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Comment by andrewzah | Hacker News Reader

No, I meant nebulous as in unclear, hazy, or undefined.

Nobody knows what the YouTube algorithm is going to decide is inappropriate next. Their site’s wording is very vague and unclear as well.

You have youtubers censoring swear words now, and people uploading footage from video games like TF2 have had issues before.

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> Nobody knows what the YouTube algorithm is going to decide is inappropriate next.

Then that is the very definition of "opaque", which is what YouTube want and aim for.

Do we really need to split hairs like this? The algorithms aren't completely opaque, as they have been trained on a set of representative inputs, and are continuously monitored. They are based on neural networks, presumably, with weights inspectable by the engineers deploying the model. So it is more "nebulous" and not completely opaque.

We do, because in terms of writing english black boxes are opaque by their very nature. OP could remove "black boxes" to make the sentence correct.

You can't actually see inside a black box. That's why it's a "black box". Sure you can probe it, but that's not the same as being "nebulous", a thing you can actually see through sometimes. I expect better of HN.

An opaque algorithm could be unknown but consistent and thus learnable. YouTube is also nebulous, in that it is fuzzy and inconsistent; what is allowed on one channel may ban another.

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