https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/t13wyv/im_banned_a...
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/t13h44/so_youtube_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/t147c3/defending_u...
I don’t think people expect much from YouTube.
Dealing with bots, and content moderation in general, is an arms race. You're fighting another person who could be just as smart as you in developing evasion strategies as you are in countering them. Getting it right all of the time is impossible.
Either way, yes, there are techniques for improving performance in the presence of an adversary but it doesn't negate the problem; anything you do will be countered eventually. Clever techniques only buy you more time before someone figures out a way around it.
even classifiers with 99.99% precision means hundreds of thousands of videos and channels will be incorrectly marked as abusive every year - we just need to accept that and hope that the automated systems are improved over time.
Please be less smug.
YouTube has no right or requirement to operate at that scale. They've consciously decided to scale past what they're able to manage well. This is no different than a developer who produces terrible non-functional code but defends it to their boss by pointing out the line count is really high.
I'd be impressed by their scale only if they managed to maintain some level of quality also.
so only you can be smug, eh ?
> They've consciously decided to scale past what they're able to manage well.
That is not true. They are doing quite well considering the overall scale.
> I'd be impressed by their scale only if they managed to maintain some level of quality also.
So you assess quality by random one-off/anecdotal articles always highlighting the negative ? How do you know what their quality is when you can never know the number of abusive videos correctly blocked ?
Side note on communication here.
Any time someone uses a phrase like "Please educate yourself on $THING", they lose a lot of credibility, at least in the context of that communication. Why?
1) It comes across as incredibly dismissive of both any knowledge that that individual may have - especially on HN, I'm pretty sure we're all familiar with YouTube's scale - and of the idea that there may be missing information, on either the situation or context for the other persons point of view.
2) It's quite condescending as well - and if someone thinks that you are coming at a conversation from a combative place, they won't want to listen to what you are saying. Why should they listen if they think you don't care?
3) It's often used to paint broad strokes in places broad strokes may not be appropriate, and the phrase being attached to that makes it lose credibility even when it is appropriate.
---
Ok, now a response to the actual content:
I don't know why we've decided to allow things to exist "at scale" willy nilly. If something becomes a net negative "at scale", don't allow it to be "at scale".
No one is entitled to a business model.
Hear! Hear! We shouldn't have to give over society to the fattest, most insatiable stomachs masquerading as technology companies.
I've taken to thinking of this sort of scaling as being the digital equivalent of race to the bottom (i.e. cheap mass-produced garbage products).
Because we allow things to exist by default. Because we're a free society.
If you want an exception, then recognize and carve that out within the democratic process, not by preemptively applying authoritarianism.
You mean like I'm advocating for now? We've let it exist, and I am now advocating for it to be broken up - like I've been for a while.
Edit: I should specify - I am advocating for platforms at the scale of Facebook/Youtube/Twitter to be broken up in general, with an explicit preference towards federated services. We've let them run, and it's time for this generations round of trust busting. I'm am advocating for it to be run through a legal manner though, and discussed and acted upon via democratic means.
I think that all over comments on my gp we've gotten off topic, my email is available in my profile for anyone who wants to discuss this sort of thing further in any manner.
Mastodon seems promising as a social media replacement, and PeerTube has the tech for YouTube replacements. Both of these two are using ActivityPub, which is on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
The problem comes with content. Matrix is in the strongest position at the moment imho - moving chat platform has the least network effect, and it has the most effective (only?) bridges between "standard" centralized services out of the three. Mastodon has a decent presence, especially of tech people, but not so much outside of the tech or "got banned from twitter" bubbles. PeerTube is in the weakest position of the three afaict - it's mostly again the tech bubble and the "got banned from youtube bubble", but with a much worse distribution.
The tech on Matrix and Mastodon at least seems well established though[0], and I think both would succeed if not for the massive network effects of YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/etc.
My honest opinion is that even if a federated solution doesn't exist or isn't far enough along yet for any of the above it would be better to break down the current state of things and force the creation of one.
[0] I've not used Peertube really, so I don't know how far along it is.
