I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next(gamefromscratch.com)
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I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next
https://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2020/05/26/I-Was-Blackmailed-Any-YouTuber-Could-Be-Next.aspx
361 comments
I don't think they are really doing their best. If other Google's support forums are any indicator of their effort, they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this. Which makes sense from the SV software engineer perspective, but really is unfathomable to the normal user who then has to live in fear if some malicious teenager decides to ruin their channel.
Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service, to me it feels that they treat it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust.
Yeah I know it's terribly expensive to keep a horde of content reviewers, but then it would be nice for Youtube to be upfront about it that there is maybe a human in the process, but most likely not. I guess honesty is not anymore a valuable commodity in this world, yet it would feel nice sometimes to hear the truth, not some lawyer jargon to avoid all responsibility.
Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service, to me it feels that they treat it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust.
Yeah I know it's terribly expensive to keep a horde of content reviewers, but then it would be nice for Youtube to be upfront about it that there is maybe a human in the process, but most likely not. I guess honesty is not anymore a valuable commodity in this world, yet it would feel nice sometimes to hear the truth, not some lawyer jargon to avoid all responsibility.
> Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service
I've worked in high volume customer services. It's not easy for the agents doing the work or the companies operating them.
I've worked in multiple call centers dealing with calls and tickets. I've worked in companies in which I dealt with mobile phone bill queries and hardware issues right up to Cisco networking problems and then eventually enterprise grade Linux clusters at Rackspace (UK). I've spanned a pretty large spectrum of industries from a customer services perspective. I've even done customer services in the food industry.
It's HARD. Not just for you as an operator, but as a company trying to offer the service to begin with. of all of the companies I worked for, O2 (a mobile phone provider and network operator) had tens of millions of customers. We had several call centers that spanned close to ten thousand agents doing everything from calls to tickets, emails to Tweets. The call queue for that company never dropped below a constant 200-300 on hold and emails took days to even get to.
Google has approx' one BILLION customers.
What is your suggestion here?
> they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this
Damn straight automation, to a larger degree, is the answer. People don't scale at all. They can do one job at a time, for a limited amount of time, and are subject to all kinds of problems.
> Yeah I know it's terribly expensive to keep a horde of content reviewers
It cost O2 about $5/6 to answer a single call. That's the cost of the agent's time and JUST answering the call, not the cost of listening, understanding, resolving and ending the call. Humans are expensive.
I'm not saying don't use people. I'm saying automation at Google's scale is one of the few solutions available to them when it comes to dealing with the simply insane amounts of complaints they'll receive just via their YouTube platform alone.
EDIT: Apologies for being so crude in my original wording. I'm updating the comment to reflect a more professional, civil tone.
I've worked in high volume customer services. It's not easy for the agents doing the work or the companies operating them.
I've worked in multiple call centers dealing with calls and tickets. I've worked in companies in which I dealt with mobile phone bill queries and hardware issues right up to Cisco networking problems and then eventually enterprise grade Linux clusters at Rackspace (UK). I've spanned a pretty large spectrum of industries from a customer services perspective. I've even done customer services in the food industry.
It's HARD. Not just for you as an operator, but as a company trying to offer the service to begin with. of all of the companies I worked for, O2 (a mobile phone provider and network operator) had tens of millions of customers. We had several call centers that spanned close to ten thousand agents doing everything from calls to tickets, emails to Tweets. The call queue for that company never dropped below a constant 200-300 on hold and emails took days to even get to.
Google has approx' one BILLION customers.
What is your suggestion here?
> they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this
Damn straight automation, to a larger degree, is the answer. People don't scale at all. They can do one job at a time, for a limited amount of time, and are subject to all kinds of problems.
> Yeah I know it's terribly expensive to keep a horde of content reviewers
It cost O2 about $5/6 to answer a single call. That's the cost of the agent's time and JUST answering the call, not the cost of listening, understanding, resolving and ending the call. Humans are expensive.
I'm not saying don't use people. I'm saying automation at Google's scale is one of the few solutions available to them when it comes to dealing with the simply insane amounts of complaints they'll receive just via their YouTube platform alone.
EDIT: Apologies for being so crude in my original wording. I'm updating the comment to reflect a more professional, civil tone.
They might have 1 billion free users, but they definitely don't have 1 billion partners or 1 billion paying customers.
Google's customer service is horrible even for organizations that pay them +$10k/month or make them +$10k/month for ad sales, and that is a far smaller number.
You would think they could at least scale customer support properly for that much smaller number, but they don't because culturally they do not want to. Even people who have used google cloud services say the support is bad compared to AWS. Google stands out as a corp that is really bad at customer service.
While apple, amazon, AWS & many other companies provide customer support that mostly works for customers who provide maybe $40/month max in revenue. They don't even let you self pay for your own support at google in most cases.
I bet youtubers who live on their work on youtube would gladly pay $100 to deal with one off incidents like these that might happen once a year if it meant they had proper thought applied to their issues for example.
Google's customer service is horrible even for organizations that pay them +$10k/month or make them +$10k/month for ad sales, and that is a far smaller number.
You would think they could at least scale customer support properly for that much smaller number, but they don't because culturally they do not want to. Even people who have used google cloud services say the support is bad compared to AWS. Google stands out as a corp that is really bad at customer service.
While apple, amazon, AWS & many other companies provide customer support that mostly works for customers who provide maybe $40/month max in revenue. They don't even let you self pay for your own support at google in most cases.
I bet youtubers who live on their work on youtube would gladly pay $100 to deal with one off incidents like these that might happen once a year if it meant they had proper thought applied to their issues for example.
> Google's customer service is horrible even for organizations that pay them +$10k/month or make them +$10k/month for ad sales, and that is a far smaller number.
Is this true? As a paying customer for gsuite, the 4 times I've contacted customer service I got someone immediately and they solved my problem immediately. I'm not a big customer either I have one account. I pay them $72 a year.
Is this true? As a paying customer for gsuite, the 4 times I've contacted customer service I got someone immediately and they solved my problem immediately. I'm not a big customer either I have one account. I pay them $72 a year.
It's very product specific. Google Cloud Platform and GSuite have support plans and offerings distinct from other Google services for example. In a prior life I was one of the Googlers handling those support inquiries (all while also trying to scale the support operations)
As far as I remember YouTube still isn't directly profitable for Google in terms of ad revenue and YT Red. For services like that Google would probably naturally try to minimize spending as much as possible.
Do you have any recent source for this?
It's all anecdotal but I also had fast support for my G Suite issues, even when marked at the lowest priority level P4.
Personal supporting anecdote:
I have a grandfathered free GSuite plan on a domain I hardly use.
The few issues I have had have been promptly solved by a real person.
I have a grandfathered free GSuite plan on a domain I hardly use.
The few issues I have had have been promptly solved by a real person.
Personally I had very much opposite experience with Google Ads support. For the person who buy ads it's exceptional and with available phone support even if you only buy ads for $100. They can literally explain how every single thing work on their system, giving advice on how to improve campaigns or fix something.
It's very much opposite when it's come to AdSense, but again they don't really care when some webmaster lose his source of income since there will be other webmasters to replace him.
It's very much opposite when it's come to AdSense, but again they don't really care when some webmaster lose his source of income since there will be other webmasters to replace him.
> person who buy ads
Fundamental difference: person who buys adds --> Google gets money person who uploads videos --> Google gives money
It's pretty clear to me what the antithesis is here. Sorry to over-simplify, but yes, imho this matters.
Fundamental difference: person who buys adds --> Google gets money person who uploads videos --> Google gives money
It's pretty clear to me what the antithesis is here. Sorry to over-simplify, but yes, imho this matters.
that's not true in my experience. the rep had no direct answer and sometimes it would take a couple days till they reached somebody that knows the answer. and for everything else that i asked that they did not know directly the answer was "it's algorithm, even when i found the answer later somewhere deep in forums or faq".
i have dealt with google europe, i even visited the offices in dublin but i do not have a confidence that they know the answer, most of them are there to try to convince you to try this new thing and incrase you budget.
i have dealt with google europe, i even visited the offices in dublin but i do not have a confidence that they know the answer, most of them are there to try to convince you to try this new thing and incrase you budget.
> i have dealt with google europe, i even visited the offices in dublin
So obviously my impression might be limited to quite superficial questions or problems. It's very much possible that if you work with something actually complex their support isn't anywhere as useful as it's for entry-level customers.
There are multiple perspectives here: the customer, the support engineer, the senior management, and more.
"Absolute certainty" aside, OP basically just said they saw the mountain from the base (only has the view of the volume of tickets pending in their queue) and most of it is in a cloud, they can't even see the top, it looked big, hard to drill, impossible to shave down to ground level. The "absolute certainty" confirms the point of view.
Senior management see it from above (see the big picture) and see total volume of work, a mathematical division based on resources, the value of each work area, which are core or not, where to focus more resources, and which parts to cut down because they set the end goal.
The customer sees the paid promise of a flat terrain. No mountain, no resources.
Now I don't expect the support engineer to know or care about more than what comes in their queue. That's their only job. But I do know management almost always sees support areas, especially for the "low value/impact" segments, as the best candidates for some savings when you have shareholders to please. Successful management will strike a balance between saving more money from cutting costs than they are losing by losing customers and image. Anything else is considered shortsightedness: they either leave money on the table, or they choke the business for short term gain.
In this particular case YouTube could solve the issues but they have deemed this not worth it. The amount needed to fix this is higher than the return so it can't be justified. Fixing one offs and high visibility cases is cheaper than eliminating the issue entirely.
"Absolute certainty" aside, OP basically just said they saw the mountain from the base (only has the view of the volume of tickets pending in their queue) and most of it is in a cloud, they can't even see the top, it looked big, hard to drill, impossible to shave down to ground level. The "absolute certainty" confirms the point of view.
Senior management see it from above (see the big picture) and see total volume of work, a mathematical division based on resources, the value of each work area, which are core or not, where to focus more resources, and which parts to cut down because they set the end goal.
The customer sees the paid promise of a flat terrain. No mountain, no resources.
Now I don't expect the support engineer to know or care about more than what comes in their queue. That's their only job. But I do know management almost always sees support areas, especially for the "low value/impact" segments, as the best candidates for some savings when you have shareholders to please. Successful management will strike a balance between saving more money from cutting costs than they are losing by losing customers and image. Anything else is considered shortsightedness: they either leave money on the table, or they choke the business for short term gain.
In this particular case YouTube could solve the issues but they have deemed this not worth it. The amount needed to fix this is higher than the return so it can't be justified. Fixing one offs and high visibility cases is cheaper than eliminating the issue entirely.
And that's how you know it's their core business, and everything else is just gravy.
Yes, Google has never been good at customer service. They believe that providing feedback tooling is the better approach. I think Google has succeeded _despite_ this not because of it
Google was always great at _customer_ service, but their only customers are in advertisement, paid subscription SaaS and cloud departments. When you use any other services you are not customer, but a product and no one owe you anything.
I don't have experience with AWS to compare, but I can say that my experience with Google Cloud support has been exceptional, and even for a P4 case I opened I got an initial response in 4 hours and a person who dedicated some time for the next week setting up a cluster and application in the exact way to reproduce and diagnose my issue.
> They might have 1 billion free users, but they definitely don't have 1 billion partners or 1 billion paying customers.
Paying or not, people will complain.
Paying or not, people will complain.
Oh please, I've worked on the anti-fraud/abuse system of a large hosting/internet provider in Europe.
It was a flexible "if then scoring escalation/ticketing rules".
I'm not saying my knowledge applies to all customer support cases, but what happened here would never have happened with our system.
Just very simple tricks go a loooong way dealing with malicious people:
how old is the account of the "reporter" ?
is the "reporters" id verified?
how long has the account we're taking action against been our customer?
whitelists/blacklists -- temporary or permanent
are all complaints against a customer of the same type grouped to the same ticket type/ticket?
Just based on those simple facts, we would mmediately lock functionality/content for unverified, new customers we received complaints about, while delaying, notifying and giving verified, aged customers the chance to respond/fix issues.
I'm not saying this is easy, for the system I worked, our agents designing the rules had about 80 individual ticket types(in a hierarchy, with rule re-use for ticket category), but they used their brains and did not take any "lock X functionality of the customer" lightly.
I'm not saying my knowledge applies to all customer support cases, but what happened here would never have happened with our system.
Just very simple tricks go a loooong way dealing with malicious people:
how old is the account of the "reporter" ?
is the "reporters" id verified?
how long has the account we're taking action against been our customer?
whitelists/blacklists -- temporary or permanent
are all complaints against a customer of the same type grouped to the same ticket type/ticket?
Just based on those simple facts, we would mmediately lock functionality/content for unverified, new customers we received complaints about, while delaying, notifying and giving verified, aged customers the chance to respond/fix issues.
I'm not saying this is easy, for the system I worked, our agents designing the rules had about 80 individual ticket types(in a hierarchy, with rule re-use for ticket category), but they used their brains and did not take any "lock X functionality of the customer" lightly.
I doubt you came close to 10% of the complaints YouTube gets via its reporting systems. It's the largest video hosting platform in the world.
You could be right, in 2008 we handled about 10^5 complaints per day, and the volume seemed to double every year(most of those were automated complaints from external systems complaining about our customers spamming/phishing/etc), I don't know what the figures are now.
My point was we had automated rules in place that worked really well and there was nothing really clever about those rules.
It was a game of cat and mouse between our rule designers and adversaries who always tried to probe our thresholds and evade us while we tried to find new useful facts about customers, new probes, new actions, react proactively, but not screwing our legitimate customers was always our number 1 concern.
My point was we had automated rules in place that worked really well and there was nothing really clever about those rules.
It was a game of cat and mouse between our rule designers and adversaries who always tried to probe our thresholds and evade us while we tried to find new useful facts about customers, new probes, new actions, react proactively, but not screwing our legitimate customers was always our number 1 concern.
There has to be something between the best customer service and things like letting shitty "AI" ban accounts without any human intervention.
How hard can it be to augment crowd sourcing and "AI" with some actual humans? If the "AI" is so crappy that it can't figure out an established, popular account is worthy of human support, what problems can it actually solve?
I also wonder why we can't just pay $X to get a human, but I know the answer. Tech companies would just take the money as extra profit and still provide the shittiest quality support possible.
How hard can it be to augment crowd sourcing and "AI" with some actual humans? If the "AI" is so crappy that it can't figure out an established, popular account is worthy of human support, what problems can it actually solve?
I also wonder why we can't just pay $X to get a human, but I know the answer. Tech companies would just take the money as extra profit and still provide the shittiest quality support possible.
It's easy to say "there has to be something between the best customer service and things like letting shitting "AI" ban accounts" as an armchair hackernews user.
But maybe, there isn't, currently. Maybe there simply isn't a solution at the scale of companies like Google.
But maybe, there isn't, currently. Maybe there simply isn't a solution at the scale of companies like Google.
'scale' is often used as a cop-out.
If you double your customer count, and double your revenue, then you can double your customer support resources. O(n) does not become impractical just because the number gets really big.
If they can't deal with something, the fundamental design is wrong, and would fail even if they downsized a thousandfold.
If you double your customer count, and double your revenue, then you can double your customer support resources. O(n) does not become impractical just because the number gets really big.
If they can't deal with something, the fundamental design is wrong, and would fail even if they downsized a thousandfold.
These things are not linear. As your scale grows, the amount of attention from bad actors you receive goes up (from what could basically be 0 for something small). Coordination also becomes more difficult, as does managing the fleet of customer services resources.
If you have 1 person doing support, they can deal with the weird cases themselves. If you have 2 people, they need to share information between themselves. If you have 10 people, they might need to set up some sort of escalation system. If you have 100 people, you'll probably set up some sort of routing system (multiple languages/specialization). If you have 500 people, you probably need some sort of internal abuse / anti-bribery effort to catch bad apples. If you have 1000 people you've now got a separate team working on setting up policies. If you have 5000 people you've got a training and evaluation system set up for your customer service staff. If you have 10000, you've got customer support staff in multiple countries around the globe and need to deal with conflicting and ever-changing laws in the countries you do business in.
All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up. So yes, in addition to it being costlier per customer to provide the same level of support as your customer base grows, you have a smaller budget per customer to do it in.
If you have 1 person doing support, they can deal with the weird cases themselves. If you have 2 people, they need to share information between themselves. If you have 10 people, they might need to set up some sort of escalation system. If you have 100 people, you'll probably set up some sort of routing system (multiple languages/specialization). If you have 500 people, you probably need some sort of internal abuse / anti-bribery effort to catch bad apples. If you have 1000 people you've now got a separate team working on setting up policies. If you have 5000 people you've got a training and evaluation system set up for your customer service staff. If you have 10000, you've got customer support staff in multiple countries around the globe and need to deal with conflicting and ever-changing laws in the countries you do business in.
All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up. So yes, in addition to it being costlier per customer to provide the same level of support as your customer base grows, you have a smaller budget per customer to do it in.
> All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up.
I don't know about that. Just a few bad actors going after a small site can be an utterly ridiculous percentage when compared to the abuse a site like youtube gets.
> If you have one person [...] If you have 10000
All of that sounds sub-linear to me. If 10000 support staff require 1000 direct managers and 200 people working on policies and training and 100 people working on development and 100 upper managers, that's still O(n).
> All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up.
If some of your customers are higher revenue, and some are lower revenue, I'm not sure if that's really a scaling problem. But even with that consideration, it's not an excuse for being unable to give proper support to paying google customers, or youtube accounts with 100k subscribers.
I don't know about that. Just a few bad actors going after a small site can be an utterly ridiculous percentage when compared to the abuse a site like youtube gets.
> If you have one person [...] If you have 10000
All of that sounds sub-linear to me. If 10000 support staff require 1000 direct managers and 200 people working on policies and training and 100 people working on development and 100 upper managers, that's still O(n).
> All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up.
If some of your customers are higher revenue, and some are lower revenue, I'm not sure if that's really a scaling problem. But even with that consideration, it's not an excuse for being unable to give proper support to paying google customers, or youtube accounts with 100k subscribers.
> All of that sounds sub-linear to me.
All of the things I mentioned are things that you can get away without but eventually scale forces you to tackle. Each of those things brings with it additional cost without increasing the throughput.
This shouldn't be too novel an idea: consider a normal supply curve: cost per unit tends to go up with volume.
All of the things I mentioned are things that you can get away without but eventually scale forces you to tackle. Each of those things brings with it additional cost without increasing the throughput.
This shouldn't be too novel an idea: consider a normal supply curve: cost per unit tends to go up with volume.
> All of the things I mentioned are things that you can get away without but eventually scale forces you to tackle. Each of those things brings with it additional cost without increasing the throughput.
That doesn't mean it costs more than O(n).
Let's say you start off with 100 workers providing 100 units of support, and 20 workers of overhead.
Let's say doubling support means you need double the existing workers, plus double the existing overhead, plus 20 more workers to handle new kinds of overhead.
So 120 x 2 + 20 = 260 workers for 200 units of support.
Then 260 x 2 + 20 = 540 workers for 400 units of support.
The percentage of overhead grows every single time we double the number of workers.
And yet if you do the math, you see that the overhead never goes over 40%. And it was already 20% when we started, so that extra amount isn't hard to afford at all.
Despite growing every stage, it's still O(n). The dominating factor is linear.
Obviously those numbers are just an example. But the point is that you have to look at how much the costs increase. Even if it's theoretically faster than linear, if the overhead only grows a moderate amount as you grow from a thousand support workers to a billion support workers then it's not an excuse. It's within a small fudge factor of linear for all real-world numbers.
> This shouldn't be too novel an idea: consider a normal supply curve: cost per unit tends to go up with volume.
Only in the short term. In the long term, production ramps up until the price is pretty close, and on top of that economies of scale drop the price by a significant amount.
That doesn't mean it costs more than O(n).
Let's say you start off with 100 workers providing 100 units of support, and 20 workers of overhead.
Let's say doubling support means you need double the existing workers, plus double the existing overhead, plus 20 more workers to handle new kinds of overhead.
So 120 x 2 + 20 = 260 workers for 200 units of support.
Then 260 x 2 + 20 = 540 workers for 400 units of support.
The percentage of overhead grows every single time we double the number of workers.
And yet if you do the math, you see that the overhead never goes over 40%. And it was already 20% when we started, so that extra amount isn't hard to afford at all.
Despite growing every stage, it's still O(n). The dominating factor is linear.
Obviously those numbers are just an example. But the point is that you have to look at how much the costs increase. Even if it's theoretically faster than linear, if the overhead only grows a moderate amount as you grow from a thousand support workers to a billion support workers then it's not an excuse. It's within a small fudge factor of linear for all real-world numbers.
> This shouldn't be too novel an idea: consider a normal supply curve: cost per unit tends to go up with volume.
