I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next
gamefromscratch.com
gamefromscratch.com
I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1]
It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge porn is left up. YouTube is doing it's best to blend automation (fast but inaccurate) with human curation (more thoughtful but slower), and sometimes it gets it wrong.
I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly. YouTube is dealing with two opposing issues, and is constantly doing its best to find a fair middle ground.
Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service, to me it feels that they treat it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust.
Yeah I know it's terribly expensive to keep a horde of content reviewers, but then it would be nice for Youtube to be upfront about it that there is maybe a human in the process, but most likely not. I guess honesty is not anymore a valuable commodity in this world, yet it would feel nice sometimes to hear the truth, not some lawyer jargon to avoid all responsibility.
I've worked in high volume customer services. It's not easy for the agents doing the work or the companies operating them.
I've worked in multiple call centers dealing with calls and tickets. I've worked in companies in which I dealt with mobile phone bill queries and hardware issues right up to Cisco networking problems and then eventually enterprise grade Linux clusters at Rackspace (UK). I've spanned a pretty large spectrum of industries from a customer services perspective. I've even done customer services in the food industry.
It's HARD. Not just for you as an operator, but as a company trying to offer the service to begin with. of all of the companies I worked for, O2 (a mobile phone provider and network operator) had tens of millions of customers. We had several call centers that spanned close to ten thousand agents doing everything from calls to tickets, emails to Tweets. The call queue for that company never dropped below a constant 200-300 on hold and emails took days to even get to.
Google has approx' one BILLION customers.
What is your suggestion here?
> they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this
Damn straight automation, to a larger degree, is the answer. People don't scale at all. They can do one job at a time, for a limited amount of time, and are subject to all kinds of problems.
> Yeah I know it's terribly expensive to keep a horde of content reviewers
It cost O2 about $5/6 to answer a single call. That's the cost of the agent's time and JUST answering the call, not the cost of listening, understanding, resolving and ending the call. Humans are expensive.
I'm not saying don't use people. I'm saying automation at Google's scale is one of the few solutions available to them when it comes to dealing with the simply insane amounts of complaints they'll receive just via their YouTube platform alone.
EDIT: Apologies for being so crude in my original wording. I'm updating the comment to reflect a more professional, civil tone.
Google's customer service is horrible even for organizations that pay them +$10k/month or make them +$10k/month for ad sales, and that is a far smaller number.
You would think they could at least scale customer support properly for that much smaller number, but they don't because culturally they do not want to. Even people who have used google cloud services say the support is bad compared to AWS. Google stands out as a corp that is really bad at customer service.
While apple, amazon, AWS & many other companies provide customer support that mostly works for customers who provide maybe $40/month max in revenue. They don't even let you self pay for your own support at google in most cases.
I bet youtubers who live on their work on youtube would gladly pay $100 to deal with one off incidents like these that might happen once a year if it meant they had proper thought applied to their issues for example.
Is this true? As a paying customer for gsuite, the 4 times I've contacted customer service I got someone immediately and they solved my problem immediately. I'm not a big customer either I have one account. I pay them $72 a year.
I have a grandfathered free GSuite plan on a domain I hardly use.
The few issues I have had have been promptly solved by a real person.
It's very much opposite when it's come to AdSense, but again they don't really care when some webmaster lose his source of income since there will be other webmasters to replace him.
Fundamental difference: person who buys adds --> Google gets money person who uploads videos --> Google gives money
It's pretty clear to me what the antithesis is here. Sorry to over-simplify, but yes, imho this matters.
i have dealt with google europe, i even visited the offices in dublin but i do not have a confidence that they know the answer, most of them are there to try to convince you to try this new thing and incrase you budget.
"Absolute certainty" aside, OP basically just said they saw the mountain from the base (only has the view of the volume of tickets pending in their queue) and most of it is in a cloud, they can't even see the top, it looked big, hard to drill, impossible to shave down to ground level. The "absolute certainty" confirms the point of view.
Senior management see it from above (see the big picture) and see total volume of work, a mathematical division based on resources, the value of each work area, which are core or not, where to focus more resources, and which parts to cut down because they set the end goal.
The customer sees the paid promise of a flat terrain. No mountain, no resources.
Now I don't expect the support engineer to know or care about more than what comes in their queue. That's their only job. But I do know management almost always sees support areas, especially for the "low value/impact" segments, as the best candidates for some savings when you have shareholders to please. Successful management will strike a balance between saving more money from cutting costs than they are losing by losing customers and image. Anything else is considered shortsightedness: they either leave money on the table, or they choke the business for short term gain.
In this particular case YouTube could solve the issues but they have deemed this not worth it. The amount needed to fix this is higher than the return so it can't be justified. Fixing one offs and high visibility cases is cheaper than eliminating the issue entirely.
Paying or not, people will complain.
I'm not saying my knowledge applies to all customer support cases, but what happened here would never have happened with our system.
Just very simple tricks go a loooong way dealing with malicious people:
how old is the account of the "reporter" ?
is the "reporters" id verified?
how long has the account we're taking action against been our customer?
whitelists/blacklists -- temporary or permanent
are all complaints against a customer of the same type grouped to the same ticket type/ticket?
Just based on those simple facts, we would mmediately lock functionality/content for unverified, new customers we received complaints about, while delaying, notifying and giving verified, aged customers the chance to respond/fix issues.
I'm not saying this is easy, for the system I worked, our agents designing the rules had about 80 individual ticket types(in a hierarchy, with rule re-use for ticket category), but they used their brains and did not take any "lock X functionality of the customer" lightly.
My point was we had automated rules in place that worked really well and there was nothing really clever about those rules.
It was a game of cat and mouse between our rule designers and adversaries who always tried to probe our thresholds and evade us while we tried to find new useful facts about customers, new probes, new actions, react proactively, but not screwing our legitimate customers was always our number 1 concern.
How hard can it be to augment crowd sourcing and "AI" with some actual humans? If the "AI" is so crappy that it can't figure out an established, popular account is worthy of human support, what problems can it actually solve?
I also wonder why we can't just pay $X to get a human, but I know the answer. Tech companies would just take the money as extra profit and still provide the shittiest quality support possible.
But maybe, there isn't, currently. Maybe there simply isn't a solution at the scale of companies like Google.
If you double your customer count, and double your revenue, then you can double your customer support resources. O(n) does not become impractical just because the number gets really big.
If they can't deal with something, the fundamental design is wrong, and would fail even if they downsized a thousandfold.
If you have 1 person doing support, they can deal with the weird cases themselves. If you have 2 people, they need to share information between themselves. If you have 10 people, they might need to set up some sort of escalation system. If you have 100 people, you'll probably set up some sort of routing system (multiple languages/specialization). If you have 500 people, you probably need some sort of internal abuse / anti-bribery effort to catch bad apples. If you have 1000 people you've now got a separate team working on setting up policies. If you have 5000 people you've got a training and evaluation system set up for your customer service staff. If you have 10000, you've got customer support staff in multiple countries around the globe and need to deal with conflicting and ever-changing laws in the countries you do business in.