Thanks for the info.
Network effects make this a losing battle, and that will not change until it is forced to - this my advocacy for it to be done via law.
I should not that I have and do occasionally watch content on peertube, there's just sadly not much there.
The conference looks quite interesting, I'll have to try to watch some of the talks this year!
>No one is entitled to a business model.
When it's just ordinary American conservatives being censored by social media, somehow nobody says things like that. Ban Trump and allow the Taliban? There's nothing wrong with that, they're private individuals, they can ban whatever they want. What do you mean nobody is entitled to a business model? Go away with your freeze peach.
<us-pov> FWIW, I see much more domestic harm in letting unchecked lies be spouted by US politicians and having that beamed into our minds non-stop then in allowing people to see atrocities committed by people on the other side of the world.
Yes that goes both ways, I'm an independent.
Edited again: Got too deep into politics on that first edit. Suffice it to say one party is worse than the other in my opinion, and that may color my POV. I still expect to see those who are lying or encouraging violence banned/fact-checked/whatever - on both sides equally.
If one side still has it happen more under those circumstances, I guess that says more about the side then the circumstance. </us-pov>
Also, free speech isn't immunity from repercussions. If I say something incredibly dumb, I expect to be mocked. If I say something hateful/dangerous, I expect people to avoid being associated with me - including being banned under certain circumstances.
I wish we wouldn't equate "free speech" with the first amendment. IMO "free speech" is a much broader concept than the specific legal protections outlined in 1A.
Mocking people for saying things you disagree with ("dumb things") doesn't violate 1A, but that doesn't mean it's aligned with the general ethos of free speech.
I feel I failed to communicate all aspects of my POV above - I definitely agree with this. Also yeah, this did get off topic and I apologize for pushing that even further just now.
In general, I try to advocate more for polite conversation and actual exchange/malleability of ideas - I just also expect for not everyone to agree with that, and to get mocked if I say something stupid.
The bigger thing is association - If I say something that someone else finds reprehensible, I bear them no ill will for trying to stop themselves from being associated with me, regardless of if that's through banning/mocking/public press conference[0]/a music video[0]/anything else.
[0] I'm glad I don't have a big enough platform to worry about these though.
Well, people are facing repercussions for viewing pro-Ukraine material. There's no immunity from repercussions, right?
(Or more precisely, people are facing repercussions for violating the algorithms that Google chose. But they're still repercussions.)
The point is that there's a double standard. If social media censors someone you hate, it's "there's no freedom from repercussions" or "they're a private group so they can ban anyone they want" or "their system, their rules". If they censor someone you like, this suddenly changes to "nobody is entitled to a business model" and "Youtube has no right to operate like that".
The issue is when automated banning leads to there not being a human in the loop, or when "well it's just the algorithm" becomes the go to excuse.
You're being very condescending when it's totally unwarranted. I assure you people are aware of the scale of YouTube.
But why should we give YouTube a free pass? You're talking about the service as if it's a force of nature rather than something human created and managed. Why are they entitled to operate at a scale beyond their own control, all while extracting huge profits?
Some people just want to throw their hands up: "Dealing with infinite uploads is hard!" "It doesn't scale!" without realizing the youtube is responsible for the very problem they created. They designed it this way!
If anything, YouTube's scale gives it a better chance of being able to address this issue, since there are likely fixed costs here that YouTube can better fund (obviously investing in better automated screening, but also setting up the workflows for human moderation, etc.) I think the only benefit a smaller scale competitor has is that they're less visible and unlikely to be "caught" for hosting content they "shouldn't". But if the rules applied equally to everyone, I think YouTube is strictly at an advantage in being able to implement better human moderation.
If I were designing from scratch, I would probably use a Peertube/Mastodon type federated system.
Each host would responsible for the videos they host - meaning they would have incentive to limit videos uploaded to any given host to an amount they could handle, or only allow trusted uploaders to their host.
Then you would have the federation so that you could allow hosts that you didn't have issues with, while blocking those you did. Eventually, there would evolve safe/block lists - like with email and adblockers - so it wouldn't even require that much effort on the parts of those running the hosts.