Only in the short term. In the long term, production ramps up until the price is pretty close, and on top of that economies of scale drop the price by a significant amount.
A lot of things get exponentially more complicated as the company or customer base scales up. You'll notice that the ones that benefit the company and the bottom line somehow manage to keep up. I take this as a sign that any such challenge can be successfully tackled providing you have a genuine interest in that. Things are as they are not because they are technically unsolvable but because this is the degree of interest each one posed for the company.
At some point you start getting lots of customers who purchase less but are more likely to require significant customer support resources for what they do purchase. At scale, things that might have looked O(n) at one volume of customers can change.
Even if you could double your customer support resources, it means a very different structure and needing to ensure you both hire in the same quality of employees up and down the escalation chain as well as adapt your organization to handle the vastly larger communication and problem resolution processes.
Noe of that is trivial and it's quite easy to take a great org and make it terrible by just adding a bunch of people.
Even if you could double your customer support resources, it means a very different structure and needing to ensure you both hire in the same quality of employees up and down the escalation chain as well as adapt your organization to handle the vastly larger communication and problem resolution processes.
Noe of that is trivial and it's quite easy to take a great org and make it terrible by just adding a bunch of people.
Then your company doesn't get to scale.
Sorry, but you can't skip support because it's not cost effective, just like you can't skip financial regulations or data regs. You don't get to use the excuse of "Sorry we are too busy making billions, maybe we wouldn't have to cut corners if we weren't so successful."
Sorry, but you can't skip support because it's not cost effective, just like you can't skip financial regulations or data regs. You don't get to use the excuse of "Sorry we are too busy making billions, maybe we wouldn't have to cut corners if we weren't so successful."
The problem isn't scale. Scale is just how they made a lot of money. If you make a dollar a billion times you made a billion dollars.
The problem is that good customer support costs more than $1. It costs more than what they make from the average user, so the average user can't have it. That would still be true if they had 100 times less users. It's a result of the service being free, not the service being large.
The problem is that good customer support costs more than $1. It costs more than what they make from the average user, so the average user can't have it. That would still be true if they had 100 times less users. It's a result of the service being free, not the service being large.
The vast majority of Google users will never need customer support, and those who do probably will mostly have easy problems.
There aren't a billion content creators on Youtube, and even fewer who would be good targets for blackmail like this.
The channel in question has 100K+ subscribers and 17M+ views. That's probably a sizable amount of profit for Google from ads. It it really so unfathomable that google could tune their ban bot from "ban this video/channel/account immediately" to "signal a human to have a look and decide on what to do, maybe after talking to the channel creator"? That's just ridiculous to me.
There aren't a billion content creators on Youtube, and even fewer who would be good targets for blackmail like this.
The channel in question has 100K+ subscribers and 17M+ views. That's probably a sizable amount of profit for Google from ads. It it really so unfathomable that google could tune their ban bot from "ban this video/channel/account immediately" to "signal a human to have a look and decide on what to do, maybe after talking to the channel creator"? That's just ridiculous to me.
> There aren't a billion content creators on Youtube, and even fewer who would be good targets for blackmail like this.
Your treating the instant case as the common one, but it's not. And you don't know that until after you've done an investigation, which means you don't know it when deciding whether to allocate resources to an investigation.
It's trivial to game subscribers and views. If having more gets you something then all the actual garbage channels will have plenty and you're back to square one.
Google gets something like two million takedown notices every day.
Your treating the instant case as the common one, but it's not. And you don't know that until after you've done an investigation, which means you don't know it when deciding whether to allocate resources to an investigation.
It's trivial to game subscribers and views. If having more gets you something then all the actual garbage channels will have plenty and you're back to square one.
Google gets something like two million takedown notices every day.
>It's trivial to game subscribers and views.
If google cannot even make a bot to detect fake views and subscriptions, then why the hell do advertisers give them money at all if only those bots watch the ads anyway?
And why would they think that a ban bot - which has far reaching consequences - is ok, if they cannot even prevent view gaming?
It's not trivial to game subscribers and views. Such gaming is a problem, and they are pretty surely not really close to perfect detection rates, but they aren't that bad either. And everytime I dare use a public VPN google/YT puts big fat captchas in front of me.
>Google gets something like two million takedown notices every day.
Not impressed. Not every "content claim" leads to a takedown, or account strike. And not every content claim is the same. If they cannot distinguish between one coming from e.g. Sony vs one coming from e.g. <random script kiddy> then what the hell are they doing? There is such a thing as reputation.
If google cannot even make a bot to detect fake views and subscriptions, then why the hell do advertisers give them money at all if only those bots watch the ads anyway?
And why would they think that a ban bot - which has far reaching consequences - is ok, if they cannot even prevent view gaming?
It's not trivial to game subscribers and views. Such gaming is a problem, and they are pretty surely not really close to perfect detection rates, but they aren't that bad either. And everytime I dare use a public VPN google/YT puts big fat captchas in front of me.
>Google gets something like two million takedown notices every day.
Not impressed. Not every "content claim" leads to a takedown, or account strike. And not every content claim is the same. If they cannot distinguish between one coming from e.g. Sony vs one coming from e.g. <random script kiddy> then what the hell are they doing? There is such a thing as reputation.
> If google cannot even make a bot to detect fake views and subscriptions, then why the hell do advertisers give them money at all if only those bots watch the ads anyway?
Because the ad slots are sold at auction. If 20% of the views are bots then the price should go down and advertisers get 20% more ad views (and the same number of real ones) for the same dollar. Assuming the advertisers are rational and informed; if not then the explanation for why they do it is that they're irrational or uninformed.
> And why would they think that a ban bot - which has far reaching consequences - is ok, if they cannot even prevent view gaming?
One thing doesn't appear to have anything to do with the other.
They have a ban bot because people keep trying to sue them or threaten them with adverse legislation if they don't take stuff down fast enough.
> And everytime I dare use a public VPN google/YT puts big fat captchas in front of me
Because you're doing the opposite of what scammers do. You're using the one IP address with a terrible reputation. They use a million IP addresses with good reputations, e.g. from a botnet full of machines that were innocent users last month.
> If they cannot distinguish between one coming from e.g. Sony vs one coming from e.g. <random script kiddy> then what the hell are they doing? There is such a thing as reputation.
You would think so, except that a ton of the erroneous takedowns come from the biggest senders, because they use garbage automated methods to send them.
Meanwhile if they give privileged access to major companies then everybody else would be complaining that they're discriminating against small content creators by not honoring their takedowns like they do for Sony.
Because the ad slots are sold at auction. If 20% of the views are bots then the price should go down and advertisers get 20% more ad views (and the same number of real ones) for the same dollar. Assuming the advertisers are rational and informed; if not then the explanation for why they do it is that they're irrational or uninformed.
> And why would they think that a ban bot - which has far reaching consequences - is ok, if they cannot even prevent view gaming?
One thing doesn't appear to have anything to do with the other.
They have a ban bot because people keep trying to sue them or threaten them with adverse legislation if they don't take stuff down fast enough.
> And everytime I dare use a public VPN google/YT puts big fat captchas in front of me
Because you're doing the opposite of what scammers do. You're using the one IP address with a terrible reputation. They use a million IP addresses with good reputations, e.g. from a botnet full of machines that were innocent users last month.
> If they cannot distinguish between one coming from e.g. Sony vs one coming from e.g. <random script kiddy> then what the hell are they doing? There is such a thing as reputation.
You would think so, except that a ton of the erroneous takedowns come from the biggest senders, because they use garbage automated methods to send them.
Meanwhile if they give privileged access to major companies then everybody else would be complaining that they're discriminating against small content creators by not honoring their takedowns like they do for Sony.
Alphabet could pay for proper customer service, though. It's not as if they're doing badly. Come on, 40b in revenue and nearly 7b profit last quarter [0]. Unfortunately it won't happen unless they're forced to.
[0] https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/1909764/alphabet-google-pr...
[0] https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/1909764/alphabet-google-pr...
Absolute numbers are useless. How much of that profit is from YouTube rather than search, and how much is that per-user? When the answer comes out to be something like $1/year, how much customer service does that buy?
Do you think charging users for support could be a feasible option? I'd pay $100 for a call with a representative who can call shots on Youtube's strike reviews.
It would solve the cost problem, but people would hate it. You'd have to pay even if you won because they have to pay the customer service rep either way.
And it would open up a new trolling vector. Now the troll files complaint after complaint and forces you to pay $100 over and over again.
What could work is to do loser pays. If someone wants to object to your video, they have to post $100, and so do you if you want to get it reinstated. Then whoever wins the dispute gets their money back. And extra points for having a builtin troll deterrent.
And it would open up a new trolling vector. Now the troll files complaint after complaint and forces you to pay $100 over and over again.
What could work is to do loser pays. If someone wants to object to your video, they have to post $100, and so do you if you want to get it reinstated. Then whoever wins the dispute gets their money back. And extra points for having a builtin troll deterrent.
Why not? If support is so important, then an competitor will show up with better support and take people away from your service.
Well. I have some experience with O2 too, from a customers point of view. Let me tell you a story:
Once upon a time i've been a happy customer of a regional ISP called Hansenet, started by the local public electric utility. It was (at least for me) lightyears ahead of the crappy experience (speed/latency/price/(competence of)service(if needed)) the former state monopolist had. Everything was golden, also excellent peering. They grew slowly, cooperated with some other regional upstarts, stayed golden, speed even got faster without raising of monthly fees, furthermore no long contracts necessary, could be canceled within a month.
Then Telecom Italia came and bought them, now it was Alice, as advertised by some mouthbreathing twen all over the public space, larger than life.
Quality of service went down, very unsexy of you, Alice! But still was better than the former state monopolist, and still got faster without raising prices or contract conditions.
They even retained a local service center where you could walk into and talk to people who knew their stuff and could change settings in realtime! Imagine that! Not some outsourced call-center agent mouthpiecing some useless uml-diagram.
Anyways, too good to be true? Right! Telefonica came to rescue (of BlackRock), to milk the cash cow as long as possible, and it was noticable.
Fortunately another neighboring public utility, pioniering fiber roll out since the nineties expanded and became a choice for me then. All is golden again! Yay!
Why am i ranting? Because everybody i know is mostly unhappy with O2 in any form, except for the price.
O2 can't do!
I wish i could add some internal, even worse insights from another ISP growing larger at the time, but am not allowed to. Also they managed, got better, and meanwhile can do again.
Lesson? There is no lesson here, with the exception of economies of scale are bad for humans above certain amounts of 'scale'.
Once upon a time i've been a happy customer of a regional ISP called Hansenet, started by the local public electric utility. It was (at least for me) lightyears ahead of the crappy experience (speed/latency/price/(competence of)service(if needed)) the former state monopolist had. Everything was golden, also excellent peering. They grew slowly, cooperated with some other regional upstarts, stayed golden, speed even got faster without raising of monthly fees, furthermore no long contracts necessary, could be canceled within a month.
Then Telecom Italia came and bought them, now it was Alice, as advertised by some mouthbreathing twen all over the public space, larger than life.
Quality of service went down, very unsexy of you, Alice! But still was better than the former state monopolist, and still got faster without raising prices or contract conditions.
They even retained a local service center where you could walk into and talk to people who knew their stuff and could change settings in realtime! Imagine that! Not some outsourced call-center agent mouthpiecing some useless uml-diagram.
Anyways, too good to be true? Right! Telefonica came to rescue (of BlackRock), to milk the cash cow as long as possible, and it was noticable.
Fortunately another neighboring public utility, pioniering fiber roll out since the nineties expanded and became a choice for me then. All is golden again! Yay!
Why am i ranting? Because everybody i know is mostly unhappy with O2 in any form, except for the price.
O2 can't do!
I wish i could add some internal, even worse insights from another ISP growing larger at the time, but am not allowed to. Also they managed, got better, and meanwhile can do again.
Lesson? There is no lesson here, with the exception of economies of scale are bad for humans above certain amounts of 'scale'.
Also had a very bad experience with O2. I switched back to T-Mobile it's expensive but at least someone will answer the phone.
> The call queue for that company never dropped below a constant 200-300 on hold and emails took days to even get to.
If those are the stats and you're still not actually solving many customers' problems; if tons of people are being hung out to dry with no recourse, then you're doing a bad job. If you don't have enough people to do the job, then hire more people. If you can't afford to hire more people, then don't do the job, or limit the number of customers you deal with.
If those are the stats and you're still not actually solving many customers' problems; if tons of people are being hung out to dry with no recourse, then you're doing a bad job. If you don't have enough people to do the job, then hire more people. If you can't afford to hire more people, then don't do the job, or limit the number of customers you deal with.
The problem with customer service is that quite often the problem is larger than a single person can fix. It requires other people both within the company and outside of the company to fix an issue.
There is also the scenario in which there is no solution and you need to balance the cost of investigating to the point where you're 100% certain there isn't a solution and efficiently deciding there isn't one.
One thing I have learnt working at these companies is that some customers think the world revolves around then and that technology should work flawlessly all the time, when it doesn't.
There is also the scenario in which there is no solution and you need to balance the cost of investigating to the point where you're 100% certain there isn't a solution and efficiently deciding there isn't one.
One thing I have learnt working at these companies is that some customers think the world revolves around then and that technology should work flawlessly all the time, when it doesn't.
A bad company devides available work in so many different departments and job titles the actually people with authority that is able to execute is by design very thin spread. This company could also pay higher salaries, give better training and enable more call agent autonomy because that is what is takes to deliver a frictionless delightful customer service.
That's why every mom and pop store outranks every Fortune 500 on customer service expect Amazon. Most still haven't learned to put customers central to their business but treat it as an after thought.
That's why every mom and pop store outranks every Fortune 500 on customer service expect Amazon. Most still haven't learned to put customers central to their business but treat it as an after thought.
Putting the customer at the center of their business is a very flamboyant term that many companies say they do but appear to perhaps not do.
I like to use Telecommunication companies as an example because I worked in one heavily and dealt with these exact scenarios.
If a customer calls the service desk because their internet is broken due to vandalism at their exchange. I as a customer service agent cannot drive to the exchange and simply fix the problem myself. It requires appropriate prioritisation of all of the other problems within the network that need fixing that may also be affecting other customers, as well as requiring outside resources to rebuild that location. To add that the customer might also have a mobile SIM as a backup within the modem but is not able to achieve the speeds nor latency needs commensurate with their fixed service. And that's if you're lucky to be the wholesaler if you aren't, then your organisation literally cannot fix the problem legally because you don't have the authority to repair infrastructure that you don't own outright.
I appreciate that this a specific example, but one I have dealt with mutltiple times. Once a business grows to a greater size, it is inherently more difficult to fix problems like a mom and pop store whether or not you care the same about your customers or not. It may appear as though they don't care, but there are simply different realities at different scales.
My point being that if you assume as the beginning that they purposely distribute available work and responsibilities in such a way that to execute is difficult by design then that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is where you are operating at such a scale that it is very difficult to provide great customer service even if you do care.
I like to use Telecommunication companies as an example because I worked in one heavily and dealt with these exact scenarios.
If a customer calls the service desk because their internet is broken due to vandalism at their exchange. I as a customer service agent cannot drive to the exchange and simply fix the problem myself. It requires appropriate prioritisation of all of the other problems within the network that need fixing that may also be affecting other customers, as well as requiring outside resources to rebuild that location. To add that the customer might also have a mobile SIM as a backup within the modem but is not able to achieve the speeds nor latency needs commensurate with their fixed service. And that's if you're lucky to be the wholesaler if you aren't, then your organisation literally cannot fix the problem legally because you don't have the authority to repair infrastructure that you don't own outright.
I appreciate that this a specific example, but one I have dealt with mutltiple times. Once a business grows to a greater size, it is inherently more difficult to fix problems like a mom and pop store whether or not you care the same about your customers or not. It may appear as though they don't care, but there are simply different realities at different scales.
My point being that if you assume as the beginning that they purposely distribute available work and responsibilities in such a way that to execute is difficult by design then that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is where you are operating at such a scale that it is very difficult to provide great customer service even if you do care.
> One thing I have learnt working at these companies is that some customers think the world revolves around then and that technology should work flawlessly all the time, when it doesn't.
I worked alliance support for a major database vendor in a former life. My experience is that enterprise customers are usually realists. They run a very complicated environment and are aware that things, especially software, is not perfect. They expect good service (and pay through the nose for it) and can be demanding. But ultimately they're realists.
The ones that think the world revolves around them and their issue must be fixed RIGHT NOW! are usually the ones that bought some ODBC driver for 40 bucks 12 years ago, which don't really have any support entitlement to begin with.
I worked alliance support for a major database vendor in a former life. My experience is that enterprise customers are usually realists. They run a very complicated environment and are aware that things, especially software, is not perfect. They expect good service (and pay through the nose for it) and can be demanding. But ultimately they're realists.
The ones that think the world revolves around them and their issue must be fixed RIGHT NOW! are usually the ones that bought some ODBC driver for 40 bucks 12 years ago, which don't really have any support entitlement to begin with.
If you can't figure out how to scale proper customer service, there's a simple solution: don't grow too large too fast.
I know, blasphemy to the VC crowd.
I know, blasphemy to the VC crowd.
It's not blasphemy, just elementary economics.
Customer service at scale, for many products, turns the product from profitable into a severe loss. It will go out of business no ifs ands or buts.
YouTube clearly cannot survive if its customer service costs exceed its advertising revenue.
It has absolutely nothing to do with speed of growth, and I don't know why you think it does.
Are you saying free user-generated video hosting sites shouldn't exist period? That YouTube simply shouldn't exist? Because that seems to be what you're saying.
Customer service at scale, for many products, turns the product from profitable into a severe loss. It will go out of business no ifs ands or buts.
YouTube clearly cannot survive if its customer service costs exceed its advertising revenue.
It has absolutely nothing to do with speed of growth, and I don't know why you think it does.
Are you saying free user-generated video hosting sites shouldn't exist period? That YouTube simply shouldn't exist? Because that seems to be what you're saying.
Not necessarily.
Either have proper human or machine evaluation and very fast response to complaints about fuckups, or,
let it be an open platform, and only respond to legal requests to remove things, the way the Internet used to work,
...because they clearly cannot handle the alternative without fucking people over repeatedly.
Either have proper human or machine evaluation and very fast response to complaints about fuckups, or,
let it be an open platform, and only respond to legal requests to remove things, the way the Internet used to work,
...because they clearly cannot handle the alternative without fucking people over repeatedly.
Customer service at scale, for many products, turns the product from profitable into a severe loss.
If that is the case then Google is helpless to stop these attacks from growing out of control. How long before the long tail of YouTube is clipped off?
If that is the case then Google is helpless to stop these attacks from growing out of control. How long before the long tail of YouTube is clipped off?
Well that's another false extreme.
That's what algorithmic detection (together with user flagging) and removal at scale is for. That prevents them from growing out of control.
The combo of algorithmic detection at scale, combined with small amounts of manual intervention and customer service where most needed, is how YouTube is able to operate.
That's what algorithmic detection (together with user flagging) and removal at scale is for. That prevents them from growing out of control.
The combo of algorithmic detection at scale, combined with small amounts of manual intervention and customer service where most needed, is how YouTube is able to operate.
The combo of algorithmic detection at scale, combined with small amounts of manual intervention and customer service where most needed, is how YouTube is able to operate.
This article is evidence that the process is breaking down. It's an old maxim in computer security that attacks become more sophisticated over time as knowledge of the system grows and spreads among attackers. That is what we are seeing here. YouTube has built a system which is ultimately unsustainable at this scale. Over time these attacks will continue to escalate until only the very large channels (those they have the resources to support in person) and the very small channels (those beneath the notice of attackers) are left.
This article is evidence that the process is breaking down. It's an old maxim in computer security that attacks become more sophisticated over time as knowledge of the system grows and spreads among attackers. That is what we are seeing here. YouTube has built a system which is ultimately unsustainable at this scale. Over time these attacks will continue to escalate until only the very large channels (those they have the resources to support in person) and the very small channels (those beneath the notice of attackers) are left.
> This article is evidence that the process is breaking down.
No, the article is a single instance. If it becomes common, YouTube will create systems to prevent this type of attack.
> YouTube has built a system which is ultimately unsustainable at this scale.
There's just no evidence of that -- that's pure conjecture. And given how Google has seemed to manage abuse and spam at a commercially successful level in plenty of other products (not perfect, but maintaining the platform), I would bet on YouTube continuing to succeed here.
No, the article is a single instance. If it becomes common, YouTube will create systems to prevent this type of attack.
> YouTube has built a system which is ultimately unsustainable at this scale.
There's just no evidence of that -- that's pure conjecture. And given how Google has seemed to manage abuse and spam at a commercially successful level in plenty of other products (not perfect, but maintaining the platform), I would bet on YouTube continuing to succeed here.
I see a dozen of these instances a week.
Consider that you're out of touch.