All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up. So yes, in addition to it being costlier per customer to provide the same level of support as your customer base grows, you have a smaller budget per customer to do it in.
Even if you could double your customer support resources, it means a very different structure and needing to ensure you both hire in the same quality of employees up and down the escalation chain as well as adapt your organization to handle the vastly larger communication and problem resolution processes.
Noe of that is trivial and it's quite easy to take a great org and make it terrible by just adding a bunch of people.
Sorry, but you can't skip support because it's not cost effective, just like you can't skip financial regulations or data regs. You don't get to use the excuse of "Sorry we are too busy making billions, maybe we wouldn't have to cut corners if we weren't so successful."
The problem is that good customer support costs more than $1. It costs more than what they make from the average user, so the average user can't have it. That would still be true if they had 100 times less users. It's a result of the service being free, not the service being large.
Once upon a time i've been a happy customer of a regional ISP called Hansenet, started by the local public electric utility. It was (at least for me) lightyears ahead of the crappy experience (speed/latency/price/(competence of)service(if needed)) the former state monopolist had. Everything was golden, also excellent peering. They grew slowly, cooperated with some other regional upstarts, stayed golden, speed even got faster without raising of monthly fees, furthermore no long contracts necessary, could be canceled within a month.
Then Telecom Italia came and bought them, now it was Alice, as advertised by some mouthbreathing twen all over the public space, larger than life.
Quality of service went down, very unsexy of you, Alice! But still was better than the former state monopolist, and still got faster without raising prices or contract conditions.
They even retained a local service center where you could walk into and talk to people who knew their stuff and could change settings in realtime! Imagine that! Not some outsourced call-center agent mouthpiecing some useless uml-diagram.
Anyways, too good to be true? Right! Telefonica came to rescue (of BlackRock), to milk the cash cow as long as possible, and it was noticable.
Fortunately another neighboring public utility, pioniering fiber roll out since the nineties expanded and became a choice for me then. All is golden again! Yay!
Why am i ranting? Because everybody i know is mostly unhappy with O2 in any form, except for the price.
O2 can't do!
I wish i could add some internal, even worse insights from another ISP growing larger at the time, but am not allowed to. Also they managed, got better, and meanwhile can do again.
Lesson? There is no lesson here, with the exception of economies of scale are bad for humans above certain amounts of 'scale'.
If those are the stats and you're still not actually solving many customers' problems; if tons of people are being hung out to dry with no recourse, then you're doing a bad job. If you don't have enough people to do the job, then hire more people. If you can't afford to hire more people, then don't do the job, or limit the number of customers you deal with.
There is also the scenario in which there is no solution and you need to balance the cost of investigating to the point where you're 100% certain there isn't a solution and efficiently deciding there isn't one.
One thing I have learnt working at these companies is that some customers think the world revolves around then and that technology should work flawlessly all the time, when it doesn't.
That's why every mom and pop store outranks every Fortune 500 on customer service expect Amazon. Most still haven't learned to put customers central to their business but treat it as an after thought.
I like to use Telecommunication companies as an example because I worked in one heavily and dealt with these exact scenarios.
If a customer calls the service desk because their internet is broken due to vandalism at their exchange. I as a customer service agent cannot drive to the exchange and simply fix the problem myself. It requires appropriate prioritisation of all of the other problems within the network that need fixing that may also be affecting other customers, as well as requiring outside resources to rebuild that location. To add that the customer might also have a mobile SIM as a backup within the modem but is not able to achieve the speeds nor latency needs commensurate with their fixed service. And that's if you're lucky to be the wholesaler if you aren't, then your organisation literally cannot fix the problem legally because you don't have the authority to repair infrastructure that you don't own outright.
I appreciate that this a specific example, but one I have dealt with mutltiple times. Once a business grows to a greater size, it is inherently more difficult to fix problems like a mom and pop store whether or not you care the same about your customers or not. It may appear as though they don't care, but there are simply different realities at different scales.
My point being that if you assume as the beginning that they purposely distribute available work and responsibilities in such a way that to execute is difficult by design then that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is where you are operating at such a scale that it is very difficult to provide great customer service even if you do care.
I worked alliance support for a major database vendor in a former life. My experience is that enterprise customers are usually realists. They run a very complicated environment and are aware that things, especially software, is not perfect. They expect good service (and pay through the nose for it) and can be demanding. But ultimately they're realists.
The ones that think the world revolves around them and their issue must be fixed RIGHT NOW! are usually the ones that bought some ODBC driver for 40 bucks 12 years ago, which don't really have any support entitlement to begin with.
I know, blasphemy to the VC crowd.
Customer service at scale, for many products, turns the product from profitable into a severe loss. It will go out of business no ifs ands or buts.
YouTube clearly cannot survive if its customer service costs exceed its advertising revenue.
It has absolutely nothing to do with speed of growth, and I don't know why you think it does.
Are you saying free user-generated video hosting sites shouldn't exist period? That YouTube simply shouldn't exist? Because that seems to be what you're saying.
Either have proper human or machine evaluation and very fast response to complaints about fuckups, or,
let it be an open platform, and only respond to legal requests to remove things, the way the Internet used to work,
...because they clearly cannot handle the alternative without fucking people over repeatedly.
If that is the case then Google is helpless to stop these attacks from growing out of control. How long before the long tail of YouTube is clipped off?
That's what algorithmic detection (together with user flagging) and removal at scale is for. That prevents them from growing out of control.
The combo of algorithmic detection at scale, combined with small amounts of manual intervention and customer service where most needed, is how YouTube is able to operate.
Right now Google makes the second most profit per employee of any large enterprise on earth: $269,000 in profit, annually, per employee.
I know of other- successful!- companies that make less money per employee, because they hire people to do customer support.
To start your argument, I think you have to explain why Google can not hire more CSRs, even though they are the #2 most profitable enterprise on Earth.
To begin your "back of the envelope math test", you should ask:
If Google were to hire CSRs until its profit went to $0 per employee per year, how much of an effect would the additional CSRs have on the experience of Google's customers? How many CSRs would that be? How many customers would each one be handling per day?
Saying that a company which is profitable because a small number of employees serve a large number of customers can obviously afford to hire a large number of employees isn't a math test, it's wishful thinking. Do some math.
It would go up, probably quite a bit, and the profit would re-emerge but at a lower level per employee.
The real problem is that their scale (in terms of reach, money, customers, political leverage - you name it) is so large that a company could compete or out-compete on customer service and still wouldn't win a significant chunk of their business. That's why they don't need to hire more CSRs.
You need to answer that one before concluding that customers' experience would improve.
Apparently temporary works and contractors make up around 54% of Google's workforce. https://www.vox.com/2019/4/4/18293900/google-contractors-ben...
The rest of this comment is going to be somewhat critical of Google criticism and seemingly apologistic. Please assume positive intent.
I agree that Google certainly could do more to help people on its platform. But this will always be the case until every single customer service issue is solved to the user's satisfaction. The important question that I never see anybody asking or answering is "How much is reasonably enough, and how do we know (subject X) has done enough?"