Secondly, for the folks saying why should we allow youtube to scale beyond what it can handle, or why should we accept the 99.99% precision ?
It is because I do not see a futuristic society in which humans are doing work like "manual reviews" - to progress humanity we need to automate such manual labour so I support the fact that companies are testing the limits of automatic content moderation - and working to improve it - I see it as a win overall. Adding human reviewers would be a step in the backward direction IMO.
Why are you assuming that HN readers don't understand YT scale?
You do know that HN has readers who have built things at YouTube scale, including YouTube itself, right?
But we mandate it because that's the world we want to live in.
The real conversation here is about Alphabet and Facebook's margins. If they're not doing enough, they can spend more and do more.
I'm not sure, but I don't think the answer is that it obviously won't materially change YouTube's profitability.
If the profitability of Youtube is on the table, then so should be antitrust, and Google should not be allowed to own it.
Even more important from Google's point of view is it was the way to push Chrome to dominance. And a way to keep it there ahead of any potential competitors.
Which is valuable because of the data and ability to block ad blockers. That is, Google's ad ecosystem.
How did YT push Chrome?
It's similar to how "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run", only with YouTube and other browsers.
Google optimizes YT for Chromium-based renderers. Or rather, Google pessimizes YT for other renderers.
They have a monopoly on search, that they use to censor any competing video hosting. If they go and start censoring their own service too, this is a very serious problem.
There are a plethora of much more conservatively sized video uploading sites that vet and have specific contracts with their content producers.
It would cost 2.5% of their profits if they had an entire US workforce and every video needed to be viewed in its entirety.
Clearly you wouldn't need to review all of it. You could use AI to identify things for review (as opposed to remove them), limit it to people with a number of downvotes or views. Hell, you could just pay people to handle the reviews/escalations/appeals.
Although, Google totally could afford it. It would cost less than 2.5% of their profits to pay US minimum wage to review every video.
So you think employing those hundreds of thousands of workers would incur no office space costs, no IT system costs, no management, no service staff, no HR, no payroll, no recruitment, no training. Wow. And your talking about Google profits, but YouTube is a business itself that needs to make money. Why does the rest of Google need to subsidise it?
Well, my numbers do allow for a $50MM/year in the various IT/management/training. I would think you could have people working from home, so office/etc. costs would be minimal. But I also made them US based and reviewing every random cat video's full length that is only seen by 1 person. Some savings could be achieved.
> your talking about Google profits, but YouTube is a business itself that needs to make money. Why does the rest of Google need to subsidise it?
Okay, fine. YouTube could internally have added the costs of reviewing every video's full length with US based people in 2021 it would have only cut in half their increase in profit over 2020.
That’s hilarious. The $50m was a rounding error you forgot to account for. Given a work force of several hundred thousand, that would just about pay for an office chair each, let alone any other equipment or infrastructure, or office space to put the chair in.
I have no idea why minimum wage workers would get an office chair worth a grand, or whatever you're assuming. You can have people do the work from their own couches and phones.
For $50MM/year I could set up the infrastructure to manage the process.
Companies that are providing such an amazingly affordable service because they're just skipping out on doing moderation don't get to use "Well, doing it the right way would be too expensive" as a defense - that's how you end up with Uber. Uber broke laws, Uber shouldn't exist at this point, something like Uber should exist, but Travis Kalanick should have been fined into near non-existence and not currently be sitting happy on 2.8 billion. We, as a society, need to have standards.
So you'd rather have the status quo of a few decades ago (ie. large media organizations acting as gatekeepers), rather than the democratized ecosystem we have now?
I'd prefer neither system, and I don't think it's a binary choice - but if forced to choose between the two I'd probably go with the monolithic status-quo machine (even though I'm extremely progressive and they hated us).
Share-holders don't have a natural right to profit off of societally destructive behavior.
[0] https://www-nytimes-com.translate.goog/2017/08/22/world/midd...
Using that information I would implement a system that would figure out the topic and prevent bots flagging that specific content only.
