

Yet, since the government was not (officially) involved in any of that, there was no review and no appeal...

And just because your house is already hooked up to your electric utility doesn't mean you can't build your own generator and and source your own fuel! Clearly the utility should have near complete immunity and let an automated algorithm cut off your power indefinitely for vague, unspecified reasons.

We could have antitrust enforcement that prevents companies like Alphabet and Facebook from becoming so dominant in our society, but if we are going to have such dominant corporations, we cannot allow unbridled censorship of speach on their platforms without undermining a pillar of societal strength, prosperity, and happiness: the marketplace of ideas.

According to what though? Walmart is ubiquitous; do they have to let people protest inside stores? No. Do they have to sell antivax books? No. You could maybe argue youtube is closer to a pseudo public place like a mall, but even there you couldn’t force a mall to protest on behalf of someone else or sell something. What exactly is your end game? Create a new type of forum (like physical forum) where private companies are compelled to act according to someone else’s standards?

By the way, you might know that in California, shopping centers may have to allow people to engage in some expressive activity on their private property, even when they don't endorse the speakers' message:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

(I don't mean to suggest that this provides some kind of obvious solution to Internet content moderation disputes.)

Thanks! That’s what I was trying to refer to. But that seems different in a few ways. First, there’s actually physical open spaces in malls where the public is invited—you don’t have to shop. Second, the protest in a mall is ephemeral. Youtube is like a store in the mall, not the open forum (I don’t think Macy’s would be required to have a protest in its store); the internet is like that open space. Second, extending this to YouTube would require YouTube to proactively host a video on its servers, pay for costs to play it, and host it forever (until the protestor takes it down).

Those do all sound like significant differences between a physical mall and a video hosting service.

Walmart is not ubiquitous in terms of property the same way Youtube is in terms of streaming video. If you want to protest you can easily avoid Walmart. Likewise if you want to publish a book you can easily avoid Walmart.

If you want to communicate to a large audience with streaming video in the US (and many other nations), it's Youtube or nothing unless you have an already established audience (which you probably established on Youtube).

I don’t follow. When you protest at Walmart you aren’t guaranteed an audience either (people can ignore you and walk away). And when you make a video you don’t get granted an audience either. Why should YouTube have to help you out?

And people can walk away on Youtube, too. That's the equivalent.

Having an audience and Youtube not taking it away, is not the same thing as Youtube intentionally helping you build your audience.

YouTube/Google/Alphabet have repeatedly said they are removing things about COVID19 from non-government sources. They cannot simply be written off as a private agents who can do what they want with their platform, considering their dominance and monopoly on content.

This is textbook definition of Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Google is either becoming the Ministry of Truth, or by its policy, allowing governments to be the Ministers of Truth, with no room of any dissent.

This should be greatly troubling.

YouTube is not the ministry of truth, it is a popular entertainment website that people visit voluntarily. People very incorrectly treating YouTube like it's some kind of authoritative source of knowledge is the problem, not YouTube.

Youtube is treating Youtube like an authoritative source of knowledge.

Marketing is not reality, this should be pretty obvious on HN.

They're not doing this for marketing reasons. They're doing it because they believe by controlling YouTube they control what people think. Even if they're wrong it's dystopian and suggests a megalomanic attitude.

Remember this is the same company that controls Chrome. It's all fun and games right up until people start discovering their Chromebooks and Androids are blocking web sites on the grounds of "misinformation"

Use dailymotion, or vimeo, or host your own site.

I’ll reiterate a point I’ve made before: the ultimate question is whether YouTube (and other social media platforms) should be permitted both the power to control on their platform as well as the freedom from liability of a common carrier. They exist in a limbo where they have their cake and eat it too- which I think is ultimately untenable.

The problem we face is that social media is about echoing information, not validity, which is how misinformation spreads so rapidly, because it sounds like what people want to hear.

There is no precedent in human history in such a thing. A private entity which controls so much public understanding and opinion.

Making YouTube liable for content would go a long way in helping keep YT content honest, and solve the moderator problem. YT will either moderate or die.

The reason YT could get so popular is because they neither have to moderate, nor fact check, but still get the benefits of being informational. This is true for ALL social media, unfortunately. How would one go about moderating the thousands of hours of content produced every hour in TikTok? Etc.

For what it's worth, I do not think people in the past were more informed than people today. If anything, more people are more informed today than at any time in history.

What we're seeing is the breakdown of consolidated narratives. It used to be that people's beliefs were all wrong in the same way. You'll note that this looks basically identical to everyone being well informed.