It all boils down to what we believe the moral obligation of people (and companies, by extension) ought to be. Any extra service that Google provides beyond those required for profit maximization (e.g. customer retention, maintaining reputation, being only slightly better than the second-best option) is purely charity. Then, how do we evaluate when a certain amount of charity is sufficient, let alone necessary? Public sentiment is fickle, and therefore not a great measure. I bet even if Google increased its CSR by 10x, we'd still see communities eagerly latch onto any criticism of the tech giant and shout "you have to do more!" without quantifying what the final demand actually is!
I take the moral position that we as a society certainly can and should do much more to take care of each other. Telling each other to be better is absolutely valuable and I will never argue against that. But I believe we ought to do a much better job of suggesting desirable and realistic end states, instead of perpetuating insubstantial discourse amounting to one of either "They need to do better!" or "Come on, they're doing the best they can."
Admittedly this places me in a non-committal position. I don't have any great suggestions for what the end states of YouTube, Twitter, et al should look like from a content moderation perspective. But I would love to hear input from actual experts in who can offer some reasonable ideas about the most cost-beneficial solutions for society as a whole.
No, it isn't.
But the damage it causes to innocent parties through its choice of business models is.
It is easy to forget that not so long ago, the Internet giants of today were little startups too, and not so long before that, they didn't exist at all. They have reached the dominant positions they are now in through a combination of factors. Several of those factors involve absolving themselves of responsibility for things going wrong, even things that might have been (or might still be) considered illegal, because preventing them is difficult or practically impossible with a purely technological solution.
Well, guess what? There is no law that says they get a right to exist and be astonishingly profitable by relying on technology at the expense of anyone else who gets hurt by their action or inaction. There is no law that requires the existence of huge video redistribution services that allow anyone to upload content, including malicious content that may cause serious harm to others, with impunity. Laws that do protect these organisations, such as the safe harbour provisions under the DMCA and its counterparts around the world, were invented after the fact and it's far from clear that they strike a healthy balance (particularly when, as I can personally testify, the likes of YouTube do not always meet their obligations even under the very generous terms of those laws).
If these companies can't act as responsible corporate citizens using their current business models, maybe they shouldn't use those business models. It is disturbing that this simple idea now seems almost heretical, as if we are somehow beholden to these Internet giants and the world would fail without them, and so it's somehow OK that they also magnify harmful effects from spreading dangerous misinformation to invasion of privacy but as long as it's someone else uploading the content the hosting service is deemed innocent of all wrong-doing.
Duty is not charity. It would be perfectly reasonable for society to determine that YouTube incurs a duty to its content creation partners, and at no point should that be considered requesting a favour.
I agree that Google has a moral duty to take care of the people who choose to put their trust in their platforms.
That’s not the logical conclusion, that’s the inverse.
If P (large profit per employee) then Q (should be able to spend more on customer support)...
- The converse is If Q then P (clearly not applicable in this case)
- The contrapositive is If not Q then not P (in this case, you would hope it’s true but obviously not!)
- The inverse is If not P then Not Q, which would roughly translate into if profit per employee is low then you would not expect a company to pay more for customer support.
Perhaps you could argue that the logical conclusion is that any profit just means they aren’t spending enough on their support. Funny thing is economists would argue profit demonstrates they are spending enough on keeping customers happy.
It certainly appears that they can afford to do better (although arguably they don’t break out financial results just for YouTube do they?) and we certainly want them to better.
I think the fundamental problem is that for every million dollars they pay humans to “do better” it’s like trying to move the beach with a pair of tweezers — you don’t even make a dent. No amount of money will solve the problem by trying to pay humans. They can only succeed by making the algorithm better, and that’s not a problem which scales with headcount (mythical man month)
> That’s not the logical conclusion, that’s the inverse.
Your logic is misapplied. If Google's profit is an indicator of its customer service obligations, it is logically necessary that less-profitable companies have lower such obligations than more-profitable companies do. If they had higher obligations, Google's profitable status would indicate that it didn't have much in the way of customer service obligations. If they had equal obligations, then profit would not be an indicator.
Which is fine, because Google's customer base is made up of people, so Google should be able to scale their support in a linear way.
on edit: I don't mean that not supporting their user base is the right thing to do, although an MBA might say it were.
That was easy, thanks for asking the question so that I can answer it.
Any more questions you think "we" should answer? I'll be glad to resolve them since you only seem to ask them.
When things go really wrong on our office365 platform or any part of Azure, Seattle will call us on the the hour with updates until it’s fixed. We have programs within Microsoft support where our developers and sysops can suggest changes, and if the suggestions gather enough popularity and fit within whatever criteria Microsoft have internally they’ll happen.
AWS didn’t always have the great support they do now, but as far as cloud operations (the nerdy bits) go, I think they’re actually better at it than even Microsoft. It build up gradually along with GDPR, but they were the first of the major three to offer things like support for AWS services that’s actually located within the European Union. I’m not updated on Microsoft, but AWS may still be the only company to do that.
Compare that to Google, where we get to talk with an automated system, the same as though we weren’t a 3,3 billion a year budget organisation. I’ve had better personal support for my free google account than I have for our company google cloud account.
Don’t get me wrong, we would probably have a lot of GDPR related reasons to prefer Azure or AWS even if google had better support, but the lack of support means we’ve never gotten beyond that step in our risk assessments.
I work pretty exclusively with AWS these days as a CloudOp. I remember building an environment in GCP and getting answers from support was terrible. I eventually left that job after 11 months.
The next job was pure AWS and sweet Jesus was the contrast strong. AWS not only had people who would phone you within 10-15 minutes, more often quicker than that, but they had a frickin' account manager who visited us every month and we only spent a thousands per month with them. Absolutely worlds apart.
Which means they also have one billion potential workers. They could tap into the power of crowd-intelligence. It's probably somewhat easy to forge some processes to oursource certain support-problems which need low human interaction.
Something they do with Recaptcha already and IIRC at Google Maps. They could sell Youtube Premium to some thoudsand people and let them instead check a handful videos per day for some cases of copyright infringment and such. Just let them be the final fonrtier of sanity in cases where the machine is weak.
They'd all have to be copyright lawyers, then?
If you aren't making enough money on YouTube to be able to afford paying someone to host your content and provide better, paid customer service, then you have to consider that the risk of being on a mostly automated, poorly supported platform is the only thing keeping you from losing money, or in other words, is the sole source of your income.
When you are as big as Google, very improbable failures happen all the time, pointing them out doesn't tell the story of how well they're doing unless your expectation is constant perfection. Go find rates, not anecdotes, then you might have something.
Also, if you're being blackmailed and harassed, it would seem to be a matter for the police and the courts, not Google, to fix.
Just a thought experiment, does Youtube need to be as big as it is? Can’t Youtube say “given the current accuracy/precision of ML based solutions and how much our manual operations can scale, we are going to rate limit the content that circulates to match our ability of giving the best judgment on what videos to take down and what videos to keep”. Physical stores have maximum occupancy limits, and with coronavirus some even shown proactive rate limiting to say “hey, we can’t ensure transmission control above a certain density”. Those are corporations too, those also have fiduciary duty.