Compromising a system that involves 100k people is generally harder than compromising a computer algo.
For the company that loves encouraging obnoxious Captcha's to self-fund their AI/ML research and data harvest the web, they surely don't seem to like using it on their own platforms.
Google still has to routinely invent new techniques to stop spam. This problem is not solved - it's an ongoing arms race.
It is also a vastly easier problem - spam filters at google scale work because they see the same spam across zillions of accounts. This is not the case for youtube, where a spammer provides them with far fewer samples, and those are across a much wider space.
These problems are barely related.
(In fact, I wonder who these spammers are targeting. Surely the average YT user is smart enough to recognize blatant spam?)
Some random dude built an anti youtube comment spam tool. Youtube could absolutely fix this problem, they just don't care
5.7 - restricted terms
8.0 - username looks like base64
Gmail has the worst spam filter of any email provider I use today, excluding the one email server I have running on my domain that gets almost no email and has no filter. Or, well, spam filtering is a lesser problem on my server too because it doesn't block nearly all the email that I care about.
80-90% of the emails in my "Spam" folder are not spam.
It's worse than no filtering at all, since I still get exposed to the spam, but now I have to check two inboxes instead of just one, and then jump through annoying hoops to view images or access links in the second one.
To be a person is to not be reduced to an array of arbitrary scores in a worksheet.
"The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven."
That is indeed....your opinion.
Businesses which scale by hiring are much harder to grow and tend to be a lot less profitable. As a result, internet companies tend to see such businesses as not worth being in. Sure, there are lots of successful companies which operate this way, but Google sees it as an unacceptably high opportunity cost. Rather than pour resources into growing a scale by hiring business, they would rather put the resources toward a different business that they think they can scale with non-linear hiring.
Given this, it surprises me that Google is going after the enterprise cloud business. It is pretty well known that such businesses scale fairly linearly with sales and support staff. My understanding is that they know this and are attempting to scale the business this way instead of their usual strategy of ignoring the issue and hoping it will go away.
GCP can't get their act together to get a consistent enterprise sales model done....
Ha ha. Last I heard, Google were actively trying to remove their engineers from client engagements, and replace them with third party "Google preferred suppliers". They really don't want to ever be face to face with a customer.
It's too easy to forget that if you do not take care of the users, they will leave and take the payers with them. Right now it's hard to escape Google.
But a little river carved the Grand Canyon, and as more people leave the services and provide easy to use alternatives, more people will follow. My guess is that, even though it might take 20 years if Google does not redirect their focus to be more equilaterally supportive of their users then Google will inevitably become a modern Yahoo.
Rim to rim, the canyon is pretty darned wide.
Maybe the root issue was letting 4 private companies control the entire public debate with dangerous moderation practices.
When something goes wrong, Apple, Amazon and Netflix (as examples) all manage to provide free, robust customer service.
Google can afford to support it's customers. They choose not to.
This is the reason I was able to sway the C suite at my last position to avoid anything Google. I'm estimating it's probably around $9m/month revenue they lost from GCE and GApps.
They're simply not trustworthy, no/terrible support, and capricious about arbitrarily holding user's data hostage when some random automated abuse system decides you're horrible.
System Engineers don't let fellow system engineers use anything google for production purposes.
They are happy to reap the benefits so it is fair to put the costs on them.
How are you helping?
This is not a new attack in either type or scope. It's merely more visible.
> How are you helping?
Not at all. I don't benefit from YouTube's business model so why do you think that I have some obligation to help YouTube?
Of course, since you think that I have some obligation, you surely do. What are you doing besides attacking people who point out that this is a foreseeable consequences of YT's business decisions?
It's not like they're going to suffer for it.
YouTube does not care. They only care when large popular cable TV networks or large partners leave YouTube. When that happens, that is a big frown for advertisers. Small users, creators or live-streamers have no chance against being listened to by YouTube. The algorithms won't ban the partners throwing cash at them but the small users will get banned automatically and YouTube doesn't care and won't care.