Now that we've moved into a regime of information abundance it looks like the world's gone crazy, when really it's just decohered.

That said, youtube as a vector is spreading the most virulent memetic viruses we've ever seen. Hard to say how it shakes out though, memes aren't all bad. Everything good we've ever done started off as a meme too.

> If anything, more people are more informed today than at any time in history.

Quantity and access to information is only one side of the equation. The other side is relevance and the meaning that information affords us. If it doesn’t help us orient ourselves better in the world, if we can’t make sense of it, that information is useless, or even harmful. Decohered is the right word, but I don’t think it is only a product of the drastic increase in virality of memes. It is also our sense-making apparatus being broken or hugely behind the information influx that is created by the platform. This like informational obesity, influx of calories that can’t be translated into nutrition. Right now youtube’s policy layer and recommendation algorithms are the only machinery for deciding relevance and sense making on this exponential transfer of information happening. A black box machinery built for maximizing ad revenue, will naturally fall short on making us wiser, relevant or coherent. In fact, it is more natural for ad revenue maximizing to align better with us being more consumptive, polarized and addicted.

The problem is that memes themselves undergo natural selection, which favors the "bad" ones overall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

I don't think this is true in the long run, any more than genes which favor their propagation are bad in the long run. In the short term, viruses, cancers, shitty memes, doomsday cults and other low-sophistication replicators are favored.

But long term you get things like multicellularity, complex nervous systems, the scientific method, civilization and art. The road may be rocky but I see no reason for it to be any different here.

It's "bad" for us as individuals with our cultural background. It's not necessarily "bad" for the memes themselves, especially since the ultimate score in this game is to have an entire civilization proactively spreading the meme to others. Christianity, Islam, and other proselytizing religions are a good example.

I suspect that the old, successful memes are good for their hosts by many definitions of good.

> the ultimate question is whether YouTube (and other social media platforms) should be permitted both the power to control on their platform as well as the freedom from liability of a common carrier

I disagree that this is the ultimate question or that this is in any way a problem that merits a changing of the laws (as current law explicitly permits this). Websites aren't common carriers, and I don't see a compelling reason to force websites to host content that they disagree with for any reason. I don't see any connection between the idea between popularity and the loss of editorial control of your own website.

> They exist in a limbo where they have their cake and eat it too- which I think is ultimately untenable.

Moderation is part of the product. I would argue that the idea that we can effectively constrict companies into a specific type of moderation behavior is what's untenable because it strikes at the heart of the creative freedom to build a website and online community with respect to your own ideals.

To be clear, I think either position is fine. If you want control over what people say that's okay - but maybe then you should be accountable for what they say like a publisher.

If you don't want to be accountable for what people say, that's fine - but maybe then like a traditional common carrier you shouldn't get to control what people say.

The asymmetry of "I control everything you can say but am accountable for none of it" is wrong, in my eyes.

> they are moderating the content on their platform with respect to their business process and company values, those decisions are not a reflection of credibility.

There is a difference between morality and legality. It might be legal for ATT to cut your Internet because they don't like you but it will be immoral for sure.

Having your video removed from someone's website isn't the same thing as having your internet cut off.

How so? Both are private properties.

Do you really not see the critical differences between having your internet cut off and having a website owner remove something you posted to their website? I am honestly having difficulty believing that.

The essential, underlying problem here is that YouTube is a corporate product, just as you say, and yet still has a major influence on the population's aggregate belief, due to its scale of adoption. This is an emergent phenomenon, not a narrative.

> YouTube is a corporate product, just as you say, and yet still has a major influence on the population's aggregate belief

What is your evidence for this? There are so many other sources of influence in this world that I find this idea completely at odds with reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub...

Considering the content of YouTube's top channels I think the evidence isn't in favor of that suggestion that YouTube has a noteworthy impact on "the population's aggregate belief"

Well, they roll out a platform where people can upload content. That is the one of the main services they offer, YT should be subject to the local regulations for uploaders and viewers, applying no other discretionary/arbitrary limits than those imposed by regulations or by technical reasons. Imagine a content platform would consider that videos created by <insert group of people> do not align with their values.

A lot of people who blame Youtube for oppressing their right to disinform other people, would immediately oppress other people if they had the chance.

There's only one grocery store in town and I need to buy food, but their prices are too high!! Oh well, guess I will just have to drive to this other town to buy food where the prices aren't so high.

..walks outside to car ..sees local grocery store owner has flattened his tire

This is such a deeply flawed and disingenuous analogy that I find it difficult to imagine you're commenting in good faith.

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