Consider that you're out of touch.
I don't think your point passes a back of the envelope math test.
Right now Google makes the second most profit per employee of any large enterprise on earth: $269,000 in profit, annually, per employee.
I know of other- successful!- companies that make less money per employee, because they hire people to do customer support.
To start your argument, I think you have to explain why Google can not hire more CSRs, even though they are the #2 most profitable enterprise on Earth.
Right now Google makes the second most profit per employee of any large enterprise on earth: $269,000 in profit, annually, per employee.
I know of other- successful!- companies that make less money per employee, because they hire people to do customer support.
To start your argument, I think you have to explain why Google can not hire more CSRs, even though they are the #2 most profitable enterprise on Earth.
Google is profitable because it has a small number of employees and a large number of customers.
To begin your "back of the envelope math test", you should ask:
If Google were to hire CSRs until its profit went to $0 per employee per year, how much of an effect would the additional CSRs have on the experience of Google's customers? How many CSRs would that be? How many customers would each one be handling per day?
Saying that a company which is profitable because a small number of employees serve a large number of customers can obviously afford to hire a large number of employees isn't a math test, it's wishful thinking. Do some math.
To begin your "back of the envelope math test", you should ask:
If Google were to hire CSRs until its profit went to $0 per employee per year, how much of an effect would the additional CSRs have on the experience of Google's customers? How many CSRs would that be? How many customers would each one be handling per day?
Saying that a company which is profitable because a small number of employees serve a large number of customers can obviously afford to hire a large number of employees isn't a math test, it's wishful thinking. Do some math.
> how much of an effect would the additional CSRs have on the experience of Google's customers?
It would go up, probably quite a bit, and the profit would re-emerge but at a lower level per employee.
The real problem is that their scale (in terms of reach, money, customers, political leverage - you name it) is so large that a company could compete or out-compete on customer service and still wouldn't win a significant chunk of their business. That's why they don't need to hire more CSRs.
It would go up, probably quite a bit, and the profit would re-emerge but at a lower level per employee.
The real problem is that their scale (in terms of reach, money, customers, political leverage - you name it) is so large that a company could compete or out-compete on customer service and still wouldn't win a significant chunk of their business. That's why they don't need to hire more CSRs.
>> How many customers would each [CSR] be handling per day?
You need to answer that one before concluding that customers' experience would improve.
You need to answer that one before concluding that customers' experience would improve.
If we assume that each CSR can handle an average number of cases then the absolute number of cases handled by a human increase with even 1 CSR taken on. The Mythical Man Month doesn't apply as there's no time limit on it.
So no, I don't need to answer that beyond any number greater than there are now, which I already did.
So no, I don't need to answer that beyond any number greater than there are now, which I already did.
Sure it would go up. But will it be significant? Or will it be a drop in the ocean. You do need numbers to answer this question.
Average wage in the US is ~$50,000 per year - without holidays I might add - and their total workforce was ~120,000 strong as of 2018. If someone claims that Google increase its workforce 6-fold by only hiring CSRs and not make a significant difference in customer satisfaction then what can be said?
Or let's make it 3-fold and claim the other hundred grand is for training and office space (yeah, can't get a CSR to work remotely and definitely can't earn less than minimum wage nor those jobs be abroad because I'm building an unrealistic quibble).
It's like people arguing that you can't know the sky is still blue on Earth because you haven't been outside yet today. Please. Worse than that, it again obscures the real questions - what level of CS does Google need to provide to stop customers going to a competitor, which is the level they have now, and hence, since they're too powerful to be competed with what should be done about it? What can be done about it?
Or let's make it 3-fold and claim the other hundred grand is for training and office space (yeah, can't get a CSR to work remotely and definitely can't earn less than minimum wage nor those jobs be abroad because I'm building an unrealistic quibble).
It's like people arguing that you can't know the sky is still blue on Earth because you haven't been outside yet today. Please. Worse than that, it again obscures the real questions - what level of CS does Google need to provide to stop customers going to a competitor, which is the level they have now, and hence, since they're too powerful to be competed with what should be done about it? What can be done about it?
The X revenue/ profit per employee can be easily manipulated. Take Google, they outsource many areas of the business. You can virtually guarantee that any building security, caterers or cleaners who work at Google, don't work for Google.
Apparently temporary works and contractors make up around 54% of Google's workforce. https://www.vox.com/2019/4/4/18293900/google-contractors-ben...
Apparently temporary works and contractors make up around 54% of Google's workforce. https://www.vox.com/2019/4/4/18293900/google-contractors-ben...
I think you’ve unintentionally provided a good argument as to why they don’t have to.
IMO, Google's profit per employee isn't an indicator of Google's obligation to increase its customer service headcount. Taken to it's logical conclusion, we should let poorly-performing companies off the hook for having awful customer service.
The rest of this comment is going to be somewhat critical of Google criticism and seemingly apologistic. Please assume positive intent.
I agree that Google certainly could do more to help people on its platform. But this will always be the case until every single customer service issue is solved to the user's satisfaction. The important question that I never see anybody asking or answering is "How much is reasonably enough, and how do we know (subject X) has done enough?"
It all boils down to what we believe the moral obligation of people (and companies, by extension) ought to be. Any extra service that Google provides beyond those required for profit maximization (e.g. customer retention, maintaining reputation, being only slightly better than the second-best option) is purely charity. Then, how do we evaluate when a certain amount of charity is sufficient, let alone necessary? Public sentiment is fickle, and therefore not a great measure. I bet even if Google increased its CSR by 10x, we'd still see communities eagerly latch onto any criticism of the tech giant and shout "you have to do more!" without quantifying what the final demand actually is!
I take the moral position that we as a society certainly can and should do much more to take care of each other. Telling each other to be better is absolutely valuable and I will never argue against that. But I believe we ought to do a much better job of suggesting desirable and realistic end states, instead of perpetuating insubstantial discourse amounting to one of either "They need to do better!" or "Come on, they're doing the best they can."
Admittedly this places me in a non-committal position. I don't have any great suggestions for what the end states of YouTube, Twitter, et al should look like from a content moderation perspective. But I would love to hear input from actual experts in who can offer some reasonable ideas about the most cost-beneficial solutions for society as a whole.
The rest of this comment is going to be somewhat critical of Google criticism and seemingly apologistic. Please assume positive intent.
I agree that Google certainly could do more to help people on its platform. But this will always be the case until every single customer service issue is solved to the user's satisfaction. The important question that I never see anybody asking or answering is "How much is reasonably enough, and how do we know (subject X) has done enough?"
It all boils down to what we believe the moral obligation of people (and companies, by extension) ought to be. Any extra service that Google provides beyond those required for profit maximization (e.g. customer retention, maintaining reputation, being only slightly better than the second-best option) is purely charity. Then, how do we evaluate when a certain amount of charity is sufficient, let alone necessary? Public sentiment is fickle, and therefore not a great measure. I bet even if Google increased its CSR by 10x, we'd still see communities eagerly latch onto any criticism of the tech giant and shout "you have to do more!" without quantifying what the final demand actually is!
I take the moral position that we as a society certainly can and should do much more to take care of each other. Telling each other to be better is absolutely valuable and I will never argue against that. But I believe we ought to do a much better job of suggesting desirable and realistic end states, instead of perpetuating insubstantial discourse amounting to one of either "They need to do better!" or "Come on, they're doing the best they can."
Admittedly this places me in a non-committal position. I don't have any great suggestions for what the end states of YouTube, Twitter, et al should look like from a content moderation perspective. But I would love to hear input from actual experts in who can offer some reasonable ideas about the most cost-beneficial solutions for society as a whole.
IMO, Google's profit per employee isn't an indicator of Google's obligation to increase its customer service headcount.
No, it isn't.
But the damage it causes to innocent parties through its choice of business models is.
It is easy to forget that not so long ago, the Internet giants of today were little startups too, and not so long before that, they didn't exist at all. They have reached the dominant positions they are now in through a combination of factors. Several of those factors involve absolving themselves of responsibility for things going wrong, even things that might have been (or might still be) considered illegal, because preventing them is difficult or practically impossible with a purely technological solution.
Well, guess what? There is no law that says they get a right to exist and be astonishingly profitable by relying on technology at the expense of anyone else who gets hurt by their action or inaction. There is no law that requires the existence of huge video redistribution services that allow anyone to upload content, including malicious content that may cause serious harm to others, with impunity. Laws that do protect these organisations, such as the safe harbour provisions under the DMCA and its counterparts around the world, were invented after the fact and it's far from clear that they strike a healthy balance (particularly when, as I can personally testify, the likes of YouTube do not always meet their obligations even under the very generous terms of those laws).
If these companies can't act as responsible corporate citizens using their current business models, maybe they shouldn't use those business models. It is disturbing that this simple idea now seems almost heretical, as if we are somehow beholden to these Internet giants and the world would fail without them, and so it's somehow OK that they also magnify harmful effects from spreading dangerous misinformation to invasion of privacy but as long as it's someone else uploading the content the hosting service is deemed innocent of all wrong-doing.
No, it isn't.
But the damage it causes to innocent parties through its choice of business models is.
It is easy to forget that not so long ago, the Internet giants of today were little startups too, and not so long before that, they didn't exist at all. They have reached the dominant positions they are now in through a combination of factors. Several of those factors involve absolving themselves of responsibility for things going wrong, even things that might have been (or might still be) considered illegal, because preventing them is difficult or practically impossible with a purely technological solution.
Well, guess what? There is no law that says they get a right to exist and be astonishingly profitable by relying on technology at the expense of anyone else who gets hurt by their action or inaction. There is no law that requires the existence of huge video redistribution services that allow anyone to upload content, including malicious content that may cause serious harm to others, with impunity. Laws that do protect these organisations, such as the safe harbour provisions under the DMCA and its counterparts around the world, were invented after the fact and it's far from clear that they strike a healthy balance (particularly when, as I can personally testify, the likes of YouTube do not always meet their obligations even under the very generous terms of those laws).
If these companies can't act as responsible corporate citizens using their current business models, maybe they shouldn't use those business models. It is disturbing that this simple idea now seems almost heretical, as if we are somehow beholden to these Internet giants and the world would fail without them, and so it's somehow OK that they also magnify harmful effects from spreading dangerous misinformation to invasion of privacy but as long as it's someone else uploading the content the hosting service is deemed innocent of all wrong-doing.
> Any extra service that Google provides beyond those required for profit maximization ... is purely charity.
Duty is not charity. It would be perfectly reasonable for society to determine that YouTube incurs a duty to its content creation partners, and at no point should that be considered requesting a favour.
Duty is not charity. It would be perfectly reasonable for society to determine that YouTube incurs a duty to its content creation partners, and at no point should that be considered requesting a favour.
Allow me to clarify: The word "charity" is used in the perverted capitalistic sense, where Google's predominant "duty" is first and foremost to its shareholders. The capitalist incentive structure requires no more than the bare minimum of customer service from Google.
I agree that Google has a moral duty to take care of the people who choose to put their trust in their platforms.
I agree that Google has a moral duty to take care of the people who choose to put their trust in their platforms.
You are implicitly assuming that the shareholder primacy theory of corporate governance is the only legitimate one. It is not. The business judgement rule allows corporate directors very wide latitude in how they choose to run the business. Google very much can hire more CSRs, exactly because they are insanely profitable on a per employee basis, but they choose not to, for reasons unknown, but likely out of concern for the stock price.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule
Small clarification: I'm assuming that shareholder obligation is the predominant force upon corporate governance, not the only one.
But, point taken.
But, point taken.
> IMO, Google's profit per employee isn't an indicator of Google's obligation to increase its customer service headcount. Taken to it's logical conclusion, we should let poorly-performing companies off the hook for having awful customer service.
That’s not the logical conclusion, that’s the inverse.
If P (large profit per employee) then Q (should be able to spend more on customer support)...
- The converse is If Q then P (clearly not applicable in this case)
- The contrapositive is If not Q then not P (in this case, you would hope it’s true but obviously not!)
- The inverse is If not P then Not Q, which would roughly translate into if profit per employee is low then you would not expect a company to pay more for customer support.
Perhaps you could argue that the logical conclusion is that any profit just means they aren’t spending enough on their support. Funny thing is economists would argue profit demonstrates they are spending enough on keeping customers happy.
It certainly appears that they can afford to do better (although arguably they don’t break out financial results just for YouTube do they?) and we certainly want them to better.
I think the fundamental problem is that for every million dollars they pay humans to “do better” it’s like trying to move the beach with a pair of tweezers — you don’t even make a dent. No amount of money will solve the problem by trying to pay humans. They can only succeed by making the algorithm better, and that’s not a problem which scales with headcount (mythical man month)
That’s not the logical conclusion, that’s the inverse.
If P (large profit per employee) then Q (should be able to spend more on customer support)...
- The converse is If Q then P (clearly not applicable in this case)
- The contrapositive is If not Q then not P (in this case, you would hope it’s true but obviously not!)
- The inverse is If not P then Not Q, which would roughly translate into if profit per employee is low then you would not expect a company to pay more for customer support.
Perhaps you could argue that the logical conclusion is that any profit just means they aren’t spending enough on their support. Funny thing is economists would argue profit demonstrates they are spending enough on keeping customers happy.
It certainly appears that they can afford to do better (although arguably they don’t break out financial results just for YouTube do they?) and we certainly want them to better.
I think the fundamental problem is that for every million dollars they pay humans to “do better” it’s like trying to move the beach with a pair of tweezers — you don’t even make a dent. No amount of money will solve the problem by trying to pay humans. They can only succeed by making the algorithm better, and that’s not a problem which scales with headcount (mythical man month)
>> IMO, Google's profit per employee isn't an indicator of Google's obligation to increase its customer service headcount. Taken to it's logical conclusion, we should let poorly-performing companies off the hook for having awful customer service.
> That’s not the logical conclusion, that’s the inverse.
Your logic is misapplied. If Google's profit is an indicator of its customer service obligations, it is logically necessary that less-profitable companies have lower such obligations than more-profitable companies do. If they had higher obligations, Google's profitable status would indicate that it didn't have much in the way of customer service obligations. If they had equal obligations, then profit would not be an indicator.
> That’s not the logical conclusion, that’s the inverse.
Your logic is misapplied. If Google's profit is an indicator of its customer service obligations, it is logically necessary that less-profitable companies have lower such obligations than more-profitable companies do. If they had higher obligations, Google's profitable status would indicate that it didn't have much in the way of customer service obligations. If they had equal obligations, then profit would not be an indicator.
I think you're now making a new claim that there's some continuum of customer service responsibility versus profitability. I don't think that was the original claim, and that's not what I'm claiming.
I simply wanted to point out that a statement like "Companies that are wildly profitable should not shirk customer service responsibility" is not logically equivalent to saying, "Companies that are not wildly profitable should shirk customer service responsibilities."
To argue that because you disagree with the inverse of a statement, therefore the statement itself is not valid, is faulty. The inverse of a statement need not be true for the statement itself to be true.
"No company should be let off the hook for having awful customer service" does not preclude judging one of the most profitable companies in the world more harshly for having awful customer service.
What I read from OP's statement is mainly this; we know in this case that it's not for lack of resources. So perhaps we can agree every company has the responsibility, but not all companies have the means. Is it not more reprehensible to fail to provide a service you are responsible for when you have the means to provide it than when you do not?
Or more to the point, it's certainly noteworthy that they could become one of the most profitable companies in the world despite having such widely recognized terrible customer support. One might say it's significant evidence that they are able to maintain their profitability through not entirely competitive means.
I simply wanted to point out that a statement like "Companies that are wildly profitable should not shirk customer service responsibility" is not logically equivalent to saying, "Companies that are not wildly profitable should shirk customer service responsibilities."
To argue that because you disagree with the inverse of a statement, therefore the statement itself is not valid, is faulty. The inverse of a statement need not be true for the statement itself to be true.
"No company should be let off the hook for having awful customer service" does not preclude judging one of the most profitable companies in the world more harshly for having awful customer service.
What I read from OP's statement is mainly this; we know in this case that it's not for lack of resources. So perhaps we can agree every company has the responsibility, but not all companies have the means. Is it not more reprehensible to fail to provide a service you are responsible for when you have the means to provide it than when you do not?
Or more to the point, it's certainly noteworthy that they could become one of the most profitable companies in the world despite having such widely recognized terrible customer support. One might say it's significant evidence that they are able to maintain their profitability through not entirely competitive means.
> I think you're now making a new claim that there's some continuum of customer service responsibility versus profitability. I don't think that was the original claim, and that's not what I'm claiming.
> "No company should be let off the hook for having awful customer service" does not preclude judging one of the most profitable companies in the world more harshly for having awful customer service.
What you're describing in that second pulled quote is a continuum of customer service responsibility versus profitability. According to you, the more profitable company has a greater responsibility than the less profitable company does.
> "No company should be let off the hook for having awful customer service" does not preclude judging one of the most profitable companies in the world more harshly for having awful customer service.
What you're describing in that second pulled quote is a continuum of customer service responsibility versus profitability. According to you, the more profitable company has a greater responsibility than the less profitable company does.
The responsibility to provide customer support is the same, but the judgement for failing to provide the support is different depending on the excuse for not providing it.
E.g. "I couldn't hire more customer support agents because I'm broke," and "I am one of the most profitable companies in the world, but I still refuse to hire more customer support agents because I'm a monopoly and don't have viable competitors so it doesn't matter anyhow"...
E.g. "I couldn't hire more customer support agents because I'm broke," and "I am one of the most profitable companies in the world, but I still refuse to hire more customer support agents because I'm a monopoly and don't have viable competitors so it doesn't matter anyhow"...
> The responsibility to provide customer support is the same, but the judgement for failing to provide the support is different depending on the excuse for not providing it.
No, this is incoherent. If the judgment for your failure to provide support is "that's understandable; we could hardly expect you to do any better" -- that is the same thing as you not having a responsibility to provide support.
No, this is incoherent. If the judgment for your failure to provide support is "that's understandable; we could hardly expect you to do any better" -- that is the same thing as you not having a responsibility to provide support.
Yeah, your original point was very fair; GP probably didn't mean for his statement to be interpreted as its inverse, which I jumped the gun on. My reasoning was that if the inverse wasn't implied, then the overall conclusion should simply be "all companies should provide exceptional customer service".
I also probably should have more charitably interpreted GP as "companies in a strong position have a better ability to provide good customer service."
I also probably should have more charitably interpreted GP as "companies in a strong position have a better ability to provide good customer service."
> People don't scale at all.
Which is fine, because Google's customer base is made up of people, so Google should be able to scale their support in a linear way.
Which is fine, because Google's customer base is made up of people, so Google should be able to scale their support in a linear way.
but we are all in agreement for years now that Google's customer base is advertisers, they can scale their support for their user base but it is unlikely to have any relation to their revenue.
on edit: I don't mean that not supporting their user base is the right thing to do, although an MBA might say it were.
on edit: I don't mean that not supporting their user base is the right thing to do, although an MBA might say it were.
We should question the assumption that we need services to be at Google's scale. Especially when it comes to pushing user-generated content to all those costumers.
I like having services that Google provides so the answer is yes.
That was easy, thanks for asking the question so that I can answer it.
Any more questions you think "we" should answer? I'll be glad to resolve them since you only seem to ask them.
That was easy, thanks for asking the question so that I can answer it.
Any more questions you think "we" should answer? I'll be glad to resolve them since you only seem to ask them.
My suggestion would be to avoid growing to 1 billion customers, until you have support that is capable of handling that many.
So I guess YouTube should just shut down?
They should. Their existence sucks all the oxygen out of the room, preventing lots of smaller competitors from gaining traction.
> They should.
That's an insane statement. YouTube should shutdown because they're successful?
What, do you think a monopoly is a bad thing? The market place decided YouTube was the better platform and continued to pile on (sure, they had market timing too.)
If you can suggest something better than YouTube do let me know.
That's an insane statement. YouTube should shutdown because they're successful?
What, do you think a monopoly is a bad thing? The market place decided YouTube was the better platform and continued to pile on (sure, they had market timing too.)
If you can suggest something better than YouTube do let me know.
The market could suggest something better than YouTube, if it were actually competitive. Monopolies may briefly be efficient, but they're always evolutionary dead ends, and getting out of one is more costly than any short-term benefits.
I work in the public sector of Europe. One of the primary reasons that we prefer Azure and AWS to google cloud is support.
When things go really wrong on our office365 platform or any part of Azure, Seattle will call us on the the hour with updates until it’s fixed. We have programs within Microsoft support where our developers and sysops can suggest changes, and if the suggestions gather enough popularity and fit within whatever criteria Microsoft have internally they’ll happen.
AWS didn’t always have the great support they do now, but as far as cloud operations (the nerdy bits) go, I think they’re actually better at it than even Microsoft. It build up gradually along with GDPR, but they were the first of the major three to offer things like support for AWS services that’s actually located within the European Union. I’m not updated on Microsoft, but AWS may still be the only company to do that.