I think “growth at all costs” is a major driver of these types of failures, especially when costs are externalized and distributed to the userbase; one annoying notification, one abuse feature change, one harmful policy decision at a time.
> Go find rates, not anecdotes, then you might have something
Youtube has near perfect knowledge of the warm data of their operations, and use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it, while we only get to know others are being abused when news make it to Hacker News. The inability to find the rates is inherent to the problem. Short of sneaking into Youtube data centers, there is only so much data you can find without Youtube’s say so. Which brings the question, for such a massive policy layer operation, why is this data not made transparent?
A few scattered moderation complaints compared to wholesale rate limiting of incoming content... I can only imagine the madness of content producers if YouTube tried that.
>Youtube has near perfect knowledge of the warm data of their operations, and use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it
YouTube content moderation isn't human spaceflight. Having a goal of never failing is, well, a very inexperienced way of thinking about failure. On the order of half a million hours of new video content a day goes on YouTube, or something like 6 million uploads.
Let's just pretend that the moderation decision is only made once on upload, you make 6 million decisions a day, how many ridiculous decisions are you going to make every day?
Do you think that number is ever going to be zero? The reality is that there is an exponential relationship.
Let's just say you can double your cost to cut failures in half. If it's not that relationship it'll be something like it.
You can just keep doing it. Doubling your cost over and over, and you're still going to fail all the time. When a "one in a million" chance means something happens several times a day, well, you have to have a different attitude about failure.
And when you're just about the only game in town, whatever you do to mitigate failure is going to attract people trying to screw with you to upset you and your users, to take advantage. Not only are you trying not to fail every day, you're trying to avoid people exploiting those attempts. It's just reality that you have a popular service, there is going to be some nonzero number of very upset users with just cause to be upset. That's just reality.
I'm sure there is already some per-user upload rate limits in place to prevent gross abuse. It is a matter of playing with these parameters. Rate limits don't have to be distributed mindlessly equally globally. Just like in Hacker News or in Twitter, certain proxy variables like the account age and karma scores are used to assess abuse potential and certain capabilities of the platform is unlocked to the user. Most probably something like this also exists. Again, it is a matter of playing with these parameters.
Additionally, "few scattered complaints" suffer from selection bias in telling what is actually going on. Not all policy (mis)applications transform into a complaint. If I had to guess, the ratio could be at least an order of magnitude but obviously we have no data on this.
> Do you think that number is ever going to be zero?
Zero complaints is a straw-man end-state. Of course there is going to be diminishing returns. You can aim to minimize user complaints at 80% to save from diminishing returns, or you can aim to maximize platform usage and ad revenue and take user frustration into account only to the extent it affects platform usage maximization. You can operate on either goals while paying attention to diminishing returns.
Very simplistically, there is a relationship such that "for every x dollars we don't spend on reducing abuse, we lose y dollars in user frustration". Who decides the satisficing ratio between x and y? This optimization is done asymmetrically by these types of services and in general there is no way for us to say "wait a second, turns out you were abusing your users/letting them get abused more than you should while making a smidge more profit out of it" with such information asymmetry.
Yet that's what the grandparent comment is suggesting:
> Can’t Youtube say “given the current accuracy/precision of ML based solutions and how much our manual operations can scale, we are going to rate limit the content that circulates to match our ability of giving the best judgment on what videos to take down and what videos to keep”.
YT already does this abuse-prevention, they just lean towards letting more content on rather than less. The grandparent suggests that they start limiting uploads in a way that more regular uploaders (eg. a few videos a day) would feel, which would warrant some explanation or statement from the company.
The comment of yours I was responding to
>use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it
It is not at all a straw man. You are criticizing nonzero optimization and encouraging minimization. To minimize is to have a goal of zero. What other definitions do minimize and optimize have in the dichotomy you are trying to make here?
In other words, if you can't afford to buy cars and hire drivers and comply with all regulations then don't compete with Uber. The missing part is, Uber intentionally cuts these things out of its business model so you can't… I guess it would be, drive for Uber until you can afford a real taxi medallion.
Likewise, I think being a YouTuber you will NEVER be able to earn enough money that you can jump ship to a competing video service with better conditions, because no such service (?) exists at the scale and audience of YouTube, because YouTube runs at a substantial loss in order to completely own the market for non-trivial uses.
That's valuable. How valuable? Stock market valuable: as in, people with money THINK it is valuable, and I don't think the reality has been well tested yet. We're still in the world where dominating and monopolizing is seen as super valuable, because of some immense perceived payback that you apparently get to do.
That said there would be some privacy concerns if that data was just floating around out there.
Of course that might create another incentive for Google not to provide any customer service at all until people pay.
But YouTube is still a platform you must be on if you care about expanding your viewership.
Of course it's not easy. You have to figure out growth for yourself, and most indie businesses and projects fail. Then again, so do most YouTube channels. So it's up to you to choose the indie path or choose YouTube.
I don't remember any of the Internet idealism of the 90s mentioning the great progress of sharing information involving the creator of every piece of data available making a fraction of a cent every time it was consumed.
I don't mind people getting paid to do things of course, but I do mind a culture dominated by selling each other's attention to advertisers in exchange for creative output, or creative output solely for the dopamine shot from attention and likes.
I guess I don't like the entitlement/blame cycle where people who help create a problem complain about the consequences.
Be the change we want to see in the world. Stop posting on YT/FB/IG/wherever, and create your own site, attract your own audience.
I'll come watch you/read it/listen to it. I'm sick of FB/YT/IG/wherever.
I have seen that, particularly in history channel circles were the content get demonetized for things like saying Hitler, many of them band together and publish to youtube last or not at all and promote these other channels in their videos. I don't know if any of them will be successful, but staying on youtube simply isn't an option for them either.
I think if/when youtube falters it will be death be a thousand cuts, it won't be a single movement with organization and it won't be to something else as centralized.
If one is not willing, capable, or even interested in trying to solve problems they help create, as an individual or a group, I have very little interest in sympathy for their difficulty.
At some point, people need to realize what constantly wanting things for free is costing them and the people they watch.
It's not free, we pay for the content by buying products, it's just very very indirect.
Which is the Star Trek model. It's the future of 'nobody has to work to eat, and so now people go insane trying to pursue popularity since survival's a solved problem'.
That makes it interesting in its own right, and we can already see both the possibilities and the 'race to the bottom' factor that ensues.
None of that changes the fact that Google is indeed "treating it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust". That's basically their MO, and they put wayyyy too much stock in the results. Saying that Google doesn't do this is crazy. This is why the Podcast Addict thing happened; they were trying to crack down on the misinformation from "plandemic" weirdos and Podcast Addict and many other apps were hit with the spray of the shotgun blast. Is their original intention worthwhile? Yes. Do I think a human "reviewed" Podcast Addict before they took it out for linking to content about literally the world's most talked about story while at the same time Google Podcasts did the exact same thing? Absolutely not. If a human reviewed that case and decided that Podcast Addict (the #1 podcast app on Android) needed to be suspended, then something is broken. Maybe someone needs to be fired, but there's no someone in the chair. You can't fire the AIs at this point- You can only tweak and rework them and hope they take out less innocent bystanders.
