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Comment by awillen | Hacker News Reader

People forget that they get these free services for free, and a big portion of that is because ML tools are able to cheaply do a really hard job of moderating. You hear about things like this because they're so unusual, which is a testament to the amount of time they work correctly without being noticed.

Granted, there have been some issues with people getting banned from Google services for what appear to be wrong reasons and then not being able to get any kind of a human response. Those aren't great, but if you ask people whether they want to pay $10/month for YouTube so human moderators can stop this from happening or get it for free and have the .0001% chance that they get banned purely by accident, they'll take the latter. And that's putting aside the fact that there will still be errors with humans doing it, and there will still need to be the same appeal process to resolve those.

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Not entirely true. First the platform is free, but also is the content that people provide and without it Youtube wouldn't make sense - so it's not a free service, it's a partnership. Second, for many people YouTube is the primary source of income, and I'm sure there would be plenty of content authors who'd be glad to pay a service with human moderators rather than bots - GIVEN THAT they get to keep access to the same traffic that YouTube provides. That's the key thing, you can't just go somewhere else when all the users are on a few popular platforms. If it's not for that, many high-profile authors who get their videos demonetized on stupidities would have left YouTube long time ago - but they can't, big players keep them in a checkmate position due to the form of monopoly on viewers that they have.

And that means you can't just say "If you don't like it, leave, it's a free service", because it's not that simple, as leaving in reality means "give up on your business", and most of people just can't afford that. Youtube has them cornered and thus needs to be careful, since it's not a game, it affects people's lives. For many accidental blocking of channel can mean they'll be living in their cars until the Gods of Google show mercy and fix the error.... and if they do it, since sometimes you don't even get a meaningful reply on what happened, just a template message.

You just described a monopoly

What does youtube do that is monopolistic? Just because all users congregate onto one site doesn't mean that Youtube needs to be broken apart.

I don't think Youtube necessarily needs to be broken apart, but they are a natural monopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch. Think of it in terms of paying users: how much would you have to pay someone to switch from Youtube to your site? Multiply the average by the number of users, and that's the advantage Youtube has over competitors.

Ooh, this is something I've often wondered (and has become more interesting since Alphabet recently started revealing revenue numbers for YouTube) - can YouTube be profitable as a standalone entity?

The reason I ask is because, despite all its flaws, YouTube is one of the treasures of the internet. And I wonder if we'd lose it by breaking up Alphabet.

I am not pro-Alphabet and 100% believe Alphabet needs more regulation, and quite frankly does need some trust busting, but I'd be really sad to lose YouTube. Yeah, there's vimeo but it's clearly not a direct competitor. I also fondly remember stage6 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage6).

I would bet it could. YouTube definitely benefits from Google infrastructure. Especially since a lot of their cost is video transcoding and batch pipelines which can easily be slotted into unused CPU around the world. YouTube almost certainly also gets very cheap storage not only because Google has optimized storage cost for them but also because of the similar flexibility that they have on where videos are stored. Furthermore they use Google's CDN which is likely the best in the world hand has many relationships with ISPs to get caches close to eyeballs.

However as I understand it the product itself isn't tied to the Google infrastructure. YouTube's main value is the user base, both of viewers and of publishers. It would be a technical marvel to move it off of Google's infrastructure however I don't think that there is any feature that they wouldn't be able to provide anymore. It would certainly be more expensive, but at YouTube's size you could probably work out similar deals with other providers (or with GCP) so I'm not sure that the prices would rise that much. (IDK, maybe 15% increase in cost between provider cut and raw cost increase?)

YouTube doesn't really fit the definition of a natural monopoly, particularly because there's nothing fundamentally stopping other services from popping up. YouTube's status as an effective monopoly doesn't come from some sort of scarcity of the means of production.

> The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch.

Only if we're assuming that users and uploaders will only ever use exactly one service at any given time. No reason why that needs to be the case; nothing stopping people from uploading to YouTube and Vimeo and Twitch and DailyMotion and PornHub and LBRY and PeerTube and whatever other platforms, and nothing stopping people from viewing from those platforms, either.