That is how it is on YouTube and their private platform with their rules or ToS and we have known for years that they continue to do this and ultimately, they will NEVER change.
Articles about YT say that 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. Moderation has to be automated. You cannot throw more humans effectively at this problem.
But, clearly YT's assessment is that the harm of a "bad" video being served on their platform greatly outweighs the harm of incorrect takedowns (which can be appealed). I will call this "The Principle Of Can't Unsee."
So about 10,000 moderators required. This costs under a billion per year. Given that Youtube brings in $20B + of revenue, I'm sure this would not kill their profits.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52642633
So you now have a situation where you are making thousands ill and in doing so will incur a cost much higher than 1B per year.
But yes, it can be done.
> If you watched any Kiev livestream it may have been the reason for your termination. It happened to a lot of us too, it seems some Russian bots have been mass-reporting every single person that watched them
> Yes, yesterday night I watched a livestream. Im shocked
> I also watched a Livestream yesterday night. How i wish I didn't now since my account got terminated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/t1445p/this_accoun...
This should be illegal. It's like a diner owner saying he's going to deny service to all terrorists and then denying service to anyone with brown skin because it's how he determines who is a terrorist.
Note: I think I've got the videos backed up somewhere, but losing the channel kind of ruined the appeal of re-uploading. Lost the channel url, subscribers, and most importantly all of the video links across the web are dead.
What you described in your simile is a violation of Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it is public (as in John Q can walk in) business practicing discrimination based on a protected class (race, in this case).
I wonder if their accounts were picked up for using the chat or if there's a viewer list that is being fetched via API.
So now if you watch the wrong video and you are in some list. Looks like it wasn't a good idea to have your full name visible and online identity tied to your youtube account.
Damn google for pushing for that crap, google+ was a blight.
I use a throwaway Google account for YouTube as well, just in case.
Source: Got banned yesterday and unbanned today.
Internet identity is too valuable to trust to a company that demonstrates they are willing to fall asleep with an armed grenade in their hand.
I did not lose any other Google services during this, just access to youtube.
Thankfully, the ban got reversed today.
But afaik YouTube livestreams with a chat also have a user list for who is present, at least they used to when I last checked.
How much live streaming happened on Youtube - and how many accounts were terminated - during the conflicts in the middle east?
Please consider supporting PeerTube: https://joinpeertube.org.
A lot of accounts were posting the comment '/cam2', with others implying something was happening on cam2. Others were saying that the cam thing was fake. I kind of thought it was a way to find out who was watching the video, since obviously youtube chat isn't going to change the video angle...And now I think that's exactly what it was, for this exact purpose.
One thing is clear, and it's very scary in light of all the NATO press conferences where people are asking if a cyber attack constitutes an act of war: There is a massive war happening on the internet right now. Reps are reluctant to respond to these questions because it's clear that total cyber war has been going on for years.
Google has said it is cheaper to ignore the problem and until that changes they aren't going to fix it. And remember that on the other end of these abusive systems are corporations that are willing to sue individuals for literally billions of dollars over sharing files.
Big corporations will not have your back when it could affect their income stream.
It seems to me the system is working as intended as demonstrated by the reversal of the bans being reported 90 minutes ago.
title written by OP is obvious clickbait. Youtube isn't banning accounts that support Ukraine, the automated queue mod system's threshold has been breached and after a human review on the AI's decision, the bans were reversed.
"We have reviewed your content and found severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines. Because of this, we have removed your channel from YouTube."
Also posted a message showing support to Ukraine in a Kiev livestream.
Hi ***,
We’re pleased to let you know that we’ve recently reviewed your YouTube account, and after taking another look, we can confirm that it is not in violation of our Terms of Service. We have lifted the suspension of your account, and it is once again active and operational.
We’d like to thank you for your patience while we reviewed this case. Our goal is to make sure content doesn't violate our Community Guidelines so that YouTube can be a safe place for all - and sometimes we make mistakes trying to get it right. We hope you understand, and we’re sorry for any inconvenience or frustration this has caused.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to us here.
