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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

The secret behind a culture's list of arbitrarily banned words is that the list is arbitrary and it is really just a low-violence way of measuring who has power and who has respect. No single word has enough power to justify monetising or demonetising some video.

There isn't a way to consistently enforce standards in this arena. The instinct for most people is to try and apply the standards irregularly to measure where social power centres are.

As long as there is a middle-man, the standards they apply around language is going to be confusing, arbitrary and logically inconsistent.

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> list of arbitrarily banned words is that the list is arbitrary

It's not arbitrary, it's a community norm.

Not everyone in a community agrees with its norms, but enough people do to keep it a norm.

As community norms change, the rules change.

What "community norms" were violated in this instrumental song to require age verification? (Likely the most egregious example I can think of.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4Mte6z7TQI

Stop making excuses for this horrible company.

Or do we truly live in a world where all sorts of horrors have become socially acceptable yet a static image of a cartoon frog is deemed "adult content"?

Just because you can find a handful of mistakes, or a thousand mistakes, or a hundred thousand mistakes, out of hundreds of billions of moderation decisions is not evidence of evil or malice.

Thousands of warehouses filled with human beings trying to manage all of this manually would introduce far, far more errors and bias.

If you hate YouTube then don't use it. There are plenty of competitors.

Mistakes themselves aren't evidence of evil or malice, sure. But when you know your system is full of mistakes, and you intentionally choose not to set up a functional system to let people get the mistakes fixed, that is evil and malice.

I've been trying for two months to provision internet service with AT&T, not because I like AT&T, but because they're the only provider with fiber in my area.

My emails aren't returned and every phone call only reaches people who have neither the ability nor the authority to fix the problem.

Today AT&T called me, not with a solution, but with offers for twenty percent off wireless service. Now that I'm a customer, I'm on every marketing list, but I cannot access the service I paid for.

AT&T's system is full of mistakes, and they haven't set up a functional system to let people get the mistakes fixed.

I believe AT&T is an evil and malicious organization for other reasons, but the fact they are denying me internet connectivity is not one of them.

This is either garden-variety incompetence, or it's a business decision that there's no ROI in fixing every broken process and edge case.

> Just because you can find a handful of mistakes, or a thousand mistakes, or a hundred thousand mistakes, out of hundreds of billions of moderation decisions is not evidence of evil or malice.

It's not a handful. Also, who cares if it's evil, malice, or incompetence, it's happening and it is YouTube that is making the mistakes.

I think you might also be missing the point, people are annoyed at that there's no way to rectify these mistakes or speak to a reasonable agent of the company more so than that they happen in the first place.

Algorithmic moderation could be okay, so long as you have the necessary human operated escape hatches, since you are in fact impacting humans with your algorithms in very real ways. There needs to be some point that you can talk to a human with the power to be reasonable.

I can't say if you're saying satire or actually serious in your corporate cuckery

Hoe about this spoken word piece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqvLTJfYnik

> Or do we truly live in a world where all sorts of horrors have become socially acceptable yet a static image of a cartoon frog is deemed "adult content"?

Society has always had “outgroups”, to which anything is permissible. In medieval times, there were literal “outlaws”, to which laws did not apply, people who were fair game for anybody to kill without repercussions. Later, there were witches, satanists, heretics, anarchists, bolsheviks, jews, communists, homosexuals, pedophiles, terrorists, nazis, racists, and fascists. At some point in that list, your mind might have just said “But those people deserve it!”. But labels are mostly applied by other people; nobody declared themselves a witch. Do you truly want the law to be so weak as to not protect you, should you someday find yourself labeled and put on that list?

That cartoon frog is, currently, on the list.

The rules of what you can and cannot say, and what content can be shown and what cannot, have changed a lot in my lifetime.

At least we can still criticize the President. I wonder how long that will last.

It is a matter of power because most people in europe don't care about people saying the english word 'fuck' but we can't see the video either.

