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Comment by JanneVee | Hacker News Reader

So I should just give up, have a talk about media habits with my parents and if they don't want to change, just hand YouTube the money? You freely admit that it is designed to be this bad and by giving them money actually just rewards their shitty behavior. I gave an example of a video showing how creators on YouTube can select which ads to show. Get-Rich-Quick is a category, YouTube could just take the decision to not carry those ads anymore and enforce violations as harshly as copyright strikes.

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Youtube clearly provides a valuable service one that is unique in world (moat or not). If you're concerned about rewarding bad behavior (scammy ads) doesn't it also make sense to factor rewarding good behavior (videos by anyone* on any topic imaginable)?

almost

Wanted to point out that “Just take the decision to not carry those ads” isn’t as easy when you’re at YT scale. Not excusing them but I think we all understand the challenges of content moderation at scale for organic content — now amplify that for paid content where the incentives get even thornier.

Yes YT should invest more in review and policy work — but it’s a forever expanding cost with no silver bullet.

I appreciate there’s a least a price and option for ads-free.

In this case, they've already crowdsourced the review labor to their users, who correctly reported the ad!

The scale of paid content is much smaller than the general youtube scale. And they already have a categorization for it. Of course you could lie about the categorization of what you pay to YouTube to show unsuspecting people, but at least you run the risk of giving YouTube money and not getting shown because you violated their advertising policy. It would change the whole economics of running scams through ads.

Not a valid reason. First, they can just charge the cost of ad review to the advertisers. Second, if they can’t do it without causing problems for innocent third-parties — the viewers — then they just can’t do it. We regulate all kinds of industries, no reason the fuck privacy for profit industry should be exempt.

> So I should just give up

I really do try not to be the perpetual downer here, but Google has nearly unlimited resources including psych PhDs on staff to influence peoples' behavior and I assume executives with black holes where their souls would normally be who are trying to satisfy that void with money, but can never do so.

I guess the best I can say is that it's about picking your battles.

Look I know I'm screaming in the wind here. It is a comment on the state of YouTube ads. It's not that I have an illusion that someone in the hierarchy of Google is going to read my comments and take decisions that improves the situation. It is a thought and opinion on the direction of what Google has become. And personally I'm reducing my reliance on google. Next year I'm starting move subscriptions and other things from my gmail mail account. I've gone back to firefox. Google Search has gotten terrible recently so I'm looking for alternatives. This is my personal choice and I just want to whine on the Internet on my way out.

You have my sympathy at least, and it's a good reminder that I probably need to get off gmail myself.

Famously, this is a place where FAANG employees have some representation, so I suspect that the comments do occasionally get read by people with at least some connection to the products. Increasingly, I wonder how they live with themselves; the older I get, the less any amount of money could get me to use psychological tricks on people in order to scam them.

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