Thing is that the free market approach just doesn't work in markets where there's only a few players and the cost of entering the market is extremely high. Simply there's no enough competition to make things actually competitive. That's why google provides no support and shuts down peoples accounts without warnings... they can, they just don't give a shit. They know they will not loose any clients over that, and in the end that attitude detriments the quality of services for both viewers and content producers (and especially them).

> and the cost of entering the market is extremely high.

The cost to enter the video sharing market is extremely low, especially in this day and age where you can rent computing and storage capacity on the cheap around the world.

> YouTube's status as an effective monopoly doesn't come from some sort of scarcity of the means of production.

The problem here is in the network effect, not in scarcity.

Hence my belief that it ain't a natural monopoly.

It's the tendency of these markets to "naturally" form monopolies.

Then where is the YouTube competitor? The closest seems to be odysee (https://odysee.com/) where you're lucky to break a few hundred views.

Suppose YouTube disappeared tomorrow. Where would everyone go? Probably odysee. So why don't they go there now? That's why Youtube is a natural monopoly.

> Then where is the YouTube competitor?

I named multiple said competitors. And they seem to get plenty of traffic themselves.

> So why don't they go there now?

Do people know about odysee? First I've heard of it (to my recollection at least).

I think it's Facebook and Instagram. You can put a video up there and a lot of people will watch it.

Yeah the fact that said service is the very first result on a major search engine, who's conveniently the owner of said service, has nothing to do with it. Organic congregation and all.

> ...that is because ML tools are able to cheaply do a really hard job of moderating

I mean , YouTube is huge, but we had moderation-at-scale before ML was a popular phrase to bandy around.

'ML' and 'Algorithms' are just convenient non-human bogeyman that any corporation can pin all their woes on without batting an eye right now -- a convenient explanation tool for when things go wrong.

I am going to take a bold stance with this next statement:

An algorithm cannot be at fault -- it is always the fault of those that implement such algorithms.

YouTube and their community is huge -- YouTube has revenue fifteen times greater than Yahoo. 'Too big to X' should not be a tolerable excuse from any industry -- especially so since YouTube/Google has been pushing the idea for years that being a YTer is an actual profession.

Imagine for a moment coming into work and being told that you're fired because an internal corporate policy checker decided that something you did in your past work history was worth of termination; and then 24 hours later being told to continue coming into work because a mistake had been made, but with no further explanation.

This kind of 'workplace' would be intolerable in any real 'work environment'. Just more evidence that YTers are not really treated like any other partner or employee anywhere else in the world -- and that they should probably curtail that language if they want expectations to match the reality that their 'employees' experience.

>People forget that they get these free services for free,

YouTube is not a free service. This fallacy needs to go.

> YouTube is not a free service. This fallacy needs to go.

To anyone still not convinced, YouTube takes 45% of all ad revenue generated on videos that YouTube had no part in creating.

Okay, fine, so an algorithm can't be at fault. Ultimately it doesn't matter whether it's an algorithm. The point is that at this scale, moderation mistakes will be made. Doesn't matter if it's humans or ML or what have you. People rush to condemn the service and the people who make it as a result of these very, very seldomly occurring mistakes, but there is no system that exists that would allow perfect moderation at this scale.

Your work comparison just isn't valid because there is no employer with a number of employees within several orders of magnitude of the number of videos on YouTube.

> You hear about things like this because they're so unusual

I feel like it's the exact opposite: we're hearing about them because these are the ones that slipped into public awareness. The inadequacy of automated moderation without any real semblance of human oversight has been rampant and frequent for about as long as the concept has existed.

Just because the user doesn't need to pay up-front doesn't mean the service operates at a loss (YouTube pulled in $15 billion in 2019, according to a quick search). Furthermore, YouTube Premium is a paid offering. IMO Alphabet just uses YouTube as a playground for its ML experiments because it can moreso than because it needs to for viability.

A YouTuber is a business partner. One that YouTube treats poorly.

>People forget that they get these free services for free

This would be true if youtube/google created the content as well. Youtube essentially gets the content "for free"... and then decides what to do with.

The service is not free.