All this said, is it hard? Yes. Is there too much content to really do this right? Yes I believe there is. Could Google do a better, more efficient and transparent job of cleaning up the mess when their scripts misfire? Oh absolutely yes.
We tried to convey the message [1] that due to corona virus fewer and fewer human reviewers will be available.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-coronavirus-content-...
Also you can’t expect people to put their heart and soul to this kind if grunt work - reviewing content and complaints all day long.
In the end it might be that humans just become robots on task like this.
And this, by far, is not the worst case of what's proliferating there.
> "I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough"
I dont want these companies touching false/immoral take downs. who are they to decide? sorry, I dont want these people in charge of the moral police. illegal stuff, like revenge porn makes sense.
> "YouTube is doing it's best to blend automation (fast but inaccurate) with human curation (more thoughtful but slower), and sometimes it gets it wrong"
I feel like they usually get it wrong, they are closer to being a blind man swinging a chain saw than a surgeon with a knife. HIRE SOME PEOPLE. they have huge margins, it would take very little for these companies to hire some people to review content.
> " feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly."
Tell that to people who have been shadow banned or demonized. most of the time, there never is resolution, their channel and all the hard work they have put together is ruined forever.
Agreed. That's something that's frequently said about Google and Facebook... That their volume is so large, they couldn't possibly do a better job with customer service. Given that they each make billions in profit every quarter, I find it hard to believe that improving customer service is unfeasible or too expensive.
It's possible that it's impossible to do any better than they currently are, but as we don't have access to all of the data that they do, we cannot make that determination.
If they hire from low cost countries from contractors. They will only have to pay 10k per headcount + additional 10k for various stuff.
That's only around 5 billion. Let's just double that, 10 billion dollars. That's it. Google can easily pay it.
From google's perspective, none of these blackmail or customer support issue is an actual issue, because you, the customer, is gonna use google's services regardless. The business case for paying support personnel is non-existent. Even if you're a paying customer, the overhead of hiring more personnel is not an effective use of capital - better spent on R&D and other scalable revenue generating options.
It sucks. But that's the reality.
Even watching every video that hits 1000 views would be a huge overkill, and that would already cut your budget by a factor of multiple thousands.
If they can't manage it they should scale it down. See some diversification in the online video space.
Your problem is with the ownership model. Good luck.
So long as more people provide a market to have their agency bought for an ever lower price... you’ll have that.
To their models we’re replaceable cogs, so long as the correct stats are up wtf do they care?
Don’t bother rethinking how we compute or anything. It’s not like people weren’t predicting just this as the cloud took off (oh wait they were!, Google it!)
See: https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/12/expanding-our-work-ag...
TL;Dr - YouTube announced they were going to have over 10,000 people to help.
Disclosure: Work at Google, but views are my own.
How many people? Youtube is probably the biggest nexus of complaints, but apps on Play and the Chrome Extension store are also up there.
Consider what it would cost to manually vet all apps on Play against even the most uncontroversial malware and data abuse policy. Malicious authors are clever and apps are big. It'd take a trained reverse engineer days to truly vet a single app. How many millions of apps are on the app store? How many different versions of those apps are there? You are looking at an army of people being paid six figures to figure out if apps are doing nasty things.
Now consider how pissed people get that things like domestic abuse apps (often hiding as child monitoring apps) exist on the app store. Or plenty of other objectionable crap. If you want to tackle any of this (you don't but lots of people do) then now you've got a whole set of complex contextual problems for enforcement.
It would take a lot more than "very little" to review content.
I believe this is precisely what Apple does, is it not? So perhaps not as impossible as you're casting it to be.
They can't vet everything, but the bare minimum of what they should be vetting is a lot closer to apple levels than their current levels.
I understand there simply not being enough manpower on Earth to manually review so many cases, but the balance seems to be so heavily skewed towards automation (which still does a very piss poor job at it) that just feels like there's no human element vetting the final decision at all, and that's the approach which so many people have gripes about, rightfully so until Google strikes that balance.
IMHO it's less about man power then how to approach thinks.
Like for example in the given case the video was reviewed by people multiple times. So they could have just "locked" it into being a good video and on put higher bars on further complains.
I mean this video got taken down even through it had been manually reviewed. So not having enough manpower isn't quite the problem.
To problem is more on the line of:
- YouTube doesn't incur much cost on false take downs (both on copyright and community standards). Even false closure of whole google accounts often doesn't cost them much even through it can cause major damages.
- There is no good law to protect small content creators against false copyright claims, false "bad content" claims or discrimination through non advisability in most countries. Sure laws exist in some places but they are mostly in-effective.
This has made me wonder,
1) how many people would this really take to review appeals manually?
2) should a publisher be allowed to run a platform that they are unable to curate?
It's an unpopular opinion, but perhaps there doesn't need to be so many videos online for public viewing.
I don't think its much to ask for a real human to review every video before allowing it to be made public. The posting person could perhaps pay a small fee for the video to be reviewed.
We could have more relaxed rules for videos that are private and shared among a small group of other accounts.
Why do we feel entitled to post any video for public consumption for free?
Actually, now that I think about it, its kind of surprising that nations don't require a film and television style rating for every video.
I don't think this is true. I expect it gets it right 99.9% of the time, but in this case someone is against a determined blackmailer who can put a lot of effort into exploiting that 0.1%. The automation will win for a while, but then the attacks will evolve.
I agree with you that it's a really hard problem, but I don't see this as finding a middle ground. In reality, there are problems on both sides (people posting bad content, and bad actors taking on good content). What I expect from Google is a constantly improving process on making sure bad content is removed, and good content is not. It doesn't seem like Google's process is getting better - if anything it's just swinging back toward blocking content faster. I feel like there have been a few swings, such as back in 2011 when any background music or movie clip might mute or block your video, even when it's fair use, to a more open model a few years later, and now we're swinging back. What I would hope is that they improve over time. And yes, many times I think that involves actual people looking at things, which is expensive in terms of people as well as having to deal with tough content (mental health of those moderators being really tricky, just look at FB). But the amount of arbitrary and poorly worded emails about how you violated the TOS but won't say how. It's obvious that working with people is more expensive than not, and that seems to be what they are doing.
It's always a cat and mouse game, I guess. And Google has fought this type of thing before with trying to fight people gaming search ranking.
Now people arguing over what content should be allowed is obviously a more tricky, moral, problem. But between illegal content and people doing illegal acts like blackmail to valid creators seems pretty similar.
They can defend against DDoS attacks, why can't they do better against fraudulent takedown requests? I think the answer lies in their monopoly status and the fact that creators don't have many other options for getting real traffic outside of YouTube.
Scalable reliable content moderation is one of the next major breakthroughs waiting to be solved. And it's not just Google it's everyone.
IMHO if you came up with a workable solution, Google would buy you out in an instant.
if passed_review_count > 0 == true
If you're trying to make money from digital video, getting banned or even demonetized from YouTube is a death sentence on your vlogger career.