Compare that to Google, where we get to talk with an automated system, the same as though we weren’t a 3,3 billion a year budget organisation. I’ve had better personal support for my free google account than I have for our company google cloud account.
Don’t get me wrong, we would probably have a lot of GDPR related reasons to prefer Azure or AWS even if google had better support, but the lack of support means we’ve never gotten beyond that step in our risk assessments.
When things go really wrong on our office365 platform or any part of Azure, Seattle will call us on the the hour with updates until it’s fixed. We have programs within Microsoft support where our developers and sysops can suggest changes, and if the suggestions gather enough popularity and fit within whatever criteria Microsoft have internally they’ll happen.
AWS didn’t always have the great support they do now, but as far as cloud operations (the nerdy bits) go, I think they’re actually better at it than even Microsoft. It build up gradually along with GDPR, but they were the first of the major three to offer things like support for AWS services that’s actually located within the European Union. I’m not updated on Microsoft, but AWS may still be the only company to do that.
Compare that to Google, where we get to talk with an automated system, the same as though we weren’t a 3,3 billion a year budget organisation. I’ve had better personal support for my free google account than I have for our company google cloud account.
Don’t get me wrong, we would probably have a lot of GDPR related reasons to prefer Azure or AWS even if google had better support, but the lack of support means we’ve never gotten beyond that step in our risk assessments.
I've had the same experience with GCP too.
I work pretty exclusively with AWS these days as a CloudOp. I remember building an environment in GCP and getting answers from support was terrible. I eventually left that job after 11 months.
The next job was pure AWS and sweet Jesus was the contrast strong. AWS not only had people who would phone you within 10-15 minutes, more often quicker than that, but they had a frickin' account manager who visited us every month and we only spent a thousands per month with them. Absolutely worlds apart.
I work pretty exclusively with AWS these days as a CloudOp. I remember building an environment in GCP and getting answers from support was terrible. I eventually left that job after 11 months.
The next job was pure AWS and sweet Jesus was the contrast strong. AWS not only had people who would phone you within 10-15 minutes, more often quicker than that, but they had a frickin' account manager who visited us every month and we only spent a thousands per month with them. Absolutely worlds apart.
So just give me priority support when I need it. Let me choose to use the free robot support or pay for a human to answer my call. Be upfront, that the human might not resolve the issue, but at least look at it and give me a non-automated answer to my problem.
That's not a bad idea: premium YouTube creators. If you pay a premium then you can get issues resolved more directly.
> Google has approx' one BILLION customers.
> What is your suggestion here?
Which means they also have one billion potential workers. They could tap into the power of crowd-intelligence. It's probably somewhat easy to forge some processes to oursource certain support-problems which need low human interaction.
Something they do with Recaptcha already and IIRC at Google Maps. They could sell Youtube Premium to some thoudsand people and let them instead check a handful videos per day for some cases of copyright infringment and such. Just let them be the final fonrtier of sanity in cases where the machine is weak.
Which means they also have one billion potential workers. They could tap into the power of crowd-intelligence. It's probably somewhat easy to forge some processes to oursource certain support-problems which need low human interaction.
Something they do with Recaptcha already and IIRC at Google Maps. They could sell Youtube Premium to some thoudsand people and let them instead check a handful videos per day for some cases of copyright infringment and such. Just let them be the final fonrtier of sanity in cases where the machine is weak.
You can use the community for support. Then make people pay a premium for paid human support.
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If you're living in fear go find a paid platform where you are the customer instead of the product.
If you aren't making enough money on YouTube to be able to afford paying someone to host your content and provide better, paid customer service, then you have to consider that the risk of being on a mostly automated, poorly supported platform is the only thing keeping you from losing money, or in other words, is the sole source of your income.
When you are as big as Google, very improbable failures happen all the time, pointing them out doesn't tell the story of how well they're doing unless your expectation is constant perfection. Go find rates, not anecdotes, then you might have something.
Also, if you're being blackmailed and harassed, it would seem to be a matter for the police and the courts, not Google, to fix.
If you aren't making enough money on YouTube to be able to afford paying someone to host your content and provide better, paid customer service, then you have to consider that the risk of being on a mostly automated, poorly supported platform is the only thing keeping you from losing money, or in other words, is the sole source of your income.
When you are as big as Google, very improbable failures happen all the time, pointing them out doesn't tell the story of how well they're doing unless your expectation is constant perfection. Go find rates, not anecdotes, then you might have something.
Also, if you're being blackmailed and harassed, it would seem to be a matter for the police and the courts, not Google, to fix.
> When you are as big as Google, very improbable failures happen all the time, pointing them out doesn't tell the story of how well they're doing unless your expectation is constant perfection
Just a thought experiment, does Youtube need to be as big as it is? Can’t Youtube say “given the current accuracy/precision of ML based solutions and how much our manual operations can scale, we are going to rate limit the content that circulates to match our ability of giving the best judgment on what videos to take down and what videos to keep”. Physical stores have maximum occupancy limits, and with coronavirus some even shown proactive rate limiting to say “hey, we can’t ensure transmission control above a certain density”. Those are corporations too, those also have fiduciary duty.
I think “growth at all costs” is a major driver of these types of failures, especially when costs are externalized and distributed to the userbase; one annoying notification, one abuse feature change, one harmful policy decision at a time.
> Go find rates, not anecdotes, then you might have something
Youtube has near perfect knowledge of the warm data of their operations, and use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it, while we only get to know others are being abused when news make it to Hacker News. The inability to find the rates is inherent to the problem. Short of sneaking into Youtube data centers, there is only so much data you can find without Youtube’s say so. Which brings the question, for such a massive policy layer operation, why is this data not made transparent?
Just a thought experiment, does Youtube need to be as big as it is? Can’t Youtube say “given the current accuracy/precision of ML based solutions and how much our manual operations can scale, we are going to rate limit the content that circulates to match our ability of giving the best judgment on what videos to take down and what videos to keep”. Physical stores have maximum occupancy limits, and with coronavirus some even shown proactive rate limiting to say “hey, we can’t ensure transmission control above a certain density”. Those are corporations too, those also have fiduciary duty.
I think “growth at all costs” is a major driver of these types of failures, especially when costs are externalized and distributed to the userbase; one annoying notification, one abuse feature change, one harmful policy decision at a time.
> Go find rates, not anecdotes, then you might have something
Youtube has near perfect knowledge of the warm data of their operations, and use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it, while we only get to know others are being abused when news make it to Hacker News. The inability to find the rates is inherent to the problem. Short of sneaking into Youtube data centers, there is only so much data you can find without Youtube’s say so. Which brings the question, for such a massive policy layer operation, why is this data not made transparent?
>Just a thought experiment, does Youtube need to be as big as it is?
A few scattered moderation complaints compared to wholesale rate limiting of incoming content... I can only imagine the madness of content producers if YouTube tried that.
>Youtube has near perfect knowledge of the warm data of their operations, and use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it
YouTube content moderation isn't human spaceflight. Having a goal of never failing is, well, a very inexperienced way of thinking about failure. On the order of half a million hours of new video content a day goes on YouTube, or something like 6 million uploads.
Let's just pretend that the moderation decision is only made once on upload, you make 6 million decisions a day, how many ridiculous decisions are you going to make every day?
Do you think that number is ever going to be zero? The reality is that there is an exponential relationship.
Let's just say you can double your cost to cut failures in half. If it's not that relationship it'll be something like it.
You can just keep doing it. Doubling your cost over and over, and you're still going to fail all the time. When a "one in a million" chance means something happens several times a day, well, you have to have a different attitude about failure.
And when you're just about the only game in town, whatever you do to mitigate failure is going to attract people trying to screw with you to upset you and your users, to take advantage. Not only are you trying not to fail every day, you're trying to avoid people exploiting those attempts. It's just reality that you have a popular service, there is going to be some nonzero number of very upset users with just cause to be upset. That's just reality.
A few scattered moderation complaints compared to wholesale rate limiting of incoming content... I can only imagine the madness of content producers if YouTube tried that.
>Youtube has near perfect knowledge of the warm data of their operations, and use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it
YouTube content moderation isn't human spaceflight. Having a goal of never failing is, well, a very inexperienced way of thinking about failure. On the order of half a million hours of new video content a day goes on YouTube, or something like 6 million uploads.
Let's just pretend that the moderation decision is only made once on upload, you make 6 million decisions a day, how many ridiculous decisions are you going to make every day?
Do you think that number is ever going to be zero? The reality is that there is an exponential relationship.
Let's just say you can double your cost to cut failures in half. If it's not that relationship it'll be something like it.
You can just keep doing it. Doubling your cost over and over, and you're still going to fail all the time. When a "one in a million" chance means something happens several times a day, well, you have to have a different attitude about failure.
And when you're just about the only game in town, whatever you do to mitigate failure is going to attract people trying to screw with you to upset you and your users, to take advantage. Not only are you trying not to fail every day, you're trying to avoid people exploiting those attempts. It's just reality that you have a popular service, there is going to be some nonzero number of very upset users with just cause to be upset. That's just reality.
> A few scattered moderation complaints compared to wholesale rate limiting of incoming content
I'm sure there is already some per-user upload rate limits in place to prevent gross abuse. It is a matter of playing with these parameters. Rate limits don't have to be distributed mindlessly equally globally. Just like in Hacker News or in Twitter, certain proxy variables like the account age and karma scores are used to assess abuse potential and certain capabilities of the platform is unlocked to the user. Most probably something like this also exists. Again, it is a matter of playing with these parameters.
Additionally, "few scattered complaints" suffer from selection bias in telling what is actually going on. Not all policy (mis)applications transform into a complaint. If I had to guess, the ratio could be at least an order of magnitude but obviously we have no data on this.
> Do you think that number is ever going to be zero?
Zero complaints is a straw-man end-state. Of course there is going to be diminishing returns. You can aim to minimize user complaints at 80% to save from diminishing returns, or you can aim to maximize platform usage and ad revenue and take user frustration into account only to the extent it affects platform usage maximization. You can operate on either goals while paying attention to diminishing returns.
Very simplistically, there is a relationship such that "for every x dollars we don't spend on reducing abuse, we lose y dollars in user frustration". Who decides the satisficing ratio between x and y? This optimization is done asymmetrically by these types of services and in general there is no way for us to say "wait a second, turns out you were abusing your users/letting them get abused more than you should while making a smidge more profit out of it" with such information asymmetry.
I'm sure there is already some per-user upload rate limits in place to prevent gross abuse. It is a matter of playing with these parameters. Rate limits don't have to be distributed mindlessly equally globally. Just like in Hacker News or in Twitter, certain proxy variables like the account age and karma scores are used to assess abuse potential and certain capabilities of the platform is unlocked to the user. Most probably something like this also exists. Again, it is a matter of playing with these parameters.
Additionally, "few scattered complaints" suffer from selection bias in telling what is actually going on. Not all policy (mis)applications transform into a complaint. If I had to guess, the ratio could be at least an order of magnitude but obviously we have no data on this.
> Do you think that number is ever going to be zero?
Zero complaints is a straw-man end-state. Of course there is going to be diminishing returns. You can aim to minimize user complaints at 80% to save from diminishing returns, or you can aim to maximize platform usage and ad revenue and take user frustration into account only to the extent it affects platform usage maximization. You can operate on either goals while paying attention to diminishing returns.
Very simplistically, there is a relationship such that "for every x dollars we don't spend on reducing abuse, we lose y dollars in user frustration". Who decides the satisficing ratio between x and y? This optimization is done asymmetrically by these types of services and in general there is no way for us to say "wait a second, turns out you were abusing your users/letting them get abused more than you should while making a smidge more profit out of it" with such information asymmetry.
> Rate limits don't have to be distributed mindlessly equally globally.
Yet that's what the grandparent comment is suggesting:
> Can’t Youtube say “given the current accuracy/precision of ML based solutions and how much our manual operations can scale, we are going to rate limit the content that circulates to match our ability of giving the best judgment on what videos to take down and what videos to keep”.
YT already does this abuse-prevention, they just lean towards letting more content on rather than less. The grandparent suggests that they start limiting uploads in a way that more regular uploaders (eg. a few videos a day) would feel, which would warrant some explanation or statement from the company.
Yet that's what the grandparent comment is suggesting:
> Can’t Youtube say “given the current accuracy/precision of ML based solutions and how much our manual operations can scale, we are going to rate limit the content that circulates to match our ability of giving the best judgment on what videos to take down and what videos to keep”.
YT already does this abuse-prevention, they just lean towards letting more content on rather than less. The grandparent suggests that they start limiting uploads in a way that more regular uploaders (eg. a few videos a day) would feel, which would warrant some explanation or statement from the company.
> they just lean towards letting more content on rather than less
Come on. It is more than a lean. Growth is an explicit, fractal goal at every level.
> The grandparent suggests that they start limiting uploads in a way that more regular uploaders (eg. a few videos a day) would feel
I didn't give implementation details on the rate limit, because as I preambled, this was a thought experiment, not a design document. They whole point is to underline the fact that, there is a cost of making the review process better (whether automatic or manual) and to what extent corners should be cut versus this cost should be paid seems to be informed by the objective to grow at any cost.
Come on. It is more than a lean. Growth is an explicit, fractal goal at every level.
> The grandparent suggests that they start limiting uploads in a way that more regular uploaders (eg. a few videos a day) would feel
I didn't give implementation details on the rate limit, because as I preambled, this was a thought experiment, not a design document. They whole point is to underline the fact that, there is a cost of making the review process better (whether automatic or manual) and to what extent corners should be cut versus this cost should be paid seems to be informed by the objective to grow at any cost.
>Zero complaints is a straw-man end-state.
The comment of yours I was responding to
>use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it
It is not at all a straw man. You are criticizing nonzero optimization and encouraging minimization. To minimize is to have a goal of zero. What other definitions do minimize and optimize have in the dichotomy you are trying to make here?
The comment of yours I was responding to
>use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it
It is not at all a straw man. You are criticizing nonzero optimization and encouraging minimization. To minimize is to have a goal of zero. What other definitions do minimize and optimize have in the dichotomy you are trying to make here?
> To minimize is to have a goal of zero
That's not what minimize means at all, hence my straw man argument. Minimize means reducing the amount as much as possible while still satisfying other parameters of your equation. Zero makes the whole operation nonviable as we agree due to diminishing returns, so it doesn't satisfy that definition.
The dichotomy of optimizing user frustration and minimizing user frustration is basically a question of what parameter gets what valence in the whole objective function. Maximizing profit at the expense of user frustration is optimizing user frustration, meaning having the perfect amount of user frustration in which their leaving the platform and the cost of reducing the frustration is on balance. Minimizing user frustration means doing this the other way around and having a product that, as Google claims, serves "the user first". If you understood that to be zero, I hope it is clear now. At any rate my point doesn't hinge on what the minimal point is. It is clear that any goal other than optimizing user frustration will be an improvement to current situation as far as what users get out of the transaction, and it is unlikely to be adopted.
That's not what minimize means at all, hence my straw man argument. Minimize means reducing the amount as much as possible while still satisfying other parameters of your equation. Zero makes the whole operation nonviable as we agree due to diminishing returns, so it doesn't satisfy that definition.
The dichotomy of optimizing user frustration and minimizing user frustration is basically a question of what parameter gets what valence in the whole objective function. Maximizing profit at the expense of user frustration is optimizing user frustration, meaning having the perfect amount of user frustration in which their leaving the platform and the cost of reducing the frustration is on balance. Minimizing user frustration means doing this the other way around and having a product that, as Google claims, serves "the user first". If you understood that to be zero, I hope it is clear now. At any rate my point doesn't hinge on what the minimal point is. It is clear that any goal other than optimizing user frustration will be an improvement to current situation as far as what users get out of the transaction, and it is unlikely to be adopted.
> Minimize means reducing the amount as much as possible while still satisfying other parameters of your equation.
> basically a question of what parameter gets what valence in the whole objective function
You're splitting extremely fine hairs there, your difference between minimize and optimize seems to be not much more than how much you like a term "satisfying other parameters of your equation".
>Minimize means reducing the amount as much as possible while still satisfying other parameters of your equation.
You have to stop after "as much as possible". Adding a "while still" makes it optimization, your value judgment doesn't get to determine what does and does not fit inside the "while still" of minimize.
Once somebody calls me out for a logical fallacy based on their own difficult to understand definitions of seemingly common words... if that can't be resolved there really isn't a point in continuing, it's not like we could really communicate anything much less make arguments if we can't agree what minimize means.
> basically a question of what parameter gets what valence in the whole objective function
You're splitting extremely fine hairs there, your difference between minimize and optimize seems to be not much more than how much you like a term "satisfying other parameters of your equation".
>Minimize means reducing the amount as much as possible while still satisfying other parameters of your equation.
You have to stop after "as much as possible". Adding a "while still" makes it optimization, your value judgment doesn't get to determine what does and does not fit inside the "while still" of minimize.
Once somebody calls me out for a logical fallacy based on their own difficult to understand definitions of seemingly common words... if that can't be resolved there really isn't a point in continuing, it's not like we could really communicate anything much less make arguments if we can't agree what minimize means.
> You have to stop after "as much as possible". Adding a "while still" makes it optimization, your value judgment doesn't get to determine what does and does not fit inside the "while still" of minimize.
I'll try to simplify it. Imagine a function with dependent and independent variables. Choosing an independent variable so that the dependent variable is the minimum is minimizing. Imagine the plotting of the equation, we are still trying to be on the curve. That's what "as much as possible" means. You are saying minimizing has to be when that dependent variable is zero. That is only possible if the equation crosses the x axis. For our case, it doesn't because diminishing returns make that impossible. Hence my calling strawman.
> You're splitting extremely fine hairs there
The thing I've been trying to separate is not optimization and minimization because minimization is a particular type of optimization. I'm trying to distinguish what particular variable is given valence while solving the whole system of equations. Because in a case where two of those variables are correlated (user frustration & revenue), picking one over the other chooses different optima for both (optimizing for user frustration vs optimizing for revenue yields different optimum values for their correlated counter-parts; for revenue and user frustration respectively). I want to emphasize, these variables are not independent with respect to each other. So there is no simple "revenue is max and frustration is min" solution for which we could say "youtube should just optimize the whole thing". There is picking to be made and max revenue is picked over min frustration, always.
Picking up on me using words "optimize" vs "minimize" for two different variables appears to me as further strawmanning. I don't ascribe malintent, but what we have been discussing has been irrelevant to the conclusion of the original post from the beginning.
I'll try to simplify it. Imagine a function with dependent and independent variables. Choosing an independent variable so that the dependent variable is the minimum is minimizing. Imagine the plotting of the equation, we are still trying to be on the curve. That's what "as much as possible" means. You are saying minimizing has to be when that dependent variable is zero. That is only possible if the equation crosses the x axis. For our case, it doesn't because diminishing returns make that impossible. Hence my calling strawman.
> You're splitting extremely fine hairs there
The thing I've been trying to separate is not optimization and minimization because minimization is a particular type of optimization. I'm trying to distinguish what particular variable is given valence while solving the whole system of equations. Because in a case where two of those variables are correlated (user frustration & revenue), picking one over the other chooses different optima for both (optimizing for user frustration vs optimizing for revenue yields different optimum values for their correlated counter-parts; for revenue and user frustration respectively). I want to emphasize, these variables are not independent with respect to each other. So there is no simple "revenue is max and frustration is min" solution for which we could say "youtube should just optimize the whole thing". There is picking to be made and max revenue is picked over min frustration, always.
Picking up on me using words "optimize" vs "minimize" for two different variables appears to me as further strawmanning. I don't ascribe malintent, but what we have been discussing has been irrelevant to the conclusion of the original post from the beginning.
There's a problem in that: what if you're up against VC-backed silicon valley unicorns whose business case is to overgrow and obliterate anything else in their sector?
In other words, if you can't afford to buy cars and hire drivers and comply with all regulations then don't compete with Uber. The missing part is, Uber intentionally cuts these things out of its business model so you can't… I guess it would be, drive for Uber until you can afford a real taxi medallion.
Likewise, I think being a YouTuber you will NEVER be able to earn enough money that you can jump ship to a competing video service with better conditions, because no such service (?) exists at the scale and audience of YouTube, because YouTube runs at a substantial loss in order to completely own the market for non-trivial uses.
That's valuable. How valuable? Stock market valuable: as in, people with money THINK it is valuable, and I don't think the reality has been well tested yet. We're still in the world where dominating and monopolizing is seen as super valuable, because of some immense perceived payback that you apparently get to do.
In other words, if you can't afford to buy cars and hire drivers and comply with all regulations then don't compete with Uber. The missing part is, Uber intentionally cuts these things out of its business model so you can't… I guess it would be, drive for Uber until you can afford a real taxi medallion.
