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Comment by awbraunstein | Hacker News Reader

As someone who worked at YouTube for some time, I'd actually say that this isn't an accurate assessment. Most of my former coworkers were disheartened at these stories. Some individuals actually were very active on the r/youtube subreddit and worked to handle individual cases that came up like this one. I think many are just resigned (but not content) to the fact that unless Google decides pump lots of money into human moderation, we are stuck with the algorithmic moderation that is responsible for many of these issues. And unfortunately, that isn't a problem that can be simply solved with code.

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> Most of my former coworkers were disheartened at these stories. Some individuals actually were very active on the r/youtube subreddit and worked to handle individual cases that came up like this one.

Out of curiousity, is there any actual process that is kicked off when someone posts into the support forum or the subreddit?

Or are there just some employees who happen to browse those boards in their free/20% time - and if they feel particularly moved by some post, they can try to rally up enough internal support to do something about it?

Because with all due respect, that's not support, that's charity.

They are simply too big now, and there is this dumb idea about promoting one path of success across many different types of creators.

A plumber that wants to promote their business and it's reliability should not be required to make funny scripted videos using the "OhNo song" just to get views.

A doctor that pops pimples should not be required to make funny or gross scripted videos using the "OhNo song" just to get views.

A musician that want's to promote their music as well should not be required to make funny scripted videos using the "OhNo song" just to get views, especially because that song is probably not their own, and it has nothing to do with their music.

None of those "creators" should be required to pay to promote/boost their originally produced content either (especially when they're primarily promoting "OhNo by Creeper", but somehow that's become a widely accepted thing as well... It's all dumb, and pretty much a modern-day pyramid scheme.

If you spend most of your time working on designing thumbnails and writing scripts, finding daily trending hash tags, and in shooting and editing videos according to success advice, you're simply not working on improving your "bread and butter". As trends become coveted goals, the overall quality of content declines as well, and it burdens attention spans of viewers overall (just look at how many videos now over-use jump cuts, overly excited and sensationalized dialogue, and zoom effects)... :\

This is what also encourages content theft as an easy route to getting views and likes that ultimately do nothing good for most people... It's popularity without profit for anyone but the platform.

People get frustrated only after years of trying to climb the mountain and finding out there is nothing at the top, the platform loses it's foothold, and then is replaced by something new... Rinse and repeat... Friendster, Myspace, Mp3.Com, Napster, etc... :\

I don't really understand this. It seems like anyone working as an engineer for YouTube could find a position anywhere else. Why put up with this sort of unethical corporate behavior -- that is, banning without providing details?

You're right that it can't be solved with code, but can't it be solved by leveraging power as a scarce resource? Hiring is incredibly expensive so at some point they have to give. And if they don't, well, at least you're not contributing to the problem.

I see a lot of posts on the Internet where it seems a lot of people get into software engineering not to solve problems but to… just write code. They hate meetings. They hate anything that takes time away from writing code.

And Google is a company with primarily software engineers…

I do not believe this would address the root issue, which is not "how to put pressure on Google to do less evil".

The challenge is to moderate a popular service where any user can upload content that many actors will try to abuse.

Even putting aside that YouTube is partly supported by ads, there is no known solution as far as I know, short of turning YouTube into an old fashioned TV channel with only a few vetted content creators allowed to upload.

It would be sufficient to notify banned uploaders what rule(s) they broke and add a human-powered appeal process. With the former, the latter will be relatively cheap as reviewers and uploaders could address the specific issue.

With sufficiently complex systems to detect fraud, such as AI or that involve constraint optimisers, it is not always doable to isolate a single, clear parameter that is responsible for the data to be flagged. This is an issue also for them (source: been working on several complex rule based systems that exhibited this very problem).

As for the human powered appeal process, how to design it so that it is not spammed/abused as easily as the upload?

It's easy to explain everything away because of evil corporation, but those are also actual technical issues.

Thanks I will try the Reddit channel.

r/youtube basically a dead sub

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