So sure, I don't blame YouTube. They're likely good folks doing their best to solve hard problems. At the same time, that this is such an impossible problem to deal with is probably a good reason to make sure Google doesn't have too much monopoly power over advertising (in this case video ads).
In short, the stakes are too high! They'd be lessened with more alternatives.
I know YouTube is called the "second most popular search engine", but it's not a monopoly when it comes to digital video.
I think the best solution would be a wide, distributed network of automated takedowns targeting every nth video, but avoiding the high profile accounts. Ramp this up to a large enough issue and they will be forced to respond with a better process, otherwise their content network dies by their own process.
I'm not actually advocating that the above should happen, just suggesting it would turn the tables. Fight bots with bots.
Here's a thought experiment:
Imagine you are a global platform which needs to deal with inappropriate behavior (posting of copyrighted materials, etc.)
Flagging content requires a verified account, where you must authenticate your meatspace identity: a small monthly payment via a traceable payment mechanism; a text to your phone number; a postal address verified by sending you a postcard; a photo of your government-issued ID; and webcam photo of yourself.
None of this information is for public exposure! It merely ties your account to you, as a person, as tightly as possible. Nor is it required to use the service -- only to engage with the moderation system.
All of these can be automated from the side of the service provider.
For companies:
If you are working on behalf of a company, your company membership requires similar verification. You are also limited to flagging only IP-related issues raised by your organization (copyright infringement, etc.)
For individuals:
You must be endorsed by three other verified users.
False flags beyond a certain threshold will erode the weight of your flags, up to the point where your the moderation system will outright ignore you, with a periodic (automated) review to see whether or not your flagging behavior has improved.
Endorsing a certain number of false-flaggers will also cause your account to silently lose the ability to flag.
This mimics real-world behavioral modification for groups of people.
Thoughts? Where does this go wrong?
This is because the only time a post like this rises to the top on HN is because it's affecting someone notable in the tech/startup circle or someone with a lot of tech followers. If you don't have this kind of leverage to get Google's attention you're usually SOL. An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrMvyVEQO6M
Edit: follow up to the above video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIK0yafnbGM
From the transcript:
> long story short it only went back up I got a message this morning from someone who is a fan of mine who is a Google employee who kind of reached out internally about it after finding out what happened and that basically immediately solved it after three months of me trying everything that I you know basically everything that I knew to try
So yeah. Unless you have a fan at Google, you can go pound sand if you run into a problem.
Automating thins is fine, and even getting things wrong is okay. YouTube is nothing without the content that's on it, so it goes without saying that any money-making channel deserves expedited support, especially in cases like this one.
If these organizations don't want to be responsible for the content on their platforms, then they shouldn't censor content unless ordered to by a judge.
They want it both ways - full editorial control, but no responsibility.
I've never seen a revenge porn video on Youtube, where are you coming up with this?
Just look at the robotic tone of their emails, they don't care. I've had a channel taken down and all my old videos deleted due to some nonsense. There is no appeals process.
This isn’t “cut them some slack” xor “revenge porn”.
This is the automated (mis)application of a rule against educational videos, a rule that should not exist in the first place.
Censorship platforms are inherently dangerous.
Isn't that exactly the complaint? There's no sane human review until an issue gets embarrassingly publicized--so if the victim can generate that publicity then the system "works", and if they can't then you never see the post.
Two aspects of the problems are very easy: first, the automated parts of the review system can be marked as such. Automated emails can trivially be signed "You Tube Bot" or something (such signalling should perhaps be mandated by law). Second, when a video has been reviewed and found "not guilty" once, it can be marked as such, and past reviews recorded. Preventing automated takedowns for the same reason, or requiring stronger reviews, is trivial (though more costly for the videos that do end up being re-reviewed).
They may have other reasons not to pluck those two low hanging fruits, but difficulty is probably not one of them.
That being said, there arguably are some contents that should be taken down. But content takedowns should always be done with care, and be used as a last resort. It certainly should not be taking down harmless gaming videos.
It's also disingenuous to bring up revenge porn to strike down criticism. No one could possibly mistake the video in question for revenge porn. Even their automated system didn't. It has nothing to do with this issue at all.
If it doesnt work on large channels then there's no blackmailing possible. If it works on smaller channels then you can't be a "bad actor" as easily.
At large enough scale (e.g. Youtube scale) there will always be people complaining about almost everything.
You can't please everybody, but it's in Youtube's long-term self interest to please the people that produce the content that keeps people coming back to Youtube, otherwise the creators will look towards other platforms (and we're already starting to see this).
> It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge porn is left up....YouTube is dealing with two opposing issues
Except here, a third factor is in play - the extortion which caused a legitimate video to be taken down. Youtube's going to need to fix that problem fast.
And that's the exact reason why Youtube should be considered a platform, that Youtube is so viciously fighting now and all the Youtube believers are blindly accepting.
Not that I believe PragerU's videos are factful or informative, but I think the argument by the court that Youtube is not a state actor is completely missing the point, and it only shows how outdated the legal system is in the US, but it doesn't actually reflect on the actual situation, i.e. how much power Youtube is wielding, and how it is censoring and actively blocking free speech.
These kind of decisions shouldn't be granted to any private firms with such user and content size without public, democratic and transparent influence on the decision making.
BTW, all your arguments seems anecdotal to me. Sentences like "I see", "I feel", etc. don't really convince me and should not anyone else either.
No, they are not! They are treating this as another big data problem, ignoring the harm it causes.
What they SHOULD do is to held the accuser responsible. To make complaints you should have a verified account and if you make wrongful claims you should foot the bill.
Not rocket science really.
Sadly the situation is only resolved because the person gets traction on Twitter etc. You shouldn't have to kick and scream and demand action on Twitter to get baseline levels of support from a human.
If it turns out to be "a really hard problem" to control, that they just can't quite manage, then it's not okay to say "well at least you tried your best" (but you still get to profit off it).
What if we had our current state of self-driving cars on the road already, with all the problems that would entail, and people would say "well, to be fair, it is a really hard problem".
The point is, we don't care whether it's "their best" or if they're even barely trying, what matters is that it's good enough.
Addressing this problem would be a lot easier if Youtube could identify the people who make these false claims and upload the illegal content. But because they can always create a new account, they stay anonymous.
Maybe an alternative would be to take long-existing, well-established accounts more seriously. That way troll accounts have a harder time taking advantage of legitimate users. It would still suck if you're a new user who gets faced with this kind of abuse, though.
It looks more like YT is busy censoring content for political/ideological reasons and doesn't care too much about porn, complaints about censorship and attacks such as reported by the OP.
If some fanatics still don't get their way of censoring content they don't like quickly enough, that's not really an excuse for YT's bad service.
I feel bad for authors that use the platform because they must to reach a sizeable audience, yet the platform does not care about them because they are not Vevo.
a cynic might assume that is because you (and thus lots of other people) are seeing the post.
(Shrug) They have an almost-infinite amount of money and resources to tackle those problems. It's not unreasonable to expect better results.