Sincerely, The YouTube Team
Don't. Have separate accounts for dev stuff, entertainment, storage, social media each.
> and a ton of SSO apps
Never do so. Use a password manager (self-host if you want) and use good old username-password to sign up and log in. I once had all my passwords stored in Chrome leaked in a security breach.
A friend's Gmail was suspended that was connected to bank. He had to waste literally tens of hours in commute and waiting and meetings to change it.
FYI this isn't enough. There are thousands of reports of people having all their Google accounts terminated because they shared the same payment method/IP/cookie session data/etc. This is how bad it can get: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...
This time it's Russia. Next time it will be an American political party (whichever one you don't like). YouTube saved some money on human moderation, and all it cost was selling their platform to the first group willing to abuse the system.
And do you know how they'll respond? By trying to improve the automation. No no, no need to add costs by having humans in the loop, we'll just make better software. Because that's what worked so well for SEO, right?
Last week I thought I had invented the phrase "accountability arbitrage" to describe the core FB, Google, section 230 business model. But a quick search found it actually has been previously used in some interesting documents.
I would like to see that phrase used more commonly. It seems important and timely.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22accountability+arbitrage%...
Seems like Google needs to disable autobans triggered by user reports until they have a solution to filter out the reports originating from Russian-operatred bots.
Which one would that be? I haven’t seen a single US media outlet saying this is a good thing…
Fox is taking a more strongly pro-Russian stance than most other networks.
If an observation is also repurposed as a propaganda piece, does that negate the validity of said observation?
I can't stand this bit of logical fallacy that's being used to stifle discussion. You asserted X, but so did some objectionable entity. Therefore, X is false, and you are just as bad as said objectionable entity.
This was part of a larger point that there's no good reason for America to get involved. I for one would not feel proud of this country if my son dies fighting in a war 5000 miles from my home, lending his young hands to one side of a territorial war that does not effect him, me, or any of us in a direct way. I'd strongly prefer to let the despot and the figurehead of the sham democracy we installed sort it out for themselves.
The rest of it is culture war stuff, and while I don't take it extremely seriously, I feel the same way about the things he brings up and I think he's fun. There are a lot of people who feel the same way as I do and you can't malign or name-call us out of our opinions.
Well, we did, and now...
Why? What does watching his shows or segments get you?
The media’s “don’t question or stray from what we tell you to think in the slightest or we’ll use whatever name we want to drag your name and character through the mud” just makes me and everyone else distrust the media even more.
I added that parenthetical because I expected without it that I might see an onslaught of comments from people saying that not all of the US mainstream media is in agreement that Russia is in the wrong here. But it's sounding like the parenthetical actually makes my statement wrong... I lost the coin flip I guess
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/news/russian-military-almost-certain...
It's not farfetched to think they have something worse planned.
Even if some channels leave, others will take their place quickly. Youtube has sufficient size for that.
Relevance is a relative term, so I have to apologize for being pedantic here, but I also can't really help it in this case either.
> Even if some channels leave, others will take their place quickly. Youtube has sufficient size for that.
To some extent, yes. That doesn't mean it will be able to keep up with loss forever, especially when it's doing things to outright sabotage new channels.
People will get tired of a mostly PG-rated platform once YouTube truly reaches that point. Cultures shift and change, and if global internet culture swings back to being more like it was in the 2000s, the warm safety blanket YouTube provides will be a totally uncool thing only old people and little kids watch. YouTube will someday have a rude awakening when their pushing of late-night TV and mainstream news clips is no longer a significant ROI to their customers. As for movies, well, they're definitely not the only ones in town for that.
The fact is - less than 2% of content watched is stuff like this.
People are mostly watching work out videos and game streams and sports commentary and so on. Not live streams of wars.
The only reason I point this out as a bad thing is that YouTube long ago represented something else that I think mattered more than cat videos, no matter how small the audience was or is.
If it is the flagging, I think we can agree that if any political thread were ever HN-appropriate then this one is. It would also be nice to have confirmation one way or another, since if it has been that fact in and of itself becomes part of the conversation.