Youtube brought in 15 billion dollars in revenue last year. It is probably most important to the customers of youtube (the ad buyers) that their ads aren't shown on controversial videos.

Also, I'd be really interested to know how much the Youtube team payed to build this classifier and how that compares to paying human moderators.

> Those aren't great, but if you ask people whether they want to pay $10/month for YouTube so human moderators can stop this from happening or get it for free and have the .0001% chance that they get banned purely by accident, they'll take the latter.

At this point, I view YouTube like I viewed bars that allowed smoking--it was sufficiently popular that nobody could compete against it even though it was harmful. So, we needed legislation to move us to a different local minimum.

And, I find this very painful because I firmly believe that smoking bans have killed live music. But I also understand that nobody was ever going to do the right thing while doing the bad one was so profitable.

> I firmly believe that smoking bans have killed live music

What's the connection?

Is an astoundingly extreme claim. First we have to accept the premise that live music is “dead”. Second it’s due to some orthogonal factor like a smoking ban as opposed to recorded music becoming way more accessible through technology.

It’s an extreme claim with very little rigor.

> First we have to accept the premise that live music is “dead”.

By almost all measures, it is. Number of artists, average age of artists, revenue, number of customers, etc.

> as opposed to recorded music becoming way more accessible through technology.

Except that by most measures the general public consumes VASTLY less music than they used to, so it isn't accessibility driving it.

Now, you could suggest that it's because of a bunch of changes: video games, social media, etc. That would at least be plausible.

> Except that by most measures the general public consumes VASTLY less music than they used to, so it isn't accessibility driving it.

Compared to when? 1800? 1970? 2010?

Intermediate size venues got wiped out because smokers are extremely profitable--smoking and drinking go together.

You can have a small venue (<100) and it will trundle along. You can have a big venue (>1000) because it probably reached self-supporting.

However, we lost a LOT of 100-1000 size venues from about 1990 to about 2005. And those are the ones that working musicians can make a living off of. But those need the stupidly profitable contingent that goes along with smoking and drinking. The single craft beer drinker isn't going to generate enough money to support such a place.

You could see this even before the smoking bans in areas which had sophisticated dancing (swing, ballroom, etc.) groups. If your venue somehow attracted the young dancing contingent, the venue was going to vaporize within 6 months. Everybody loved them--they tended to be polite, didn't harass the waitstaff, looked good, prevented highly skewed M/F ratios, etc. -- except that they spent next to no money compared to the general public so the owners HATED them. This was in stark contrast to the elder dancing contingent who smoked and drank like fish and could keep clubs alive long beyond their expiration date.

There must be other factors at play, because pre-pandemic I attended several live music events every month, a lot of them small <250 people venues. A friend of mine has a goal of seeing 1000 artists in a year, and he got within spitting distance of it in 2019.

Of course, all venues make sure to have outside areas for smoking, because that's the sensible thing to do.

Okay, I'm going to ask "Where?" because my musician friends probably want to move there once Covid is done.

Although, if you say Nashville or New York, you're not helping--those are mega anomalies and all the musicians are already there which makes the situation untenable.

Side Note: WTF, people? Why downvote this person?

Denmark, but it goes for most of Europe in general, at least the places I've been. Any city over a certain size will have a bunch of small venues, and the laws against smoking indoors are EU-wide.

However, I am concerned that a lot of these smaller venues and promoters will struggle to survive the pandemic lockdowns, unless our governments pull themselves together and support cultural venues, instead of focusing so hard on sports. Culture isn't just something you play with a ball :-)

As for the downvotes, probably general disagreement or spillover from other discussions where someone has taken offense to what I wrote.

Intermediate size venues got wiped out because smokers are extremely profitable--smoking and drinking go together.

Same in pubs. The smoking-and-drinking crowd got edged out by parents who for some reason want to bring their kids to the pub. They will have brought their own drinks and snacks for the kids too. The mother will have a small glass of wine and the father will drink half a pint of "craft beer", stretched out over a couple of hours while their kids run around screaming and annoying the few remaining paying drinkers.

I loved pubs in the old days but even before COVID they were dying out because they just don't want their loyal paying customers any more.

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