Likewise, I think being a YouTuber you will NEVER be able to earn enough money that you can jump ship to a competing video service with better conditions, because no such service (?) exists at the scale and audience of YouTube, because YouTube runs at a substantial loss in order to completely own the market for non-trivial uses.
That's valuable. How valuable? Stock market valuable: as in, people with money THINK it is valuable, and I don't think the reality has been well tested yet. We're still in the world where dominating and monopolizing is seen as super valuable, because of some immense perceived payback that you apparently get to do.
How does one find ban/review rates for YouTube? Wouldn't this be internal data? Can you provide a link to a public datasource that shows shows outcomes of YouTube's banning/takedown and review processes?
Nice, though aggregate data doesn't allow for third party analysis, only the analysis presented by YouTube, which if you suspect YouTube's analysis/handling, isn't that useful.
That said there would be some privacy concerns if that data was just floating around out there.
That said there would be some privacy concerns if that data was just floating around out there.
Comb through public support forums, do public asks for reports of inappropriate moderation outcomes, find someone with significant enough financial losses to justify a lawsuit and use the legal discovery process to get internal stats or ask Google's representative on the stand, ask your state or national representative to support legislation requiring publishing of such statistics... there are a few ideas. All of them would require action to try to get data, I wouldn't know of any existing data because I haven't looked.
Ok, so the answer is: no. This information isn't publicly available or easily accessible.
I have no idea, like I said. I haven't looked and wouldn't otherwise know.
“If you’re being blackmailed...” does sound like a matter for legal redress, but it ought not suffice as a guard against a company backed by Alphabet’s resources taking action. While your argument is technically sound, the consequences of inaction by YouTube can exit the sterile world of bits and bytes and bring real pain.
Sometimes it would be nice if you could pay extra to get better customer service. Especially when your income depends on it. In a case like this, I'd much rather pay the $50 to Google to make sure this gets fixed, than to the blackmailer.
Of course that might create another incentive for Google not to provide any customer service at all until people pay.
Of course that might create another incentive for Google not to provide any customer service at all until people pay.
Yup. Similarly, I'm now assuming the base Amazon shipping is 'pay ten-twenty bucks or so for super fast delivery, which will be about what the previous free shipping was'. Because since coronavirus, they claim to be so busy that normal stuff takes months: therefore, I don't think that will ever change. They will continue to have the free tier take months, making it more impractical and motivating the choice of 'fast' shipping, and since it's a global change I figure they get to keep it (in practical terms).
If you're earning enough to afford a different, paid, hosting provider, yes you should definitely get it.
But YouTube is still a platform you must be on if you care about expanding your viewership.
But YouTube is still a platform you must be on if you care about expanding your viewership.
Youtube has locked viewers in. If a content creator leaves youtube no one consumes their content, so this isn't really an option.
It's quite possible to create content that survives and thrives without depending on some large, proprietary platform like YouTube. Happens all the time.
Of course it's not easy. You have to figure out growth for yourself, and most indie businesses and projects fail. Then again, so do most YouTube channels. So it's up to you to choose the indie path or choose YouTube.
Of course it's not easy. You have to figure out growth for yourself, and most indie businesses and projects fail. Then again, so do most YouTube channels. So it's up to you to choose the indie path or choose YouTube.
You can also do things because you want to do them, share ideas because you want to share them. This advertising fueled content filled Internet is pretty toxic.
I don't remember any of the Internet idealism of the 90s mentioning the great progress of sharing information involving the creator of every piece of data available making a fraction of a cent every time it was consumed.
I don't mind people getting paid to do things of course, but I do mind a culture dominated by selling each other's attention to advertisers in exchange for creative output, or creative output solely for the dopamine shot from attention and likes.
I don't remember any of the Internet idealism of the 90s mentioning the great progress of sharing information involving the creator of every piece of data available making a fraction of a cent every time it was consumed.
I don't mind people getting paid to do things of course, but I do mind a culture dominated by selling each other's attention to advertisers in exchange for creative output, or creative output solely for the dopamine shot from attention and likes.
That’s a pretty indifferent attitude to take. Do things because you want to? A lot of people make these videos for a living, and have no choice but to feed the advertisement machine. The business model of the internet is not something most content creators have any control over, and it’s pointless to criticize them for it. The only players who might be able to do that are the big tech companies controlling the platforms, which is why they take a lot of flak for how things are going.
>That’s a pretty indifferent attitude to take.
I don't see that at all. Encouraging people to do things for their own merit and not just to make money – and we have to be realistic here, most people trying to make money on YouTube or anywhere by creating content won't ever see a single dollar from it, so it's more like trying to win a crappy lottery.
It's this constant sense of entitlement or talking like people are forced into making videos for a living which bothers me. It's a crappy job that is pretty easy to know how it works before you get into it. I keep seeing "no choice", well you can always do something else.
I don't see that at all. Encouraging people to do things for their own merit and not just to make money – and we have to be realistic here, most people trying to make money on YouTube or anywhere by creating content won't ever see a single dollar from it, so it's more like trying to win a crappy lottery.
It's this constant sense of entitlement or talking like people are forced into making videos for a living which bothers me. It's a crappy job that is pretty easy to know how it works before you get into it. I keep seeing "no choice", well you can always do something else.
Then complain about Google's monopoly, not its moderation inadequacies, and consider that creators unwilling to leave are the source of the monopoly, not necessarily its victims, especially if they're not even trying other platforms.
I guess I don't like the entitlement/blame cycle where people who help create a problem complain about the consequences.
I guess I don't like the entitlement/blame cycle where people who help create a problem complain about the consequences.
The monopoly is due to threshold of creators being on youtube. A single channel leaving would make no difference. I'd love to see a movement away from youtube, but that would require a movement with serous organization, which creators mostly aren't capable of doing.
This is exactly the same conversation that HN is having about blogging/social media.
Be the change we want to see in the world. Stop posting on YT/FB/IG/wherever, and create your own site, attract your own audience.
I'll come watch you/read it/listen to it. I'm sick of FB/YT/IG/wherever.
Be the change we want to see in the world. Stop posting on YT/FB/IG/wherever, and create your own site, attract your own audience.
I'll come watch you/read it/listen to it. I'm sick of FB/YT/IG/wherever.
> I'd love to see a movement away from youtube
I have seen that, particularly in history channel circles were the content get demonetized for things like saying Hitler, many of them band together and publish to youtube last or not at all and promote these other channels in their videos. I don't know if any of them will be successful, but staying on youtube simply isn't an option for them either.
I think if/when youtube falters it will be death be a thousand cuts, it won't be a single movement with organization and it won't be to something else as centralized.
I have seen that, particularly in history channel circles were the content get demonetized for things like saying Hitler, many of them band together and publish to youtube last or not at all and promote these other channels in their videos. I don't know if any of them will be successful, but staying on youtube simply isn't an option for them either.
I think if/when youtube falters it will be death be a thousand cuts, it won't be a single movement with organization and it won't be to something else as centralized.
Cue the Simpsons clip "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
If one is not willing, capable, or even interested in trying to solve problems they help create, as an individual or a group, I have very little interest in sympathy for their difficulty.
If one is not willing, capable, or even interested in trying to solve problems they help create, as an individual or a group, I have very little interest in sympathy for their difficulty.
How is writing blog posts not trying something? Seems pretty clear to me that content creators are trying to create outrage to force youtube's hand, which seems to me to be the only successful strategy other than getting laws changed.
If the only thing you are willing to do about your problems is publicly complain about them implicitly hoping for an angry mob in response is... quite nearly the least you could do. I think I have expended the amount that I care about the issue.
People have tried it, that's how we know it doesn't work.
Refusing your pet idea isn't a refusal to do anything at all.
Refusing your pet idea isn't a refusal to do anything at all.
If viewers would actually pay for content they like, this wouldn't be an issue. The problems are that tech companies are 1. dumping product well under cost while 2. training customers not to pay anything.
At some point, people need to realize what constantly wanting things for free is costing them and the people they watch.
At some point, people need to realize what constantly wanting things for free is costing them and the people they watch.
> At some point, people need to realize what constantly wanting things for free is costing them and the people they watch.
It's not free, we pay for the content by buying products, it's just very very indirect.
It's not free, we pay for the content by buying products, it's just very very indirect.
Much of the population isn't economically able to purchase all the media they watch. The Silicon Valley 'everything free' experience doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's in an environment where there's an overwhelming majority of people who are only able to pay with their time and attention.
Which is the Star Trek model. It's the future of 'nobody has to work to eat, and so now people go insane trying to pursue popularity since survival's a solved problem'.
That makes it interesting in its own right, and we can already see both the possibilities and the 'race to the bottom' factor that ensues.
Which is the Star Trek model. It's the future of 'nobody has to work to eat, and so now people go insane trying to pursue popularity since survival's a solved problem'.
That makes it interesting in its own right, and we can already see both the possibilities and the 'race to the bottom' factor that ensues.
I completely agree with your sentiment here, and having read the other sibling comments to mine, I'd like to note that I have dealt with high volume customer support, I work closely with YouTube so I know their reps/support/processes pretty well and I'm also a software engineer who thinks about these challenges quite a lot.
None of that changes the fact that Google is indeed "treating it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust". That's basically their MO, and they put wayyyy too much stock in the results. Saying that Google doesn't do this is crazy. This is why the Podcast Addict thing happened; they were trying to crack down on the misinformation from "plandemic" weirdos and Podcast Addict and many other apps were hit with the spray of the shotgun blast. Is their original intention worthwhile? Yes. Do I think a human "reviewed" Podcast Addict before they took it out for linking to content about literally the world's most talked about story while at the same time Google Podcasts did the exact same thing? Absolutely not. If a human reviewed that case and decided that Podcast Addict (the #1 podcast app on Android) needed to be suspended, then something is broken. Maybe someone needs to be fired, but there's no someone in the chair. You can't fire the AIs at this point- You can only tweak and rework them and hope they take out less innocent bystanders.
All this said, is it hard? Yes. Is there too much content to really do this right? Yes I believe there is. Could Google do a better, more efficient and transparent job of cleaning up the mess when their scripts misfire? Oh absolutely yes.
None of that changes the fact that Google is indeed "treating it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust". That's basically their MO, and they put wayyyy too much stock in the results. Saying that Google doesn't do this is crazy. This is why the Podcast Addict thing happened; they were trying to crack down on the misinformation from "plandemic" weirdos and Podcast Addict and many other apps were hit with the spray of the shotgun blast. Is their original intention worthwhile? Yes. Do I think a human "reviewed" Podcast Addict before they took it out for linking to content about literally the world's most talked about story while at the same time Google Podcasts did the exact same thing? Absolutely not. If a human reviewed that case and decided that Podcast Addict (the #1 podcast app on Android) needed to be suspended, then something is broken. Maybe someone needs to be fired, but there's no someone in the chair. You can't fire the AIs at this point- You can only tweak and rework them and hope they take out less innocent bystanders.
All this said, is it hard? Yes. Is there too much content to really do this right? Yes I believe there is. Could Google do a better, more efficient and transparent job of cleaning up the mess when their scripts misfire? Oh absolutely yes.
(Disclaimer: I work on YouTube, but all the opinions are strictly my own).
We tried to convey the message [1] that due to corona virus fewer and fewer human reviewers will be available.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-coronavirus-content-...
We tried to convey the message [1] that due to corona virus fewer and fewer human reviewers will be available.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-coronavirus-content-...
Why? Surely reviewing content is a perfect candidate for remote work?
Sorry for the late reply. I am speculating as I don't know the reason for the decision, but I believe it has to do with the fact that we don't want to expose families to some really gruesome content or that for some parts of the world internet connections are not available (e.g. rural India).
If you have large amount of people for these tasks, you need to give clear guidelines for them to get consistent results.
Also you can’t expect people to put their heart and soul to this kind if grunt work - reviewing content and complaints all day long.
In the end it might be that humans just become robots on task like this.
Also you can’t expect people to put their heart and soul to this kind if grunt work - reviewing content and complaints all day long.
In the end it might be that humans just become robots on task like this.
Here is how YouTube is dong their best about this:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spiderman+elsa
And this, by far, is not the worst case of what's proliferating there.
And this, by far, is not the worst case of what's proliferating there.
What baffles me is that the Games From Scratch YouTube channel has likely generated over $15,000 in revenue for YouTube. Is it really so difficult for them to have a human that the youtuber could turn to?
I dont feel sorry for them at all.
> "I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough"
I dont want these companies touching false/immoral take downs. who are they to decide? sorry, I dont want these people in charge of the moral police. illegal stuff, like revenge porn makes sense.
> "YouTube is doing it's best to blend automation (fast but inaccurate) with human curation (more thoughtful but slower), and sometimes it gets it wrong"
I feel like they usually get it wrong, they are closer to being a blind man swinging a chain saw than a surgeon with a knife. HIRE SOME PEOPLE. they have huge margins, it would take very little for these companies to hire some people to review content.
> " feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly."
Tell that to people who have been shadow banned or demonized. most of the time, there never is resolution, their channel and all the hard work they have put together is ruined forever.
> "I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough"
I dont want these companies touching false/immoral take downs. who are they to decide? sorry, I dont want these people in charge of the moral police. illegal stuff, like revenge porn makes sense.
> "YouTube is doing it's best to blend automation (fast but inaccurate) with human curation (more thoughtful but slower), and sometimes it gets it wrong"
I feel like they usually get it wrong, they are closer to being a blind man swinging a chain saw than a surgeon with a knife. HIRE SOME PEOPLE. they have huge margins, it would take very little for these companies to hire some people to review content.
> " feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly."
Tell that to people who have been shadow banned or demonized. most of the time, there never is resolution, their channel and all the hard work they have put together is ruined forever.
>HIRE SOME PEOPLE. they have huge margins, it would take very little for these companies to hire some people to review content.
Agreed. That's something that's frequently said about Google and Facebook... That their volume is so large, they couldn't possibly do a better job with customer service. Given that they each make billions in profit every quarter, I find it hard to believe that improving customer service is unfeasible or too expensive.
Agreed. That's something that's frequently said about Google and Facebook... That their volume is so large, they couldn't possibly do a better job with customer service. Given that they each make billions in profit every quarter, I find it hard to believe that improving customer service is unfeasible or too expensive.
That's an elaborate version of what I was saying I didn't believe.
They should hire more humans to do a proper job and provide actual customer service, using their excessive profits. The AI/automation stuff is just cost cutting and its lowering the quality of service.
Three hundred hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute [0]. There's no amount of "excessive profit" that can scale humans to review it all.
[0] https://merchdope.com/youtube-stats/
[0] https://merchdope.com/youtube-stats/
No one's saying not to have algorithms involved at all. Humans don't have to review all of the content, just the stuff the algorithms are unsure about, as well as takedown/review requests.
The latter is more important, I think: there is no reasonable way for a bad actor to set out to spam the REVIEWING of takedown requests. You could even make spamming takedowns more likely to trigger human review. So you can target a person on YouTube, you can try to do things to harass them, but it's not really feasible to try and attack the entire YouTube 'takedown review' process just to protect your attack on an individual.
That's already how it works.
How could this type of blackmail happen if someone was already reviewing the videos manually? Takedowns being automated is fundamentally at odds with free speech.
YT is legally required to accept all takedowns and takedown counter-notices to reduce liability. Not taking down something in lieu of a DMCA takedown request would put YT at risk of a lawsuit if the submitter does own said copyright.
Content ID, on the other hand, is a problem of their own making.
Content ID, on the other hand, is a problem of their own making.
And how do you know that's not what Youtube is doing already ?
A sufficiently poorly done job is indistinguishable from nothing being done at all.
It's possible that it's impossible to do any better than they currently are, but as we don't have access to all of the data that they do, we cannot make that determination.
It's possible that it's impossible to do any better than they currently are, but as we don't have access to all of the data that they do, we cannot make that determination.
So about 270000 assuming they have 4 monitors each.
If they hire from low cost countries from contractors. They will only have to pay 10k per headcount + additional 10k for various stuff.
That's only around 5 billion. Let's just double that, 10 billion dollars. That's it. Google can easily pay it.
If they hire from low cost countries from contractors. They will only have to pay 10k per headcount + additional 10k for various stuff.
That's only around 5 billion. Let's just double that, 10 billion dollars. That's it. Google can easily pay it.
10 billion is a lot. And that's 10 billion that is not making them any more money.
From google's perspective, none of these blackmail or customer support issue is an actual issue, because you, the customer, is gonna use google's services regardless. The business case for paying support personnel is non-existent. Even if you're a paying customer, the overhead of hiring more personnel is not an effective use of capital - better spent on R&D and other scalable revenue generating options.
It sucks. But that's the reality.
From google's perspective, none of these blackmail or customer support issue is an actual issue, because you, the customer, is gonna use google's services regardless. The business case for paying support personnel is non-existent. Even if you're a paying customer, the overhead of hiring more personnel is not an effective use of capital - better spent on R&D and other scalable revenue generating options.
It sucks. But that's the reality.
The reality is that watching all the videos all the way through is an extreme strawman of the actual amount they would need to do to have competent moderation, and yet even that strawman is within their budget!
Even watching every video that hits 1000 views would be a huge overkill, and that would already cut your budget by a factor of multiple thousands.
Even watching every video that hits 1000 views would be a huge overkill, and that would already cut your budget by a factor of multiple thousands.
A more relevant metric might be how many channels are subjected to community guideline or copyright strikes per day. Hiring humans to individual examine each of these circumstances is probably far more feasible than hiring humans to individually examine every single video.
So they built this thing that is too large to properly manage.
If they can't manage it they should scale it down. See some diversification in the online video space.
If they can't manage it they should scale it down. See some diversification in the online video space.
They are the ones who own the systems and services that make YouTube a thing?
Your problem is with the ownership model. Good luck.
So long as more people provide a market to have their agency bought for an ever lower price... you’ll have that.
To their models we’re replaceable cogs, so long as the correct stats are up wtf do they care?
Don’t bother rethinking how we compute or anything. It’s not like people weren’t predicting just this as the cloud took off (oh wait they were!, Google it!)
Your problem is with the ownership model. Good luck.
So long as more people provide a market to have their agency bought for an ever lower price... you’ll have that.
To their models we’re replaceable cogs, so long as the correct stats are up wtf do they care?
Don’t bother rethinking how we compute or anything. It’s not like people weren’t predicting just this as the cloud took off (oh wait they were!, Google it!)
[deleted]
> HIRE SOME PEOPLE
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23317390
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23317390
A well implemented karma system might be a thing: employees don't scale, trusted users do.
Except people (including HN) hated the Youtube Heroes program.
> HIRE SOME PEOPLE
See: https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/12/expanding-our-work-ag...
TL;Dr - YouTube announced they were going to have over 10,000 people to help.
Disclosure: Work at Google, but views are my own.
See: https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/12/expanding-our-work-ag...
TL;Dr - YouTube announced they were going to have over 10,000 people to help.
Disclosure: Work at Google, but views are my own.
> HIRE SOME PEOPLE. they have huge margins, it would take very little for these companies to hire some people to review content.
How many people? Youtube is probably the biggest nexus of complaints, but apps on Play and the Chrome Extension store are also up there.
Consider what it would cost to manually vet all apps on Play against even the most uncontroversial malware and data abuse policy. Malicious authors are clever and apps are big. It'd take a trained reverse engineer days to truly vet a single app. How many millions of apps are on the app store? How many different versions of those apps are there? You are looking at an army of people being paid six figures to figure out if apps are doing nasty things.
Now consider how pissed people get that things like domestic abuse apps (often hiding as child monitoring apps) exist on the app store. Or plenty of other objectionable crap. If you want to tackle any of this (you don't but lots of people do) then now you've got a whole set of complex contextual problems for enforcement.
It would take a lot more than "very little" to review content.
How many people? Youtube is probably the biggest nexus of complaints, but apps on Play and the Chrome Extension store are also up there.
Consider what it would cost to manually vet all apps on Play against even the most uncontroversial malware and data abuse policy. Malicious authors are clever and apps are big. It'd take a trained reverse engineer days to truly vet a single app. How many millions of apps are on the app store? How many different versions of those apps are there? You are looking at an army of people being paid six figures to figure out if apps are doing nasty things.
Now consider how pissed people get that things like domestic abuse apps (often hiding as child monitoring apps) exist on the app store. Or plenty of other objectionable crap. If you want to tackle any of this (you don't but lots of people do) then now you've got a whole set of complex contextual problems for enforcement.
It would take a lot more than "very little" to review content.
> Consider what it would cost to manually vet all apps on Play against even the most uncontroversial malware and data abuse policy
I believe this is precisely what Apple does, is it not? So perhaps not as impossible as you're casting it to be.