Just like it's weird to hear talking about god as a justification for politics, or people self censoring 'nigger' into the 'n word' in a conversation reporting the usage of the word. Or hidding nipples but showing violent death. Or demonetizing videos showing pics of september 11 in a respectful context.

It's power because the american culture is strong enough to impose the view of a subset of communities to the rest of the world.

I don't like having to click through endless cookie warnings on every website just because Europe decided to enact another bullshit regulation that doesn't accomplish anything, but European culture is strong enough to waste even more of everyone's time and make the web even shittier than it was before.

You don't click through cookies just because europe decided so, you click through them because corporations (most of them american) decided that tracking you was so juicy that it was worth it to make you pay this price.

I have plenty of websites using cookies, but because we are not invading your privacy, we don't need a banner.

You are blaming laws adding informed consent instead of the bullies that milk every cent out of spying. Instead of learning, wow the web is rotten there is so much tracking, you complain to the doctor showing you cancer in your lung.

Also, what's funny is that this banner is only legal in europe, we don't impose it on the rest of the world. Again, corporations decided it was just easier to apply it to everyone. They have a choice.

But we can't uncensor youtube content. We dont have a choice. I'd be ok with a pop up "this video contain images of september 11, do you want to watch it uncensored?" that is mandatory only to americans. But we don't have that. Instead, the video is either not published, or removed from any way to discover it.

Not to mention comparing the need for a click, and the addition of a choice to not be tracked, cannot remotely be compared to forced format for most content. It's neither of the same nature, nor the same scale.

Even if you don't agree with any of that, the initial point of the comment stands: it's a matter of power.

>You don't click through cookies just because europe decided so

Wrong, it’s because the EU wrote the law so poorly that every site is able to create their own cookie gate with its own dark patterns so now we have to solve what is essentially a puzzle on every website which then decides of we’re tracked or not.

If it had been written competently it would have been a browser setting and we’d have never seen a dialog once.

Sure the intentions were good but the action on those intentions adds up to wasting probably hours or people’s time a year considering it’s every single major website.

The law shows you which companies act in bad faith (ostensibly all of them).

The companies choose whether to continue acting badly (but having to tell you, if you're in the EU); or to act kindly and so have no need to inform you they're doing something malicious.

There is already a "do not track" setting in browsers. Companies choose whether to annoy you or not.

They could have done the exact same thing by punishing the same people who don’t do the cookie popup but with do not track. As you say people don’t comply with it yet you think they’ll comply with the popup.

But instead they had to make a new thing that’s just ended up being abused. The face sites can even force you to wait a few seconds if you don’t opt in is insane.

There is no reason why it had to be a dialog, it’s just an arbitrary choice by career bureaucrats that now we have to experience at least once a day.

The law says nothing about a pop up, it requires informed consent. The corporations choose to use the pop up and to ignore the header to comply. Again you are orienting your anger in the wrong direction.

>you click through them because corporations (most of them american) decided that tracking you was so juicy that it was worth it to make you pay this price

And, realistically, the cookie banner addresses this how?

The laws says nothing about cookie banners, only informed consent. You get the banner because of corporations, not EU law.

You can have site without them, with login and accounts working just fine (cookies required for obvious functionality like logins don't need consent), the single thing site would have to do is to stop tracking you

Youtube doesn't ban the word "fuck". There are consequences for using profanity in the first 30 seconds of a video in terms of marketability, but after that you can use many forms of profanity.

You can say fuck, maybe even fucking fuck, but six fucks are age restricted? That's incredibly arbitrary, especially for a video that is otherwise practically clear of foul language.

There are entire channels that spout profanity every ten seconds and get fully ad supported, yet this video is deemed inappropriate.

Banning profanity is easy to explain, but such rules must be applied consistently. The biggest guidelines problem YouTube has is that whether or not they'll add any restrictions to your video is based on a dice roll.

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