This is so sneaky. Why link "false" and "immoral" and "illegal" together? I can agree that social media should take down illegal content, but "false" and "immoral" content should be left up. People who whine about "false" content really mean facts and truths they disagree with. As for immoral, do we really want to play this game? Immoral from which perspective?
> I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly.
Only if you are a big youtuber.
Not every problem can be solved with automation, because content adapts. If there will be people involved, there will be biases and scandals. Not that I trust people designing algorithms to be some kind of saints.
We know now that people are more likely to discriminate basing on political orientation than race. Basically all the people that would be racists 100 years ago now took a different angle to be able to behave in the same manner. I do not trust moderators and overlords, because they seem to be all from one political orientation. Being a black person 100 years ago, would you trust an all-white private company to handle all your information in an equal way, even knowing that some of the data exposes illegal practices of the said company? It's absurd to think that anyone under those circumstances would be 100% clean and it's just plain insane to thinnk we can hold hundrets of thousands of people at the same time to thius standard.
Do you have an example?
These seem like inherently contradictory values. You can either make a safe platform or one that treats its tenants well. Like many of its products, google has not made it clear which set of customers they’re trying to please, pissing off both parties.
Here's a bunch more:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/youtube-not-doing-enough-...
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/27/671285261/critics-say-youtube...
https://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/story?id=4889745&p...
https://coingeek.com/ripple-calls-out-youtube-for-not-doing-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-internet-meeting/inter...
Granted I am also worried about kids using youtube but I also don’t expect google to do anything about it—what could they do, manually vet all videos meant for kids? No, quality is not the google way, it’s automation.
My overall point is that google seems to be fine with just doing things there way and pissing off everyone rather than picking a customer base and meeting its needs.
100% agree. Also true of Paypal, another common 'whipping boy' because enforcing various regulations around moving money while still providing good customer service is HARD.
Of their own making. It's solvable. You throw humans at it.
If Google can't deal with this then they shouldn't be allowed to collect money by running ads. Problem solved.
And other sites will spring up that might actually be willing to deal with the problem correctly because now YouTube isn't a monopoly anymore.
Google (and others) are going to continue to be shit until we hit them with anti-trust actions and big fines. Until then, this is all just a cost of doing business and they will laugh all the way to the bank.
The one counter-argument I do find interesting, however, is that YouTube BECAUSE of their monopoly status is able to throw far more resources into this than others sites do. We don't notice it on those other sites because (a) far fewer people are making a living there, and (b) they aren't targeted the way YouTube is targeted.
But that nevertheless, that monopoly is the only reason they are able to do as good a job as they do. And even if there was tons of competition and you lowered the stakes of getting booted, starting at zero followers on another site isn't exactly lowering the stakes to a point where it doesn't matter that you got the boot.
I still say split up tech companies. That said, so many industries have monopoly issues and rather than getting 90% of the attention tech companies should probably get more like 10%.
The thing that really doesn't make sense to me is that when a moderator marks a claim as invalid it doesn't switch the automod system to requiring the moderator to review the claim before taking the video down. Ideally you'd like that to be the case for all videos, but presumably that would anger the media cartels that dictated the requirements for the system and just want a way to do mass takedowns that doesn't cost them lawyer hours or have the potential of consequences for them.
This is exactly what happens. At least, with Facebook. It's not that pranksters or trolls can flag your post/account/page and have it automatically blocked or banned; it's that eventually one of the human reviewers will make a mistake. I've seen it happen more than once and the only way to appeal was through back channels (i.e. via a friend working for Facebook).
"We don't pay for fraud traffic, we don't bill our advertisers for fraud traffic, and youtube analytics represent real users not bots" is pretty much Google's whole business model.
They can survive being caught being mistaken, but it's much worse for them to be caught lying.
So they have to pretend to believe that reporting spam represents large numbers of real humans filing mistaken or dishonest reports that they have to manually review.
This doesn't have anything to do with the media cartels though -- they have access to ContentID and can take down YT videos without filing reports or involving Google employees at all. Media companies wouldn't care if YT removed the report feature entirely.
If you're looking for a corporation to blame for this it's the advertisers, they don't want to see their ads next to brand-unsafe videos. YT has outsourced the hard work of actually watching and classifying videos for appropriateness to the report system. They assume that once they take down anything that catches a lot of reports, whatever is left will be anodyne enough to be brand-safe.
Google is not subtle about where its priorities lie. There is a section in their 10-K titled “How we make money” and the two sub-bullets are “Performance advertising” and “Brand advertising”. The rest is a footnote.
Their revenue breakdown tells a similar story. Google as a whole had revenues of $161B in 2019, and $134B of that was direct revenue from from ad sales. “Other bets” (inclusive of consumer product things like Fiber, Fi, etc) is less than $1B — a rounding error in the scope of their overall business.
I know it’s flippant to say “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” but it’s particularly true in the case of Google. They are a B2B advertising company, not a B2C products company. It’s just not part of their business model to provide support to anyone who isn’t an ad buyer. It honestly ends up thwarting their ambitions in the product space because the kind of customer support required to succeed just isn’t in their DNA.
Fiber has been effectively cancelled; Google has been shopping it around to various telecoms since 2017 but because it's an overlay network and it's not very large, nobody wants the headache of trying to integrate it. Fiber was always an attempt to push broadband providers to update their networks to better support YouTube; Google was never going to throw down the $100B that it would have taken to be competitive. It was never designed for long-term viability because it didn't need to be to serve its purpose.
And I hate to admit, they're doing great. I recently tried some different search engines (DDG among others) and they just never give me results as accurate as Google does.
Essentially YT is a middleman between billboard manufacturers (content creators) and advertisers (drivel manufacturers).
Patreon and Squarespace are not competitors to Youtube, they're in completely different races.
There is no real competition to Youtube when it comes to UX (specially loading speeds and availability of different resolutions) just due to the sheer number of CDNs and server infrastructure that Youtube has. Youtubers can complain and complain (sometimes rightfully), but 99% of them are not willing to abandon the platform, because that's equivalent to abandoning their online career altogether.
The revenue potential in the advertising space cannot be underestimated. Merch has high fixed costs and does not scale dynamically. Live-streaming is inaccessible for both streamers and viewers (in comparison to YouTube videos). Donation fees aren’t a secure revenue source. Either the donators or the creators could turn off donations at any time. But ads are guaranteed. There’s so much to the ad space that isn’t publicly known; Google’s operating on a whole‘nother level.
It’s also a lot more complicated to start ten $300 million projects than to optimize one $3 billion project. The people steering the ship (CEO, CFO, CTO, ...) only have so much time and brain power. They could delegate projects to others, but that requires hiring the right people and that’s really hard. If you have 4 layers of accounting management, and the probability of a bad hire is 25%, the chance of each layer being managed well is only 32%. Whereas if you have only one or a few big projects, you can have less layers, so the probability of success increases all round.
(You might say that Google should do all these projects so can diversify. But why should they take the risk? There are thousands of startups out there testing the waters. They can just acquire those when they show promise. If those startups fail, Google loses nothing.)