It's incredibly difficult to reach a human being in their customer support chain, and using bots to take out rival / oponent / people you don't like YouTube channels has been "normal" for years.
Anyone can literally create a few fake Google accounts (or take over / steal existing ones esp. long-running ones) and write a bot to ban practically anyone else.
Twitter has this thing in Germany where they are required to tell you if someone reported your account. This is at least a good way for reporters to know that they are being targetted by trolls.
I now propose an updated motto: "Don't be evil: just look away."
I'm sure this is top priority right now for Google to fix. But perhaps everything is automated to an extent that this has no good countermove. We shall see.
"It's automated" has become the new "it's policy," the go-to excuse for doing evil and pretending it's not a choice.
Are they ready to fill the gap to some extend?
I think this is a typical use case for the decentralized approach?
Still not there, once it gets there it will revolutionize media.
Yet we definitely need something different than BitTorrent, Tor, or IPFS. Something that incentivizes hosting and creation of an economy around this is a must.
They have been posting very consistently and frequently. They went from tens of subscribers two days ago, to over 100K as of like 12 hours ago. They're putting in the work.
https://theintercept.com/2022/02/24/ukraine-facebook-azov-ba...
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People have talked a lot about how this is morally wrong.
It's more morally pretty wrong for a long time.
Copyright complaints shouldn't get settled by a "report them instant action," model. Not having a fair hearing in a court of law, is a serious weakness in our modern day legal system.
Jurists legitimately have not figured out how to solve this problem. Copyright & patent law when social graphs spread IP at light-speed is a real conundrum.
But it's not a new problem.
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What's new is Youtube's algorithm has become a huge asset to Russian foreign policy.
Which is directly opposed to the United State's interests.
If you're working in the foreign policy apparatus of the US Government and watching this... the fact Alphabet is projecting Russian soft power is a big big problem.
The spiciest example I can think of is one Estonian parish being marked as belonging to Russia, even right this moment, on Google Maps.
1.) Generalized content hosting that has minimal oversight with commenting, upvotes and monetization, etc. Basically "bring your own audience" Vimeo style.
2.) More carefully moderated content that gets reviewed by human moderators/stricter opinionated screening filters before it is pushed into the auto-recommendation engine/viral feed algorithm.
This blind viral content also based solely on uplikes seems a bit too blind/automated.
Wait not like that
Maybe they want to save face for politicians who - people will argue - mishandled this crisis.
Maybe it is just not really true, despite some people saying it on the internet.
It's usually not that clear cut, but the war in Ukraine has a clear unilateral nature (aggressor is pretty obvious). It's not crazy for western companies to echo western values and interests in such situations.
Edit: Consider the alternative, where western companies maintain "neutrality" and help oppressive regimes surveil their citizens or spread propaganda at home and abroad. This seems like a great way for western democracy to shoot itself in the head.
If the West expects corporations to ensure democracy prevails, the West will fail.
Eg, 6 year old account https://www.reddit.com/user/lamka02sk/ Or 2 years https://www.reddit.com/user/SoftGreener/ 4 years https://www.reddit.com/user/omerby12/comments/
These are the reddit thread ids which have "similar namess". The users behind them have different names and have been active on the network for up to 6 years.
Aside from that, food for thought; I know this won't be popular but Google does have ties to JetBrains (Android Studio, Android development used to be done in Eclipse, I prefer Eclipse). JetBrains has offices in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Google has a strong interest in pushing nginx (formerly (?) Russian made, though I personally prefer Apache) in Kubernetes.
It seems like the new media are keen to shut down information offensives, but are trying to use AI or some other lazy technique.
I mean we knew that, but now it's like they're competing who is worse.
Big tech more likely wants to censor the Kremlin than the pro Ukraine wing. Which leads me to believe this is YouTube getting trapped in its own algorithmic approach to moderation, until or unless they can manually intervene.
And if that were true, they would not have de-platformed Trump and they wouldn't take down lots of other high traffic content (eg anti vax) that they do.
