Hacker News Reader

Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

> When you deal with the scale that YT are operating at, automating content moderation is the only cost effective way.

Is this something that should be a limit to scale then? If you instead ran a petrol station that grew so large that you couldn't economically hire enough people to safely and fairly service all your patrons, you've reached a natural limit of the scale of the business. I think it's fair to say that if they're failing to moderate the platform in a way that doesn't harm it's users fairly regularly then they've reached a limit to their scale. Remembering as well that a lot of their users are clients, making business transactions with YouTube, not just users watching content.

View on HN

This is a question I think about a lot.

It seems to me that a tech company can only pick two of the following:

1. Free-to-use products 2. High-touch support 3. Profitability

I really just don’t see how free-to-use, instant sign-up services with billions of users can feasibly guarantee a human in the loop for every situation that arises.

Your position seems to be that if a company can’t provide human support, then it ought not expand their services. I can understand this position, but it has pretty major trade-offs: this would probably exclude large swaths of the world from uploading videos or using email.

There are many communities that 1) are unable to pay for email or video hosting services and 2) are not a big target of advertisers’ budgets.

That might be a shame but it could also be an opportunity for those countries to build their own ecosystems around it. As much as it sounds like a positive to the citizens of the other countries on an individual scale, YouTube and Google being a free global platform stops any chance of local alternatives popping up.

Though I am a massive advocate for making software more distributed and local, for the communities they are servicing. So it's worth noting I have that bias. I imagine a much more diverse software landscape, with more providers and more opportunities on smaller scales, rather than global behemoths that hoover up all the users and opportunities.

How do you define “harm”? And who are YTs customers?

The problem here is that “harm” is subjective and YTs customers (advertisers) are not the same as their users (viewers), who are also different from their content creators.

I’m not defending YT here. Just explaining how it’s gotten to the place it is.

Harm I feel is when YT doesn't pay them for their contribution to the platform anymore, based on any myriad of reasons that the YT moderation can trigger falsely. There's also the extra complication of brand and personal impact of having videos removed or flagged falsely. Of course you have to work within the platform rules, but many people are doing exactly that and still getting flagged by the algorithmic moderation. Especially in the music YouTube space.

Content creators are working with YT for distribution of content in return for a cut of ad revenue, so it's more than an account on an internet platform like a forum, it's a business relationship, which would make them a client or vendor.

But this comes back to the point about who the customer is. YT are not harming his customers. They’re harming (from their perspective) those annoying expenses.

I don’t think you can equate it to a business relationship because those same relationships in broadcasting looks totally different (disclaimer: I used to work in broadcasting).

Content creators need to wise up that they’re not part of the business relationship in YTs business model. The fact they get paid at all is a by product.

The customer for YouTube is definitely the advertisers I do agree there.

I think the relationship between YT and creators is more akin to an event venue, definitely nothing like broadcasting. In venues, the relationship is symbiotic, without artists there would be no events, without venues, artists would have no where to host a large audience. YT similarly does not have an audience without it's creators, and so it requires their work.

YT is of course a mixed bag, since there are lots of accounts that treat it more like a video hosting platform. But for those making it their business to make YouTube videos, it's definitely a commercial relationship.

> The problem here is that “harm” is subjective

Sure, but we have national laws, regulations, and cultural norms that specify harms and YouTube just shrugs their shoulders and says "we don't care".

I agree it sucks but again, I feel compelled to remind people who YTs customers are.

Content creators benefit from YouTubes business model but they are neither YTs customers, employers nor even their intended users (ie the people watching the ads).

This is where the problem lies. Content creators are effectively just an expense. And it’s compounded by the fact that if one creator leaves there are plenty of others with big aspersions. So creators are an expense that’s easy to replace.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com