(The claims in this comment are educated guesses from reading a lot of articles. I definitely haven’t run a $300 million project!)
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/01/08/report-ama... [1] https://www.drift.com/blog/squarespace-billion-dollar-growth... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/elisabethbrier/2019/07/16/next-... [3] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
You have:
- 2 billion monthly active users
- 73% of US adults
- The most-downloaded iOS app in 2018
- As of December 2018, installed on 5 billion Android devices
- One billion hours of content viewed per day
- 500 hours of content uploaded every minute
The only one that matters is "how many complaint-review-hours do I get?"
For instance, you might lower complaint-review-hours by letting complainants submit timestamps and prioritizing complaints with timestamps.
Let's put a number on the complaint-review-hours with the current stats.
A human can do X cases/hour, but if you have more cases than humans can handle your backlog will start to grow steadily. At this point you either hire more people or start to automate things, after all you don't want a city of people moderating stuff.
So what's your target number and what do you guess the actual number is?
Doesn't really help when the other party is clearly a child with no money.
Your post is extremely confusing and bizarre to me.
PeerTube is a more distributed clone of YouTube, and this site explains what it is well: https://framablog.org/2019/11/12/peertube-has-worked-twice-a....
Technology used includes a HLS video player, and WebTorrent. Like Mastodon it also uses the ActivityPub protocol.
Peertube = email software
In order to have an email account you don't go to "email.com", you have to go to an email service provider. Peertube works in the same way so they have a list of providers: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances
If you can understand email, you can understand peertube.
It actually has a list of instances too where you can watch videos. I'd suggest picking one and simply having a look.
If someone has been hit with these takedown requests over and over where the resolution was always to put it back up, what likelihood is there that future resolutions will be different? By standing by your content creators with a history of improper takedown requests you'll build brand loyalty. By making it just as difficult on content creators the 100th time as the first time makes me think YouTube isn't going to be the "platform of the future" for content creators.
Kind of super thankful I am not a YouTube Creator because having my channel hacked and my content deleted would be very hard to deal with.
Tweet 4 hours ago from that creator: https://mobile.twitter.com/gamefromscratch/status/1265579494...
In the old days griefing was done for the lulz. Today it's done out of malice, or worse, out of greed.
That way, if you lose one channel you don't lose your followers, and you can take your time to deal with getting your channel back. And you still get the benefits of YouTube's reach.
I agree, though, that a website with merchandise (depending on the channel) or a Patreon, distributing your video hosting across platforms, is probably the safest way to go.
Notice that I'm saying "give back". That's because it was deliberately gutted: https://promarket.org/2019/09/05/how-robert-bork-fathered-th...
Imagine, instead, if we applied the same norms to establish "market dominance" as the court did in this case from 1961: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/#tab-opi...
They want to enjoy the type of monopoly that Facebook/Google/Amazon currently have online, except in the podcast space.
Now, you can argue that those anticircumvention laws exist in service to the existing copyright regime, sure. But those aren't the laws we forced other countries to adopt.
"Malicious actors reports, and Youtube bots autoremoved, my video four times" should not be possible.
There might be some subscriber count threshold or partner status that, once crossed, flags extra steps that mean a new violation is escalated for a closer look first?
If the majority of subscriber's vote confirms the content then the channel owner could be given a 2nd chance?
Just an idea off the top of my bald head.
I don't use Youtube as a creator, so I can only guess.
Links to it from outside of Youtube? 'Millions of views' type of stuff? Ad revenue? Getting their account perma-banned?
Google can and will try to do a better job, but as long as such people are around (i.e. forever) those problems will persist.
1) According to this video, it is very easy for some troll living in another country, who has a bot network, to extort money from YouTube creators by gaming YouTube's takedown request system:
"I'll get your video taken down unless you pay me" (Sounds a whole lot like patent trolls -- but applied to videos).
2) YouTube (or any other video sharing site, present or future), should conduct a thorough investigation as to how their system for user requested takedowns -- could be gamed by bot networks / multiple phony user accounts requesting takedowns -- and what could be done about it, using what happened here as a baseline for that investigation.
Note that this also applies to non-video sharing sites where user takedowns can be requested, i.e., craigslist -- if that process is automated in any way, it should be thought about from the perspective of "how do we protect against swarms of automated bots / fake user accounts, requesting takedowns?"
3) Any ML/AI algorithm that is used in the takedown determination process should consider the reputation of the user whose videos are being requested to be taken down.
This includes such things as 'how long has the user been a user', how many other videos have they uploaded, how many likes they've received over the years, how many video views, and how many real legitimate complaints, verified by an actual YouTube human staffer -- have occurred on that account over the years (feeding that data in only after human YouTube staffer review, etc.)
4) It wouldn't be a bad idea (if YouTube is short of staff), to create another tier of users, "review users", that is, these users would be / could be called upon to review content that was flagged for removal/deletion for one reason or another. If enough "review users" (randomly selected) collectively vote that the content should be removed, THEN and only then it gets queued for a human being staffer at YouTube for final review... otherwise it's not banned, and sticks around... but this would hopefully save a lot of work for human YouTube staffers -- much in the same way automated voice assistants do for human telephone operators or receptionists... any AI/ML algorithms could be the gatekeeper for this tier of users; if the AI/ML has a problem with the content -- escalate it to this tier of users for further review...
5) To implement #4, User accounts, agreements, and YouTube's suggestion algorithm -- would have to be modified (basically you're adding another user account type and another agreement type) to support the functionality.
6) No matter how great YouTube is, it's a human created system like all others, and as such, subject to failure. As the old expression, "Don't put all of your eggs in one basket" goes, similarly:
Don't host all of your videos on one and only one video hosting site.
Just like you wouldn't store your important files in one location only, without making/having backups...
FBI: 'Go away and come back when you have a name and address, and can prove the guy is under our jurisdiction.'
They don't work for you.
There's a bunch of valid use cases for easily being able to send and receive money rather than relying on banks for everything when there are viable alternatives.
https://www.elliptic.co/our-thinking/bitcoin-transactions-mo...
Transmission of wallets between people is not traceable.
ACH takes days to transfer between bank accounts in the same country. Maybe you want your money to get somewhere faster than that.
Maybe you need to take money with you when leaving the country and don't want the border agents to nail you with civil asset forfeiture.
Those are off the top of my head. If that's not sufficient, I'm really not sure why umbrellas exist - it's not raining on me at the moment.
I don't have a credit card. A site can either support Paypal (ugh), or support our nice secure local payment system (marginally likely), or they can support Bitcoin and then a Bitcoin payment provider has to support our nice secure local payment system, which is much more likely. Either way, once the money is in Bitcoin, I am the only one responsible for the security of my wallet, and if I lose that I'll at least know it's my fault.
The biggest problem imo is that its unrooted, its value is purely speculative. At least the USD has the petrodollar system to keep it in check.
Just because something enables crimes doesn't mean it needs to be stopped. Even though many don't use bitcoin, the ideas that bitcoin (and physical cash) represent outweigh their capabilities for committing crimes.