I believe this is precisely what Apple does, is it not? So perhaps not as impossible as you're casting it to be.
It isn't. You can't possibly manually review every new version of every app in detail.
You can do it for every app with a hundred thousand installs, though. And they could manually review support tickets from youtube partner channels of similar size.
They can't vet everything, but the bare minimum of what they should be vetting is a lot closer to apple levels than their current levels.
They can't vet everything, but the bare minimum of what they should be vetting is a lot closer to apple levels than their current levels.
It's only ever resolved favorably if you have enough clout.
I understand there simply not being enough manpower on Earth to manually review so many cases, but the balance seems to be so heavily skewed towards automation (which still does a very piss poor job at it) that just feels like there's no human element vetting the final decision at all, and that's the approach which so many people have gripes about, rightfully so until Google strikes that balance.
I understand there simply not being enough manpower on Earth to manually review so many cases, but the balance seems to be so heavily skewed towards automation (which still does a very piss poor job at it) that just feels like there's no human element vetting the final decision at all, and that's the approach which so many people have gripes about, rightfully so until Google strikes that balance.
> I understand there simply not being enough manpower on Earth to manually review so many cases
IMHO it's less about man power then how to approach thinks.
Like for example in the given case the video was reviewed by people multiple times. So they could have just "locked" it into being a good video and on put higher bars on further complains.
I mean this video got taken down even through it had been manually reviewed. So not having enough manpower isn't quite the problem.
To problem is more on the line of:
- YouTube doesn't incur much cost on false take downs (both on copyright and community standards). Even false closure of whole google accounts often doesn't cost them much even through it can cause major damages.
- There is no good law to protect small content creators against false copyright claims, false "bad content" claims or discrimination through non advisability in most countries. Sure laws exist in some places but they are mostly in-effective.
IMHO it's less about man power then how to approach thinks.
Like for example in the given case the video was reviewed by people multiple times. So they could have just "locked" it into being a good video and on put higher bars on further complains.
I mean this video got taken down even through it had been manually reviewed. So not having enough manpower isn't quite the problem.
To problem is more on the line of:
- YouTube doesn't incur much cost on false take downs (both on copyright and community standards). Even false closure of whole google accounts often doesn't cost them much even through it can cause major damages.
- There is no good law to protect small content creators against false copyright claims, false "bad content" claims or discrimination through non advisability in most countries. Sure laws exist in some places but they are mostly in-effective.
> I understand there simply not being enough manpower on Earth to manually review so many cases
This has made me wonder,
1) how many people would this really take to review appeals manually?
2) should a publisher be allowed to run a platform that they are unable to curate?
This has made me wonder,
1) how many people would this really take to review appeals manually?
2) should a publisher be allowed to run a platform that they are unable to curate?
> should a publisher be allowed to run a platform that they are unable to curate?
That one is tricky.
My take on it is if they do content dependent advertisement, user behaviour based recommendations and similar then no. They should not.
If they don't have this I'm not sure.
If are based on content which isn't widely publicly available but mostly 1-to-1 or 1-to-n (with a smallish n), then I would argue they should _not be allowed to curate content_. I mean how absurd would it be if Google would delete a file which is not public visible from Drive because it seems inappropriate (yes, sarcasm). What's next they delete files from your android phone or computer when they are deemed inappropriate?!
That one is tricky.
My take on it is if they do content dependent advertisement, user behaviour based recommendations and similar then no. They should not.
If they don't have this I'm not sure.
If are based on content which isn't widely publicly available but mostly 1-to-1 or 1-to-n (with a smallish n), then I would argue they should _not be allowed to curate content_. I mean how absurd would it be if Google would delete a file which is not public visible from Drive because it seems inappropriate (yes, sarcasm). What's next they delete files from your android phone or computer when they are deemed inappropriate?!
> should a publisher be allowed to run a platform that they are unable to curate?
It should. If these services didn't exist people (more exactly, a fraction thereof) would be hosting the videos themselves, and we'd have even less of a curation. It would be perverse to penalize Google for attempting some moderation rather than just working as a hosting service, which is exactly why section 230 immunizes this kind of imperfect moderation.
It should. If these services didn't exist people (more exactly, a fraction thereof) would be hosting the videos themselves, and we'd have even less of a curation. It would be perverse to penalize Google for attempting some moderation rather than just working as a hosting service, which is exactly why section 230 immunizes this kind of imperfect moderation.
With a profit of more than 10 billion per quarter, I find it hard to believe that Google can't hire more people to handle cases like this. It's not a manpower problem.
And 2) is a really interesting question. The most obvious answer is if you can't manage (curate) a platform, you shouldn't run one.
And 2) is a really interesting question. The most obvious answer is if you can't manage (curate) a platform, you shouldn't run one.
> 2) should a publisher be allowed to run a platform that they are unable to curate?
Absolutely. I’d prefer to see it go back to the old days - where there was no moderation and they had safe harbor.
Of course we shouldn’t permit illegal content but everything else absolutely should be fair game. If you don’t like it then don’t watch it. Someone else might.
Absolutely. I’d prefer to see it go back to the old days - where there was no moderation and they had safe harbor.
Of course we shouldn’t permit illegal content but everything else absolutely should be fair game. If you don’t like it then don’t watch it. Someone else might.
Why is there no trust factor established? I mean if you have been posting without any hiccups for many years, you should be protected from trolls like this.
It is common to open accounts and make them appear relatively benign only to pivot to malicious use after some time on the platform. Not to mention the secondary market where people sell aged accounts to bad actors.
>I understand there simply not being enough manpower on Earth to manually review so many cases
It's an unpopular opinion, but perhaps there doesn't need to be so many videos online for public viewing.
I don't think its much to ask for a real human to review every video before allowing it to be made public. The posting person could perhaps pay a small fee for the video to be reviewed.
We could have more relaxed rules for videos that are private and shared among a small group of other accounts.
Why do we feel entitled to post any video for public consumption for free?
Actually, now that I think about it, its kind of surprising that nations don't require a film and television style rating for every video.
It's an unpopular opinion, but perhaps there doesn't need to be so many videos online for public viewing.
I don't think its much to ask for a real human to review every video before allowing it to be made public. The posting person could perhaps pay a small fee for the video to be reviewed.
We could have more relaxed rules for videos that are private and shared among a small group of other accounts.
Why do we feel entitled to post any video for public consumption for free?
Actually, now that I think about it, its kind of surprising that nations don't require a film and television style rating for every video.
I don'y understand why you just don't make your own site instead of ruining the one we like.
I don't really want a video site. What I want is a world where people can be held accountable for the things they post publicly on the internet, whether that's YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or any other medium.
Is that true? I mean, you can also argue it's only ever an issue in the first place if you have enough clout to be targeted. And I haven't seen any proof that people "without clout" aren't able to get it resolved, have you? Even this person isn't exactly a YouTube heavy-hitter, it's a relatively niche channel.
I don't know about YouTube, but I know for a fact some kinds of bans on Facebook can only be reversed if you have a friend inside Facebook that advocates for you and contacts the relevant team. Source: I know because I have such a friend, and only going through him and not through the official appeal channels got stuff unbanned (not mine: I was in turn advocating for friends. Not that it matters). The official channels are often so slow and ineffective -- and often inscrutable -- as to be useless.
I had a customer two years ago that we needed to rename her professional page from "Person's Name Service" to "Person's Name". That's all, we didn't change the named person, or the content of the page, just removed the service because she did more than that now. I got denied THREE times by bots claiming the change was too severe and changing the "topic" of the page, which would be potentially confusing to users, or worse, akin to changing the page to something they wouldn't otherwise support ("Local Girl Scout Troupe 4" suddenly becomes "Fans of the KKK").
I had to contact someone I know at FB to get a human to review the change. My friend and the reviewer felt the change was completely legit and allowed it.
What do you do when you don't have someone on the inside?
I had to contact someone I know at FB to get a human to review the change. My friend and the reviewer felt the change was completely legit and allowed it.
What do you do when you don't have someone on the inside?
It's happened multiple times on hn (given the large number of google peoples milling about).
FB channels are slow even if you're giving them millions of dollars in ad spend.
I think there's an extent where "clout" (depending on how you define that) makes sense.
Let's take Joe Rogan as an example, ignoring for now that he's going to Spotify next year. I'd imagine that what happened to this small YouTuber would be impossible to happen to Joe Rogan. He likely has the cell phone number of several people at YouTube. It could even be the case that his account is flagged in a way that only a high-level staffer can take certain actions. So many people are watching him that it'd be a huge problem for YouTube's audience if something were to happen to his channel in error.
It's good service to the YouTube community to give the most popular folks outsized attention. Not even talking PR here, though I'm sure that's just as powerful a force. Just in terms of "how quickly would the audience be affected." Obviously, there are limits to this and it would seriously hurt YouTube's brand if they were known as being bad for small creators.
Let's take Joe Rogan as an example, ignoring for now that he's going to Spotify next year. I'd imagine that what happened to this small YouTuber would be impossible to happen to Joe Rogan. He likely has the cell phone number of several people at YouTube. It could even be the case that his account is flagged in a way that only a high-level staffer can take certain actions. So many people are watching him that it'd be a huge problem for YouTube's audience if something were to happen to his channel in error.
It's good service to the YouTube community to give the most popular folks outsized attention. Not even talking PR here, though I'm sure that's just as powerful a force. Just in terms of "how quickly would the audience be affected." Obviously, there are limits to this and it would seriously hurt YouTube's brand if they were known as being bad for small creators.
> automation ... does a very piss poor job at it
I don't think this is true. I expect it gets it right 99.9% of the time, but in this case someone is against a determined blackmailer who can put a lot of effort into exploiting that 0.1%. The automation will win for a while, but then the attacks will evolve.
I don't think this is true. I expect it gets it right 99.9% of the time, but in this case someone is against a determined blackmailer who can put a lot of effort into exploiting that 0.1%. The automation will win for a while, but then the attacks will evolve.
> YouTube is dealing with two opposing issues, and is constantly doing its best to find a middle ground.
I agree with you that it's a really hard problem, but I don't see this as finding a middle ground. In reality, there are problems on both sides (people posting bad content, and bad actors taking on good content). What I expect from Google is a constantly improving process on making sure bad content is removed, and good content is not. It doesn't seem like Google's process is getting better - if anything it's just swinging back toward blocking content faster. I feel like there have been a few swings, such as back in 2011 when any background music or movie clip might mute or block your video, even when it's fair use, to a more open model a few years later, and now we're swinging back. What I would hope is that they improve over time. And yes, many times I think that involves actual people looking at things, which is expensive in terms of people as well as having to deal with tough content (mental health of those moderators being really tricky, just look at FB). But the amount of arbitrary and poorly worded emails about how you violated the TOS but won't say how. It's obvious that working with people is more expensive than not, and that seems to be what they are doing.
It's always a cat and mouse game, I guess. And Google has fought this type of thing before with trying to fight people gaming search ranking.
Now people arguing over what content should be allowed is obviously a more tricky, moral, problem. But between illegal content and people doing illegal acts like blackmail to valid creators seems pretty similar.
I agree with you that it's a really hard problem, but I don't see this as finding a middle ground. In reality, there are problems on both sides (people posting bad content, and bad actors taking on good content). What I expect from Google is a constantly improving process on making sure bad content is removed, and good content is not. It doesn't seem like Google's process is getting better - if anything it's just swinging back toward blocking content faster. I feel like there have been a few swings, such as back in 2011 when any background music or movie clip might mute or block your video, even when it's fair use, to a more open model a few years later, and now we're swinging back. What I would hope is that they improve over time. And yes, many times I think that involves actual people looking at things, which is expensive in terms of people as well as having to deal with tough content (mental health of those moderators being really tricky, just look at FB). But the amount of arbitrary and poorly worded emails about how you violated the TOS but won't say how. It's obvious that working with people is more expensive than not, and that seems to be what they are doing.
It's always a cat and mouse game, I guess. And Google has fought this type of thing before with trying to fight people gaming search ranking.
Now people arguing over what content should be allowed is obviously a more tricky, moral, problem. But between illegal content and people doing illegal acts like blackmail to valid creators seems pretty similar.
The videos were flagged and reviewed as acceptable several times, then subsequently flagged and reviewed as unacceptable. The inability to prevent scripted attacks like this where an attacker brute forces takedown requests doesn't strike me as "doing their best".
They can defend against DDoS attacks, why can't they do better against fraudulent takedown requests? I think the answer lies in their monopoly status and the fact that creators don't have many other options for getting real traffic outside of YouTube.
They can defend against DDoS attacks, why can't they do better against fraudulent takedown requests? I think the answer lies in their monopoly status and the fact that creators don't have many other options for getting real traffic outside of YouTube.
IMHO if you came up with a workable solution, Google would buy you out in an instant.
Scalable reliable content moderation is one of the next major breakthroughs waiting to be solved. And it's not just Google it's everyone.
Scalable reliable content moderation is one of the next major breakthroughs waiting to be solved. And it's not just Google it's everyone.
>>The videos were flagged and reviewed as acceptable several times
IMHO if you came up with a workable solution, Google would buy you out in an instant.
IMHO if you came up with a workable solution, Google would buy you out in an instant.
if passed_review_count > 0 == true
I agree with this, except that the reason they receive so much criticism is because of their monopoly status.
If you're trying to make money from digital video, getting banned or even demonetized from YouTube is a death sentence on your vlogger career.
So sure, I don't blame YouTube. They're likely good folks doing their best to solve hard problems. At the same time, that this is such an impossible problem to deal with is probably a good reason to make sure Google doesn't have too much monopoly power over advertising (in this case video ads).
In short, the stakes are too high! They'd be lessened with more alternatives.
If you're trying to make money from digital video, getting banned or even demonetized from YouTube is a death sentence on your vlogger career.
So sure, I don't blame YouTube. They're likely good folks doing their best to solve hard problems. At the same time, that this is such an impossible problem to deal with is probably a good reason to make sure Google doesn't have too much monopoly power over advertising (in this case video ads).
In short, the stakes are too high! They'd be lessened with more alternatives.
I think you're giving them too much credit for "monopoly status". I know a LOT of creators who make a lot of money with digital video (including myself) who don't have much to do with YouTube.
I know YouTube is called the "second most popular search engine", but it's not a monopoly when it comes to digital video.
I know YouTube is called the "second most popular search engine", but it's not a monopoly when it comes to digital video.
In this case the author shares your view. That is until the point where the third review found their video in violation. One might argue there is a corrupted element in the youtube moderation team that is either lazy, or on the take. I'd wager both.
I think the best solution would be a wide, distributed network of automated takedowns targeting every nth video, but avoiding the high profile accounts. Ramp this up to a large enough issue and they will be forced to respond with a better process, otherwise their content network dies by their own process.
I'm not actually advocating that the above should happen, just suggesting it would turn the tables. Fight bots with bots.
I think the best solution would be a wide, distributed network of automated takedowns targeting every nth video, but avoiding the high profile accounts. Ramp this up to a large enough issue and they will be forced to respond with a better process, otherwise their content network dies by their own process.
I'm not actually advocating that the above should happen, just suggesting it would turn the tables. Fight bots with bots.
It seems that part of the solution here is to require meatspace authentication.
Here's a thought experiment:
Imagine you are a global platform which needs to deal with inappropriate behavior (posting of copyrighted materials, etc.)
Flagging content requires a verified account, where you must authenticate your meatspace identity: a small monthly payment via a traceable payment mechanism; a text to your phone number; a postal address verified by sending you a postcard; a photo of your government-issued ID; and webcam photo of yourself.
None of this information is for public exposure! It merely ties your account to you, as a person, as tightly as possible. Nor is it required to use the service -- only to engage with the moderation system.
All of these can be automated from the side of the service provider.
For companies:
If you are working on behalf of a company, your company membership requires similar verification. You are also limited to flagging only IP-related issues raised by your organization (copyright infringement, etc.)
For individuals:
You must be endorsed by three other verified users.
False flags beyond a certain threshold will erode the weight of your flags, up to the point where your the moderation system will outright ignore you, with a periodic (automated) review to see whether or not your flagging behavior has improved.
Endorsing a certain number of false-flaggers will also cause your account to silently lose the ability to flag.
This mimics real-world behavioral modification for groups of people.
Thoughts? Where does this go wrong?
Here's a thought experiment:
Imagine you are a global platform which needs to deal with inappropriate behavior (posting of copyrighted materials, etc.)
Flagging content requires a verified account, where you must authenticate your meatspace identity: a small monthly payment via a traceable payment mechanism; a text to your phone number; a postal address verified by sending you a postcard; a photo of your government-issued ID; and webcam photo of yourself.
None of this information is for public exposure! It merely ties your account to you, as a person, as tightly as possible. Nor is it required to use the service -- only to engage with the moderation system.
All of these can be automated from the side of the service provider.
For companies:
If you are working on behalf of a company, your company membership requires similar verification. You are also limited to flagging only IP-related issues raised by your organization (copyright infringement, etc.)
For individuals:
You must be endorsed by three other verified users.
False flags beyond a certain threshold will erode the weight of your flags, up to the point where your the moderation system will outright ignore you, with a periodic (automated) review to see whether or not your flagging behavior has improved.
Endorsing a certain number of false-flaggers will also cause your account to silently lose the ability to flag.
This mimics real-world behavioral modification for groups of people.
Thoughts? Where does this go wrong?
> I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly.
This is because the only time a post like this rises to the top on HN is because it's affecting someone notable in the tech/startup circle or someone with a lot of tech followers. If you don't have this kind of leverage to get Google's attention you're usually SOL. An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrMvyVEQO6M
Edit: follow up to the above video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIK0yafnbGM
From the transcript:
> long story short it only went back up I got a message this morning from someone who is a fan of mine who is a Google employee who kind of reached out internally about it after finding out what happened and that basically immediately solved it after three months of me trying everything that I you know basically everything that I knew to try
So yeah. Unless you have a fan at Google, you can go pound sand if you run into a problem.
This is because the only time a post like this rises to the top on HN is because it's affecting someone notable in the tech/startup circle or someone with a lot of tech followers. If you don't have this kind of leverage to get Google's attention you're usually SOL. An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrMvyVEQO6M
Edit: follow up to the above video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIK0yafnbGM
From the transcript:
> long story short it only went back up I got a message this morning from someone who is a fan of mine who is a Google employee who kind of reached out internally about it after finding out what happened and that basically immediately solved it after three months of me trying everything that I you know basically everything that I knew to try
So yeah. Unless you have a fan at Google, you can go pound sand if you run into a problem.
Google support in general (and YouTube specifically) is one of the most incompetent, entitled, and utterly useless systems that exist. Your feeling of YT doing their best doesn't match the reality of how incapable, slow and unhelpful they are. There are many stories of YouTube channels being taken down, receiving strikes for false copyright claims, or just demonetized based on the whims of some virtue signaling employee.
Automating thins is fine, and even getting things wrong is okay. YouTube is nothing without the content that's on it, so it goes without saying that any money-making channel deserves expedited support, especially in cases like this one.
Automating thins is fine, and even getting things wrong is okay. YouTube is nothing without the content that's on it, so it goes without saying that any money-making channel deserves expedited support, especially in cases like this one.
In my view, if platforms like YouTube/Twitter/Facebook are going to exercise editorial control over the content they host, they should be held fully responsible for all of the content that isn't taken down.
If these organizations don't want to be responsible for the content on their platforms, then they shouldn't censor content unless ordered to by a judge.
They want it both ways - full editorial control, but no responsibility.
If these organizations don't want to be responsible for the content on their platforms, then they shouldn't censor content unless ordered to by a judge.
They want it both ways - full editorial control, but no responsibility.
There are relatively way more people complaining about their videos being erroneously taken down then people complaining about "immoral" content. In fact, I've never seen anyone claim that "immoral" content should be taken down, most people tend to favor freedom of speech outside of obviously the obviously wrong (eg. torture, doxxing).
I've never seen a revenge porn video on Youtube, where are you coming up with this?
Just look at the robotic tone of their emails, they don't care. I've had a channel taken down and all my old videos deleted due to some nonsense. There is no appeals process.
I've never seen a revenge porn video on Youtube, where are you coming up with this?
Just look at the robotic tone of their emails, they don't care. I've had a channel taken down and all my old videos deleted due to some nonsense. There is no appeals process.
There is no reason for them to be censoring how-to videos, even if those how-to videos are for illegal things.
This isn’t “cut them some slack” xor “revenge porn”.
This is the automated (mis)application of a rule against educational videos, a rule that should not exist in the first place.
Censorship platforms are inherently dangerous.
This isn’t “cut them some slack” xor “revenge porn”.
This is the automated (mis)application of a rule against educational videos, a rule that should not exist in the first place.
Censorship platforms are inherently dangerous.
> I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly.
Isn't that exactly the complaint? There's no sane human review until an issue gets embarrassingly publicized--so if the victim can generate that publicity then the system "works", and if they can't then you never see the post.
