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Comment by tjpnz | Hacker News Reader

I've reported these on YouTube yet they're still being recommended to me hours later. Clearly they're incapable of moderating their own platform. What's it going to take for them to start taking this seriously?

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Genuine question: Does anyone here have a good sense of how easy/hard it is to moderate a platform like YouTube? My sense is that the answer is VERY HARD, so I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong. But perhaps I’m being too generous. Is this something that could be prevented if YouTube just tried harder?

Yeah I see just as many complaints about unfair takedowns. At their scale, I think it’s a little more complex than people want to admit.

YouTube could at least make it harder for scammers by not promoting streams through the algorithm or at least not showing them unless there's a subscription. I would also argue that they shouldn't just give everybody the ability to livestream at first given how many of the scammer accounts are new. That strikes me as a common sense solution.

If both were implemented I suspect these sorts of scams would no longer be worth the effort.

>I would also argue that they shouldn't just give everybody the ability to livestream at first

They don't. You have to verify your channel first using a phone number.

Here's an easy solution: only allow people who have proven their identities to have videos promoted by YouTube's algorithms, so they can be held legally liable if they publish videos that break the law

Then people will complain the recommended videos are not as related as before and/or they only promote corporate entities who will verify

It's basically impossible to do it right - when you have such a wide audience, every single decision you make will upset potentially millions of people, be illegal/legal in some parts of the world, will impact both good and bad actors, etc. And you have to relay on automation a lot, as it's not cost effective to have meaningful review by humans.

But that brings obvious follow up question - should then such a big platform exist? IMO, even with all those problems - yes. Being able to easily share content with people around the world is and remove barriers for acquiring knowledge is a huge advancement. But I can totally see people disagree with that.

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