Russia has a mediocre economy, mediocre median standard of living, mediocre consumer economy, zero economic growth for a decade, and a disaster of a future economically going forward.
US big tech all by itself generates more surplus cash (capital available for saving after expenses) every year than the entire nation of Russia does.
Russia is an economic weakling and provides no great allure for big tech.
Deferring all decisions to an opaque algorithm isn't the most responsible approach, it's just the cheapest. Worrying about externalities of their services costs money and produces little, so they mostly don't.
The fact that their approach can be used to help horrendous warmongers is not intentional, but maintaining a system that can be used in that way is.
I mean, it's not like this idea is unfounded. Trump has praised Putin many times, including during the current invasion. Meanwhile, Putin has been very friendly towards Trump.
I think the "Russian election interference" stuff is very overblown, but it's pretty clear that Trump respects (and maybe even idolizes) Putin.
One other problem with what you said is that I think the cause and effect goes the other way. The democrats are anti-Trump in part because he's pro Putin. They're not anti-Putin because Putin is pro-Trump. Being anti-Putin is very simply a matter of being anti-dictator and doesn't require tying Putin to a controversial US political figure.
The point was: big tech is exclusively run by people that dislike the perceived Trump | Putin axis, and there's nothing to debate about it frankly, it's something beyond overwhelmingly the case.
I stated no position on whether I thought that was good or bad.
There was no problem with what I said in fact. I never declared cause and effect (order to why such was the case), that'd be a pointless distraction from the core (and would merely prompt endless opinion thrashing based on partisan beliefs on this forum, or most any forum these days). I simply stated the part that they're quite obviously anti-Putin, and they are. Why for the purposes of the thread doesn't matter. Thus it's more interesting that they'd be blocking pro-Ukraine content and most likely indicates it's not their preference and is an automation problem that they'll have to manually act against.
It's almost like the conman Trump says one and does the other, but because he's our political nemesis this does not matter anymore, and all of the sudden we start believing what he says and not look at the actions.
Tell me, is this praising Putin, or trying to put some sense into Germany:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRyuW51M_fI
https://publimetros.publimetro.us/2018/07/trump-blasts-allie...
“The 1980s called, they want their foreign policy back.” - Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama.
Remember how all the journos and Democrats barked and clapped at that line like trained seals whenever you read them now angsting over Russia.
I do agree though, this is most likely just the nature of the problem of trying to moderate such a massive amount of video content.
Some will be caught in the net and attribute agency to the process when it was just completely random.
I mean there is 50k watching a live stream of Kyiv right now.
Strange.
It's certainly a charged event with emotions running hot. People are going to say things that are wrong.
Crimea was a difficult subject because they are ethnically russian. Due in large part to a gigantic naval base. They did vote to separate from the Ukraine.
That was then, today is different. The direct invasion of Ukraine is aggression. Putin lied, diplomacy has failed.
As emperor of canada I would have done what my gov has done so far, but also put a sunset. In 1 year, unless something changes, we end any and all connection to russia. their citizens may not come here. none of their citizens may own property here. Absolutely no trade of any kind. Anyone who is currently doing business with them, your contracts are null and void. Find new suppliers.
Sucks for people who are still trapped in the Goolag ecosystem though. Maybe this should be a warning at least not to host your precious family photos with Google and not to use their email service.
This is about centralization. If there isn't Google, there is Facebook Video which would do the same. If there isn't FB Video then there's Twitter, which would do the same and so on.
Even if we, as a minority remove all our accounts from those platforms, the majority use them as the primary media platforms.
We need a paradigm shift at scale to move people off centralized platforms, but we need a candidate first that is convenient for people.
I also wonder if youtube is trying to do detect propaganda somehow. Some videos were clearly using old/altered clips and making claims about the war. This might be factoring in too. Unfortunately, no actual detail is provided of what exactly was the trigger. Even some of the reddit thread seems to have disappeared.
In my humble opinion, HN is a file place to be outraged about something some company/person has not but not really that good of a place if there is no data/information/real indication/ that something bad has happened. I am happy to listen to counter points.