Isn't that exactly the complaint? There's no sane human review until an issue gets embarrassingly publicized--so if the victim can generate that publicity then the system "works", and if they can't then you never see the post.
Sanity check in my head telling me that once content is reinstated by human operator - it shouldn't be taken down by algorithm, but flagged for secondary human examination instead.
> I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem
Two aspects of the problems are very easy: first, the automated parts of the review system can be marked as such. Automated emails can trivially be signed "You Tube Bot" or something (such signalling should perhaps be mandated by law). Second, when a video has been reviewed and found "not guilty" once, it can be marked as such, and past reviews recorded. Preventing automated takedowns for the same reason, or requiring stronger reviews, is trivial (though more costly for the videos that do end up being re-reviewed).
They may have other reasons not to pluck those two low hanging fruits, but difficulty is probably not one of them.
Two aspects of the problems are very easy: first, the automated parts of the review system can be marked as such. Automated emails can trivially be signed "You Tube Bot" or something (such signalling should perhaps be mandated by law). Second, when a video has been reviewed and found "not guilty" once, it can be marked as such, and past reviews recorded. Preventing automated takedowns for the same reason, or requiring stronger reviews, is trivial (though more costly for the videos that do end up being re-reviewed).
They may have other reasons not to pluck those two low hanging fruits, but difficulty is probably not one of them.
The solution is really very easy, add more human moderators like other companies do. But that would cut into their profit, so they don't.
Censorship is not a solution to your problems. It's never going to scale due to the sheer volume of the contents. In addition to being ineffective, it would also cause active harm because there never will be sufficient checks and balances in place.
That being said, there arguably are some contents that should be taken down. But content takedowns should always be done with care, and be used as a last resort. It certainly should not be taking down harmless gaming videos.
It's also disingenuous to bring up revenge porn to strike down criticism. No one could possibly mistake the video in question for revenge porn. Even their automated system didn't. It has nothing to do with this issue at all.
That being said, there arguably are some contents that should be taken down. But content takedowns should always be done with care, and be used as a last resort. It certainly should not be taking down harmless gaming videos.
It's also disingenuous to bring up revenge porn to strike down criticism. No one could possibly mistake the video in question for revenge porn. Even their automated system didn't. It has nothing to do with this issue at all.
The problem is they aren't giving benefit of the doubt in channels that are in good standing for a long time with high subscriber/viewership/video counts. The guy has 100k subscribers and fairly active videos that don't get reported, you'd think that would count for something. Someone doesn't go from uploading regular content to "revenge porn" overnight.
If it doesnt work on large channels then there's no blackmailing possible. If it works on smaller channels then you can't be a "bad actor" as easily.
If it doesnt work on large channels then there's no blackmailing possible. If it works on smaller channels then you can't be a "bad actor" as easily.
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> I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough.
At large enough scale (e.g. Youtube scale) there will always be people complaining about almost everything.
You can't please everybody, but it's in Youtube's long-term self interest to please the people that produce the content that keeps people coming back to Youtube, otherwise the creators will look towards other platforms (and we're already starting to see this).
> It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge porn is left up....YouTube is dealing with two opposing issues
Except here, a third factor is in play - the extortion which caused a legitimate video to be taken down. Youtube's going to need to fix that problem fast.
At large enough scale (e.g. Youtube scale) there will always be people complaining about almost everything.
You can't please everybody, but it's in Youtube's long-term self interest to please the people that produce the content that keeps people coming back to Youtube, otherwise the creators will look towards other platforms (and we're already starting to see this).
> It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge porn is left up....YouTube is dealing with two opposing issues
Except here, a third factor is in play - the extortion which caused a legitimate video to be taken down. Youtube's going to need to fix that problem fast.
Another unpopular opinion:
And that's the exact reason why Youtube should be considered a platform, that Youtube is so viciously fighting now and all the Youtube believers are blindly accepting.
Not that I believe PragerU's videos are factful or informative, but I think the argument by the court that Youtube is not a state actor is completely missing the point, and it only shows how outdated the legal system is in the US, but it doesn't actually reflect on the actual situation, i.e. how much power Youtube is wielding, and how it is censoring and actively blocking free speech.
These kind of decisions shouldn't be granted to any private firms with such user and content size without public, democratic and transparent influence on the decision making.
BTW, all your arguments seems anecdotal to me. Sentences like "I see", "I feel", etc. don't really convince me and should not anyone else either.
And that's the exact reason why Youtube should be considered a platform, that Youtube is so viciously fighting now and all the Youtube believers are blindly accepting.
Not that I believe PragerU's videos are factful or informative, but I think the argument by the court that Youtube is not a state actor is completely missing the point, and it only shows how outdated the legal system is in the US, but it doesn't actually reflect on the actual situation, i.e. how much power Youtube is wielding, and how it is censoring and actively blocking free speech.
These kind of decisions shouldn't be granted to any private firms with such user and content size without public, democratic and transparent influence on the decision making.
BTW, all your arguments seems anecdotal to me. Sentences like "I see", "I feel", etc. don't really convince me and should not anyone else either.
> I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem.
No, they are not! They are treating this as another big data problem, ignoring the harm it causes.
What they SHOULD do is to held the accuser responsible. To make complaints you should have a verified account and if you make wrongful claims you should foot the bill.
Not rocket science really.
No, they are not! They are treating this as another big data problem, ignoring the harm it causes.
What they SHOULD do is to held the accuser responsible. To make complaints you should have a verified account and if you make wrongful claims you should foot the bill.
Not rocket science really.
> I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly.
Sadly the situation is only resolved because the person gets traction on Twitter etc. You shouldn't have to kick and scream and demand action on Twitter to get baseline levels of support from a human.
Sadly the situation is only resolved because the person gets traction on Twitter etc. You shouldn't have to kick and scream and demand action on Twitter to get baseline levels of support from a human.
There's another easy fix here too. It doesn't solve the whole problem, but it makes the problem less chronic. This shouldn't happen more than once... once a human does review it, it should be nearly impossible for the automated system to override that decision in the future. Then if someone really thinks the content needs to come down then it should be reviewed by a human before it comes down.
But it's YouTube controlling and profiting off the platform that they created and continue to actively put out there.
If it turns out to be "a really hard problem" to control, that they just can't quite manage, then it's not okay to say "well at least you tried your best" (but you still get to profit off it).
What if we had our current state of self-driving cars on the road already, with all the problems that would entail, and people would say "well, to be fair, it is a really hard problem".
The point is, we don't care whether it's "their best" or if they're even barely trying, what matters is that it's good enough.
If it turns out to be "a really hard problem" to control, that they just can't quite manage, then it's not okay to say "well at least you tried your best" (but you still get to profit off it).
What if we had our current state of self-driving cars on the road already, with all the problems that would entail, and people would say "well, to be fair, it is a really hard problem".
The point is, we don't care whether it's "their best" or if they're even barely trying, what matters is that it's good enough.
Part of the problem is also internet anonymity. I know there are cases where this anonymity is important, but there are also clearly cases where it hurts, and this is one.
Addressing this problem would be a lot easier if Youtube could identify the people who make these false claims and upload the illegal content. But because they can always create a new account, they stay anonymous.
Maybe an alternative would be to take long-existing, well-established accounts more seriously. That way troll accounts have a harder time taking advantage of legitimate users. It would still suck if you're a new user who gets faced with this kind of abuse, though.
Addressing this problem would be a lot easier if Youtube could identify the people who make these false claims and upload the illegal content. But because they can always create a new account, they stay anonymous.
Maybe an alternative would be to take long-existing, well-established accounts more seriously. That way troll accounts have a harder time taking advantage of legitimate users. It would still suck if you're a new user who gets faced with this kind of abuse, though.
> I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1]
It looks more like YT is busy censoring content for political/ideological reasons and doesn't care too much about porn, complaints about censorship and attacks such as reported by the OP.
If some fanatics still don't get their way of censoring content they don't like quickly enough, that's not really an excuse for YT's bad service.
It looks more like YT is busy censoring content for political/ideological reasons and doesn't care too much about porn, complaints about censorship and attacks such as reported by the OP.
If some fanatics still don't get their way of censoring content they don't like quickly enough, that's not really an excuse for YT's bad service.
This is a money problem. Google don't want to spend money on human curation. The cost of that is that legitimate channels lose income.
I feel bad for authors that use the platform because they must to reach a sizeable audience, yet the platform does not care about them because they are not Vevo.
I feel bad for authors that use the platform because they must to reach a sizeable audience, yet the platform does not care about them because they are not Vevo.
They are doing their best under a particular, self-imposed, restriction. To use as little human work as possible to solve the problem. What we are learning is that you need people in the process that can look at the situation and make decisions.
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>I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably
a cynic might assume that is because you (and thus lots of other people) are seeing the post.
a cynic might assume that is because you (and thus lots of other people) are seeing the post.
They are not doing their best. Google is well known for not hiring support people. They automate things, they use ML and also some people in India...but not enough
The question for me is, why censor/remove false information? Who is the judge? And even if something is blatantly false, we cannot allow it to be manifested?
Is it very hard to have a policy that once a video has been taken down, and then successfully appealed, that it becomes harder to take down?
I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem.
(Shrug) They have an almost-infinite amount of money and resources to tackle those problems. It's not unreasonable to expect better results.
(Shrug) They have an almost-infinite amount of money and resources to tackle those problems. It's not unreasonable to expect better results.
> YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content
This is so sneaky. Why link "false" and "immoral" and "illegal" together? I can agree that social media should take down illegal content, but "false" and "immoral" content should be left up. People who whine about "false" content really mean facts and truths they disagree with. As for immoral, do we really want to play this game? Immoral from which perspective?
> I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly.
Only if you are a big youtuber.
This is so sneaky. Why link "false" and "immoral" and "illegal" together? I can agree that social media should take down illegal content, but "false" and "immoral" content should be left up. People who whine about "false" content really mean facts and truths they disagree with. As for immoral, do we really want to play this game? Immoral from which perspective?
> I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly.
Only if you are a big youtuber.
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They try their best to keep their business as profitable as possible.
This often means they just don't want to analyse content in a sufficient way, although it should be possible to do it in an automated way.
It's better to take down 10 videos with the word pedophilia, even if 9 of them talk about how to make your kid safe, than to spend computing power on a more detailed analysis.
Why bother, those videos won't sell ads anyway.
It's one of the reason that the whole "I'm a private company na na na na na na ha ha ha ha ha ha, you can't regulate me!" argument is so weak.
Not every problem can be solved with automation, because content adapts. If there will be people involved, there will be biases and scandals. Not that I trust people designing algorithms to be some kind of saints.
We know now that people are more likely to discriminate basing on political orientation than race. Basically all the people that would be racists 100 years ago now took a different angle to be able to behave in the same manner. I do not trust moderators and overlords, because they seem to be all from one political orientation. Being a black person 100 years ago, would you trust an all-white private company to handle all your information in an equal way, even knowing that some of the data exposes illegal practices of the said company? It's absurd to think that anyone under those circumstances would be 100% clean and it's just plain insane to thinnk we can hold hundrets of thousands of people at the same time to thius standard.
Not every problem can be solved with automation, because content adapts. If there will be people involved, there will be biases and scandals. Not that I trust people designing algorithms to be some kind of saints.
We know now that people are more likely to discriminate basing on political orientation than race. Basically all the people that would be racists 100 years ago now took a different angle to be able to behave in the same manner. I do not trust moderators and overlords, because they seem to be all from one political orientation. Being a black person 100 years ago, would you trust an all-white private company to handle all your information in an equal way, even knowing that some of the data exposes illegal practices of the said company? It's absurd to think that anyone under those circumstances would be 100% clean and it's just plain insane to thinnk we can hold hundrets of thousands of people at the same time to thius standard.
> I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough.
Do you have an example?
These seem like inherently contradictory values. You can either make a safe platform or one that treats its tenants well. Like many of its products, google has not made it clear which set of customers they’re trying to please, pissing off both parties.
Do you have an example?
These seem like inherently contradictory values. You can either make a safe platform or one that treats its tenants well. Like many of its products, google has not made it clear which set of customers they’re trying to please, pissing off both parties.
Sure, here's one I just saw today: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-conspiracy-wuhan...
Here's a bunch more:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/youtube-not-doing-enough-...
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/27/671285261/critics-say-youtube...
https://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/story?id=4889745&p...
https://coingeek.com/ripple-calls-out-youtube-for-not-doing-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-internet-meeting/inter...
Here's a bunch more:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/youtube-not-doing-enough-...
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/27/671285261/critics-say-youtube...
https://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/story?id=4889745&p...
https://coingeek.com/ripple-calls-out-youtube-for-not-doing-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-internet-meeting/inter...
Fair enough, but note that most of the people quoted are politicians and people who work at think tanks—pretty much the definition of manufactured consent.
Granted I am also worried about kids using youtube but I also don’t expect google to do anything about it—what could they do, manually vet all videos meant for kids? No, quality is not the google way, it’s automation.
My overall point is that google seems to be fine with just doing things there way and pissing off everyone rather than picking a customer base and meeting its needs.
Granted I am also worried about kids using youtube but I also don’t expect google to do anything about it—what could they do, manually vet all videos meant for kids? No, quality is not the google way, it’s automation.
My overall point is that google seems to be fine with just doing things there way and pissing off everyone rather than picking a customer base and meeting its needs.
You've got to be joking. Zuckerberg testified to congress about this. It's gotten huge national attention, especially after russia interfered with our elections by posting fake content on social media.
Wait until congress hears about the influence Charles Koch wields. If you think I trust Koch more than Putin you’re out of your damn mind.
vosper(2)
LOL maybe they should actually look into it before replying with their canned response.
It's pretty disturbing how you put "immoral" in between "false" and "illegal", as if it was just as bad.
>This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem.
100% agree. Also true of Paypal, another common 'whipping boy' because enforcing various regulations around moving money while still providing good customer service is HARD.
100% agree. Also true of Paypal, another common 'whipping boy' because enforcing various regulations around moving money while still providing good customer service is HARD.
> This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem.
Of their own making. It's solvable. You throw humans at it.
If Google can't deal with this then they shouldn't be allowed to collect money by running ads. Problem solved.
And other sites will spring up that might actually be willing to deal with the problem correctly because now YouTube isn't a monopoly anymore.
Google (and others) are going to continue to be shit until we hit them with anti-trust actions and big fines. Until then, this is all just a cost of doing business and they will laugh all the way to the bank.
Of their own making. It's solvable. You throw humans at it.
If Google can't deal with this then they shouldn't be allowed to collect money by running ads. Problem solved.
And other sites will spring up that might actually be willing to deal with the problem correctly because now YouTube isn't a monopoly anymore.
Google (and others) are going to continue to be shit until we hit them with anti-trust actions and big fines. Until then, this is all just a cost of doing business and they will laugh all the way to the bank.
The main innovation google has seemed to make is to create products that scale with nearly zero customer service overhead. They have half-assed algorithms that mostly do something approximating a thing that might sorta be kind of near almost the right thing. With no recourse. Their success is that they've gotten people to swallow this state of affairs because they're almost the only game in town.
I favor splitting up tech companies (see my comment above).
The one counter-argument I do find interesting, however, is that YouTube BECAUSE of their monopoly status is able to throw far more resources into this than others sites do. We don't notice it on those other sites because (a) far fewer people are making a living there, and (b) they aren't targeted the way YouTube is targeted.
But that nevertheless, that monopoly is the only reason they are able to do as good a job as they do. And even if there was tons of competition and you lowered the stakes of getting booted, starting at zero followers on another site isn't exactly lowering the stakes to a point where it doesn't matter that you got the boot.
I still say split up tech companies. That said, so many industries have monopoly issues and rather than getting 90% of the attention tech companies should probably get more like 10%.
The one counter-argument I do find interesting, however, is that YouTube BECAUSE of their monopoly status is able to throw far more resources into this than others sites do. We don't notice it on those other sites because (a) far fewer people are making a living there, and (b) they aren't targeted the way YouTube is targeted.
But that nevertheless, that monopoly is the only reason they are able to do as good a job as they do. And even if there was tons of competition and you lowered the stakes of getting booted, starting at zero followers on another site isn't exactly lowering the stakes to a point where it doesn't matter that you got the boot.
I still say split up tech companies. That said, so many industries have monopoly issues and rather than getting 90% of the attention tech companies should probably get more like 10%.
It seems like the extortionists can keep sending claims until they stumble across a YouTube moderator who guesses wrong and clicks the "this claim was legit" button. Even if 90% of the moderators would get it right eventually your video is going to be down for good. Even humans make mistakes sometimes, so human-in-the-loop isn't a perfect solution.
The thing that really doesn't make sense to me is that when a moderator marks a claim as invalid it doesn't switch the automod system to requiring the moderator to review the claim before taking the video down. Ideally you'd like that to be the case for all videos, but presumably that would anger the media cartels that dictated the requirements for the system and just want a way to do mass takedowns that doesn't cost them lawyer hours or have the potential of consequences for them.
The thing that really doesn't make sense to me is that when a moderator marks a claim as invalid it doesn't switch the automod system to requiring the moderator to review the claim before taking the video down. Ideally you'd like that to be the case for all videos, but presumably that would anger the media cartels that dictated the requirements for the system and just want a way to do mass takedowns that doesn't cost them lawyer hours or have the potential of consequences for them.
> It seems like the extortionists can keep sending claims until they stumble across a YouTube moderator who guesses wrong and clicks the "this claim was legit" button.
This is exactly what happens. At least, with Facebook. It's not that pranksters or trolls can flag your post/account/page and have it automatically blocked or banned; it's that eventually one of the human reviewers will make a mistake. I've seen it happen more than once and the only way to appeal was through back channels (i.e. via a friend working for Facebook).
This is exactly what happens. At least, with Facebook. It's not that pranksters or trolls can flag your post/account/page and have it automatically blocked or banned; it's that eventually one of the human reviewers will make a mistake. I've seen it happen more than once and the only way to appeal was through back channels (i.e. via a friend working for Facebook).
If Google created systems to defend against a single actor spamming their reporting system, it would be an admission that they're aware that they aren't capable of identifying and filtering that out automatically.
"We don't pay for fraud traffic, we don't bill our advertisers for fraud traffic, and youtube analytics represent real users not bots" is pretty much Google's whole business model.
They can survive being caught being mistaken, but it's much worse for them to be caught lying.
So they have to pretend to believe that reporting spam represents large numbers of real humans filing mistaken or dishonest reports that they have to manually review.
This doesn't have anything to do with the media cartels though -- they have access to ContentID and can take down YT videos without filing reports or involving Google employees at all. Media companies wouldn't care if YT removed the report feature entirely.
If you're looking for a corporation to blame for this it's the advertisers, they don't want to see their ads next to brand-unsafe videos. YT has outsourced the hard work of actually watching and classifying videos for appropriateness to the report system. They assume that once they take down anything that catches a lot of reports, whatever is left will be anodyne enough to be brand-safe.
"We don't pay for fraud traffic, we don't bill our advertisers for fraud traffic, and youtube analytics represent real users not bots" is pretty much Google's whole business model.
They can survive being caught being mistaken, but it's much worse for them to be caught lying.
So they have to pretend to believe that reporting spam represents large numbers of real humans filing mistaken or dishonest reports that they have to manually review.
This doesn't have anything to do with the media cartels though -- they have access to ContentID and can take down YT videos without filing reports or involving Google employees at all. Media companies wouldn't care if YT removed the report feature entirely.
If you're looking for a corporation to blame for this it's the advertisers, they don't want to see their ads next to brand-unsafe videos. YT has outsourced the hard work of actually watching and classifying videos for appropriateness to the report system. They assume that once they take down anything that catches a lot of reports, whatever is left will be anodyne enough to be brand-safe.
Would be pretty interesting if some moderators (who are probably residents of low wage countries) not just simply "guess wrong" but are part of the scheme and mark some videos on purpose.
I feel like this is too deep into the conspiracy domain. There are so many videos and moderators, that, of course, there's assholes in there. But the chance that this one specific video ends up on the task queue of the fraudulent moderator just seems too low to be a feasible strategy.
Agree. This will have to be fixed at the legislative level.
Google has an absolute fetish for making the ratio of profit to employees as large as possible. They will do it at any cost. There is no Google service without horrific customer support. Youtube, Google Fiber, Google Fi, doesn't matter. They refuse to accept that having 2x as many customers requires 2x as many support personnel.
I’m a big fan of looking at annual reports to understand a company.
Google is not subtle about where its priorities lie. There is a section in their 10-K titled “How we make money” and the two sub-bullets are “Performance advertising” and “Brand advertising”. The rest is a footnote.
Their revenue breakdown tells a similar story. Google as a whole had revenues of $161B in 2019, and $134B of that was direct revenue from from ad sales. “Other bets” (inclusive of consumer product things like Fiber, Fi, etc) is less than $1B — a rounding error in the scope of their overall business.
I know it’s flippant to say “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” but it’s particularly true in the case of Google. They are a B2B advertising company, not a B2C products company. It’s just not part of their business model to provide support to anyone who isn’t an ad buyer. It honestly ends up thwarting their ambitions in the product space because the kind of customer support required to succeed just isn’t in their DNA.
Google is not subtle about where its priorities lie. There is a section in their 10-K titled “How we make money” and the two sub-bullets are “Performance advertising” and “Brand advertising”. The rest is a footnote.
Their revenue breakdown tells a similar story. Google as a whole had revenues of $161B in 2019, and $134B of that was direct revenue from from ad sales. “Other bets” (inclusive of consumer product things like Fiber, Fi, etc) is less than $1B — a rounding error in the scope of their overall business.
I know it’s flippant to say “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” but it’s particularly true in the case of Google. They are a B2B advertising company, not a B2C products company. It’s just not part of their business model to provide support to anyone who isn’t an ad buyer. It honestly ends up thwarting their ambitions in the product space because the kind of customer support required to succeed just isn’t in their DNA.
Does this mean that Google is basically using all their services like Stadia or Fiber to keep people's minds aware of their presence, essentially using these services as their own advertisement outreach while hoping they also return a profit on their own advertisement?
They're using those services to "grab eyeballs" and collect data for advertising. You don't need a ton of users to get enough data about a market via sampling. Stadia is pretty new but I don't see it sticking around for the long haul. Amazon (Twitch) and Microsoft are in a much better position in that market.
Fiber has been effectively cancelled; Google has been shopping it around to various telecoms since 2017 but because it's an overlay network and it's not very large, nobody wants the headache of trying to integrate it. Fiber was always an attempt to push broadband providers to update their networks to better support YouTube; Google was never going to throw down the $100B that it would have taken to be competitive. It was never designed for long-term viability because it didn't need to be to serve its purpose.
Fiber has been effectively cancelled; Google has been shopping it around to various telecoms since 2017 but because it's an overlay network and it's not very large, nobody wants the headache of trying to integrate it. Fiber was always an attempt to push broadband providers to update their networks to better support YouTube; Google was never going to throw down the $100B that it would have taken to be competitive. It was never designed for long-term viability because it didn't need to be to serve its purpose.
Or as other vectors for advertising. Stadia store sells ad space to game companies. Google Home is a speaker capable of playing ads (or more subtly giving paid-for answers to questions) etc.
Yup, it's amazing, the number of places they can sell ad space, or use to collect data to improve targeting. The games you play and the platforms you play them on will definitely help fine tune ad targeting. It's just Google clawing deeper into your personal life.
And I hate to admit, they're doing great. I recently tried some different search engines (DDG among others) and they just never give me results as accurate as Google does.
And I hate to admit, they're doing great. I recently tried some different search engines (DDG among others) and they just never give me results as accurate as Google does.
They're also a recruitment tool. It's much easier to convince people to join Google with the promise of working on cool new tech, instead of just micro-hyper-optimizing endless facets of ad placement.
Aren't YouTube's customers the advertisers paying to have their ads displayed? YouTubers are not customers. At best, I believe they are "partners" (like with Twitch)
They are the people making the content ad companies can plaster their drivel on.
Essentially YT is a middleman between billboard manufacturers (content creators) and advertisers (drivel manufacturers).
Essentially YT is a middleman between billboard manufacturers (content creators) and advertisers (drivel manufacturers).
Youtube Premium subscribers are customers.
Hard to convince a company to provide good service when they can make more money by not doing so.
I'm not sure about that. It's pretty common knowledge that YouTube isn't the endgame for a lot of content creators. If instead, YouTube supported their users more (especially the larger ones) they would have potential to be in the loop for other services like livestreaming, merch, and donations instead of having creators resort to using services like Twitch, Squarespace, and Patreon.
The overlap between Twitch-able content and Youtube-able content is rather small, and the Twitch audience is much smaller (and different) than Youtube's audience.
Patreon and Squarespace are not competitors to Youtube, they're in completely different races.
There is no real competition to Youtube when it comes to UX (specially loading speeds and availability of different resolutions) just due to the sheer number of CDNs and server infrastructure that Youtube has. Youtubers can complain and complain (sometimes rightfully), but 99% of them are not willing to abandon the platform, because that's equivalent to abandoning their online career altogether.
Patreon and Squarespace are not competitors to Youtube, they're in completely different races.
There is no real competition to Youtube when it comes to UX (specially loading speeds and availability of different resolutions) just due to the sheer number of CDNs and server infrastructure that Youtube has. Youtubers can complain and complain (sometimes rightfully), but 99% of them are not willing to abandon the platform, because that's equivalent to abandoning their online career altogether.
the overlap _used to be_ huge. "let's play" was the single largest genre on youtube for a while. then they all moved to twitch.
The revenue of Twitch [0], Squarespace [1] and Patreon [2] combined pales in comparison to that of YouTube [3].
The revenue potential in the advertising space cannot be underestimated. Merch has high fixed costs and does not scale dynamically. Live-streaming is inaccessible for both streamers and viewers (in comparison to YouTube videos). Donation fees aren’t a secure revenue source. Either the donators or the creators could turn off donations at any time. But ads are guaranteed. There’s so much to the ad space that isn’t publicly known; Google’s operating on a whole‘nother level.
It’s also a lot more complicated to start ten $300 million projects than to optimize one $3 billion project. The people steering the ship (CEO, CFO, CTO, ...) only have so much time and brain power. They could delegate projects to others, but that requires hiring the right people and that’s really hard. If you have 4 layers of accounting management, and the probability of a bad hire is 25%, the chance of each layer being managed well is only 32%. Whereas if you have only one or a few big projects, you can have less layers, so the probability of success increases all round.
(You might say that Google should do all these projects so can diversify. But why should they take the risk? There are thousands of startups out there testing the waters. They can just acquire those when they show promise. If those startups fail, Google loses nothing.)
(The claims in this comment are educated guesses from reading a lot of articles. I definitely haven’t run a $300 million project!)
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/01/08/report-ama... [1] https://www.drift.com/blog/squarespace-billion-dollar-growth... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/elisabethbrier/2019/07/16/next-... [3] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
The revenue potential in the advertising space cannot be underestimated. Merch has high fixed costs and does not scale dynamically. Live-streaming is inaccessible for both streamers and viewers (in comparison to YouTube videos). Donation fees aren’t a secure revenue source. Either the donators or the creators could turn off donations at any time. But ads are guaranteed. There’s so much to the ad space that isn’t publicly known; Google’s operating on a whole‘nother level.
It’s also a lot more complicated to start ten $300 million projects than to optimize one $3 billion project. The people steering the ship (CEO, CFO, CTO, ...) only have so much time and brain power. They could delegate projects to others, but that requires hiring the right people and that’s really hard. If you have 4 layers of accounting management, and the probability of a bad hire is 25%, the chance of each layer being managed well is only 32%. Whereas if you have only one or a few big projects, you can have less layers, so the probability of success increases all round.
(You might say that Google should do all these projects so can diversify. But why should they take the risk? There are thousands of startups out there testing the waters. They can just acquire those when they show promise. If those startups fail, Google loses nothing.)
(The claims in this comment are educated guesses from reading a lot of articles. I definitely haven’t run a $300 million project!)
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/01/08/report-ama... [1] https://www.drift.com/blog/squarespace-billion-dollar-growth... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/elisabethbrier/2019/07/16/next-... [3] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
also applies to android developers as well. they have been struggling for a very long time due to app takedowns without human intervention.
Support scales linearly only if you don’t do anything to work smarter. Maybe your product sucks so much that every customer needs to interact with support to get things to work. Maybe you don’t have the right resources for customers to self solve. Hiring your way out of a support problem rarely ends well.
Funny thing is, support scales nonlinearly only while you're fixing those problems. At both ends of the spectrum it goes linear again. If you've done nothing it's linear, and after you've done everything possible it's also linear. Google is convinced the number of required personnel is zero and in any situation it isn't zero it isn't their problem.
As an exercise, please do a back of an envelope calculation and estimate costs and features of a good (feel free to use your own definition) customer service for a mainstream video streaming platform with users ranging from 3 to 99.
You have:
- 2 billion monthly active users
- 73% of US adults
- The most-downloaded iOS app in 2018
- As of December 2018, installed on 5 billion Android devices
- One billion hours of content viewed per day
- 500 hours of content uploaded every minute
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/
You have:
- 2 billion monthly active users
- 73% of US adults
- The most-downloaded iOS app in 2018
- As of December 2018, installed on 5 billion Android devices
- One billion hours of content viewed per day
- 500 hours of content uploaded every minute
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/
None of those stats matter at all.
The only one that matters is "how many complaint-review-hours do I get?"
For instance, you might lower complaint-review-hours by letting complainants submit timestamps and prioritizing complaints with timestamps.
The only one that matters is "how many complaint-review-hours do I get?"
For instance, you might lower complaint-review-hours by letting complainants submit timestamps and prioritizing complaints with timestamps.
They will in the next step if you thing through your idea.
Let's put a number on the complaint-review-hours with the current stats.
A human can do X cases/hour, but if you have more cases than humans can handle your backlog will start to grow steadily. At this point you either hire more people or start to automate things, after all you don't want a city of people moderating stuff.
So what's your target number and what do you guess the actual number is?
Let's put a number on the complaint-review-hours with the current stats.
A human can do X cases/hour, but if you have more cases than humans can handle your backlog will start to grow steadily. At this point you either hire more people or start to automate things, after all you don't want a city of people moderating stuff.
So what's your target number and what do you guess the actual number is?
This is extortion.
Did Google disclose to you the identity of the party who sent the takedown notice. If not, a lawyer might be able to help here. You have a good case against the other party for extortion, and a weak case against Google for assisting them. There's a strong legal incentive here for Google to disclose the name of the other party, if they are being difficult about doing so. DMCA notices can't be anonymous.
Is a circumvention of technology claim part of the DMCA?
>You have a good case against the other party for extortion
Doesn't really help when the other party is clearly a child with no money.
Doesn't really help when the other party is clearly a child with no money.
I think this is called extortion, not blackmail.
You are correct. Blackmail would involve threatening to expose some sort of negative info about the YouTuber.
Right?! This annoyed the hell out of me when i saw the vid on youtube. It sucks his videos are getting taken down, but to my mind he loses intergity by playing it up as blackmail. Extortion is bad enough, why not call it like it is?
Extortion is a worse crime than blackmail generally, in my opinion, ethically speaking. Extortion is using one's power and force to threaten harm to someone in some way if not paid, while blackmail is using knowledge of information to do the same. Extortion is the more "violent" and violating act. Either way, they're pretty similar, though
Your post is extremely confusing and bizarre to me.
Your post is extremely confusing and bizarre to me.
You perceive one to be dramatically worse than the other? I don't.. I don't think he's using incorrect terminology to play up the severity of what happened. It's more likely he simply made a mistake.
You can also mirror on PeerTube, https://joinpeertube.org/.
PeerTube is a more distributed clone of YouTube, and this site explains what it is well: https://framablog.org/2019/11/12/peertube-has-worked-twice-a....
Technology used includes a HLS video player, and WebTorrent. Like Mastodon it also uses the ActivityPub protocol.
PeerTube is a more distributed clone of YouTube, and this site explains what it is well: https://framablog.org/2019/11/12/peertube-has-worked-twice-a....
Technology used includes a HLS video player, and WebTorrent. Like Mastodon it also uses the ActivityPub protocol.
PeerTube sounds interesting, but going to their website I am lost. Why all those promotional videos and descriptions and confusing links? I expected to just see the videos in their directory and be able to search for videos, something like the YouTube interface. And I'm a technical user, I imagine the average user would close the page instantly.
Think of it as email:
Peertube = email software
In order to have an email account you don't go to "email.com", you have to go to an email service provider. Peertube works in the same way so they have a list of providers: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances
If you can understand email, you can understand peertube.
Peertube = email software
In order to have an email account you don't go to "email.com", you have to go to an email service provider. Peertube works in the same way so they have a list of providers: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances
If you can understand email, you can understand peertube.
So the site is mostly promoting the technology, right? Is there any popular platform that uses PeerTube and actually has interesting or exclusive content?
If you want to think of it as promotion, yeah. You check out the promoted content.
It actually has a list of instances too where you can watch videos. I'd suggest picking one and simply having a look.
It actually has a list of instances too where you can watch videos. I'd suggest picking one and simply having a look.
DevFactor (https://youtube.com/devfactor) was shut down several years ago due to a similar issue with automated copyright trolling that took YouTube about 3 months to fix per time it happened.
It seems an obvious solution would be to incorporate historical data into future decisions on whether to take down immediately vs take down after manual verification.
If someone has been hit with these takedown requests over and over where the resolution was always to put it back up, what likelihood is there that future resolutions will be different? By standing by your content creators with a history of improper takedown requests you'll build brand loyalty. By making it just as difficult on content creators the 100th time as the first time makes me think YouTube isn't going to be the "platform of the future" for content creators.
If someone has been hit with these takedown requests over and over where the resolution was always to put it back up, what likelihood is there that future resolutions will be different? By standing by your content creators with a history of improper takedown requests you'll build brand loyalty. By making it just as difficult on content creators the 100th time as the first time makes me think YouTube isn't going to be the "platform of the future" for content creators.
This is how I naively assumed it worked back in the day and was constantly perplexed by how much trouble TeamFourStar would get into with seemingly every new upload.
YouTube isn't even trying to protect the creators here. You could make excuses about how they have to review each claim to ensure it's valid bases on the DMCA or some interpretation of the DMCA. Having said this I have watched prominent channels get hacked and spread Binance (bitcoin) videos all their content deleted. After 90 days YouTube finally stepped in and stopped the hacker and very slowly restored some of the content.
Kind of super thankful I am not a YouTube Creator because having my channel hacked and my content deleted would be very hard to deal with.
Kind of super thankful I am not a YouTube Creator because having my channel hacked and my content deleted would be very hard to deal with.
Not surprising given what other creators have said about YouTube’s “moderation” system. I watch this channel regularly and am posting in hopes that this gets enough publicity that someone from Google steps in. It’s sadly the only way for these issues to get resolved.
More incredible is that they don’t seem to have a system for “this account is being actively targeted” because even after this somewhat public attack and “fix”, the same creator just got attacked again with the same thing on another video.
Tweet 4 hours ago from that creator: https://mobile.twitter.com/gamefromscratch/status/1265579494...
Tweet 4 hours ago from that creator: https://mobile.twitter.com/gamefromscratch/status/1265579494...
It used to be that everyone on the internet were a Dog, nowadays it seems like the internet became a cesspool of stagnant hyper centralized services catering to the lowest common denominator (twitter, youtube, linkedin, facebook) with morally bankrupt somali-pirate types circling around them like vultures.
In the old days griefing was done for the lulz. Today it's done out of malice, or worse, out of greed.
In the old days griefing was done for the lulz. Today it's done out of malice, or worse, out of greed.
I keep reading these horror stories about YouTube. It must really suck, as there are alternatives, but they just don't have the audience YouTube has. I guess there just isn't much we can do about this apart from hosting elsewhere when necessary?
My personal, non-Toutuber theory is that people should use YouTube as a promotion channel, but have your main presence elsewhere: make your own website your hub, use Patreon as your main income, and post copies to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Twitch, pretty much wherever you can.
That way, if you lose one channel you don't lose your followers, and you can take your time to deal with getting your channel back. And you still get the benefits of YouTube's reach.
That way, if you lose one channel you don't lose your followers, and you can take your time to deal with getting your channel back. And you still get the benefits of YouTube's reach.
Unfortunately, if you want to monetize your Youtube, Twitch, or other videos, the partner agreements on those platforms explicitly forbid uploading the same content to other video sites within certain time periods or posting videos on one platform to send users to your preferred platform. In particular, I know that you have to wait at least 24 hours after a Twitch stream to upload the VOD to Youtube, you can't co-stream simultaneously or upload immediately after streaming and retain your Twitch partnership, and Youtube has killed channels for posting 30-second "I'm going live on Twitch in 5 minutes" notifications (Twitch notifications are notoriously broken). If your income is through advertisements monetizing video views that won't work.
I agree, though, that a website with merchandise (depending on the channel) or a Patreon, distributing your video hosting across platforms, is probably the safest way to go.
I agree, though, that a website with merchandise (depending on the channel) or a Patreon, distributing your video hosting across platforms, is probably the safest way to go.
They could post a free teaser in YouTube with a link to their main platform.
Against YT tos, Linustechtips got channel blocked for it once.
Interesting. I guess it only applies to monetized content, otherwise, I can't think of a more clearer case of antitrust with YouTube, given their monopoly on internet videos.
How would that apply to movie trailers?
There is obviously different rules for big Hollywood players vs small youtubers, since YouTube also sells their movies in VOD, if you know what I mean. I mean that's already the case regarding copyright strikes where big corps, music labels and Hollywood can abuse the YouTube copyright system without any repercussion whatsoever. All YouTube channels aren't equal.
I've started to notice a lot of youtube channels I watch do that. They'll put 5-10 minute videos on youtube, and the full length version of those videos are on their personal websites, and more in-depth videos are exclusive to patreon subscribers.
I'm hoping this will improve the quality of videos too. So many videos are just filler trying to hit that 10 minute mark.
We could give teeth back to our anti-trust enforcement, for starters. That would ensure that there's more viable alternatives.
Notice that I'm saying "give back". That's because it was deliberately gutted: https://promarket.org/2019/09/05/how-robert-bork-fathered-th...
Imagine, instead, if we applied the same norms to establish "market dominance" as the court did in this case from 1961: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/#tab-opi...
Notice that I'm saying "give back". That's because it was deliberately gutted: https://promarket.org/2019/09/05/how-robert-bork-fathered-th...
Imagine, instead, if we applied the same norms to establish "market dominance" as the court did in this case from 1961: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/#tab-opi...
https://lbry.tv/ - they also recently launched paid videos, so you can get paid if you make premium content.
Why lbry instead of peertube?
I guess it is changing after Joe Rogan is moving to Spotify. He has a point.
Weirdly enough, Spotify's goal is to scoop up all the money that's currently going directly to podcasters by making the advertising market more efficient.
They want to enjoy the type of monopoly that Facebook/Google/Amazon currently have online, except in the podcast space.
They want to enjoy the type of monopoly that Facebook/Google/Amazon currently have online, except in the podcast space.
Oh well, podcasts had a good run.
Switch to Napster. I did, for this reason, and I'm very happy I did.
How does that help prevent podcasts going Spotify-exclusive and ceasing to be podcasts?
By ceasing to give Spotify the money they're using to buy them out, and declining to allow them to be a central platform monopolist.
It never gets old, seeing people assume I must necessarily use the same monopolistic platforms I despise for their constant encroachment upon and enclosure of what were once cultural commons, or that uncoordinated individual action can possibly suffice to counterbalance such concentrations of power.
As long as it remains useful to preserve the appearance of competition in the streaming audio market, Napster will continue to exist. Enjoy it while it lasts.
As long as it remains useful to preserve the appearance of competition in the streaming audio market, Napster will continue to exist. Enjoy it while it lasts.
well, it seemed like it was due to abuse w/ a botnet making a bunch of community guideline claims. I'm sure youtube will patch their codebase better.
Perhaps takedown requests should be accompanied by a fee:
If the request is successfully appealed, the fee is kept. If not, it is returned.
Same problem only this time you'll leverage rich vs. poor while Internet is suppose to be the great equalizer.
Yeah, our copyright laws are absurd but how do you change them when we spent the tariff wars forcing other countries to adopt US copyright laws? How could we go back now?
Many of YouTube's policies aren't required by law.
There's no copyright claim involved here. The complaint process being abused was an anticircumvention thing.
Now, you can argue that those anticircumvention laws exist in service to the existing copyright regime, sure. But those aren't the laws we forced other countries to adopt.
Now, you can argue that those anticircumvention laws exist in service to the existing copyright regime, sure. But those aren't the laws we forced other countries to adopt.
After a video has been reviewed by a moderator on appeal, why isn't a block on new reports put on it? If, say, they can tell that a video hasn't been altered since the last time it was looked at, why aren't things disabled after initial flagging and review?
"Malicious actors reports, and Youtube bots autoremoved, my video four times" should not be possible.
"Malicious actors reports, and Youtube bots autoremoved, my video four times" should not be possible.
I'm not discounting that this was an annoying ordeal for this channel to go through, but if this is so easy, why don't professional criminals go after huge channels and take them down as easily?
There might be some subscriber count threshold or partner status that, once crossed, flags extra steps that mean a new violation is escalated for a closer look first?
There might be some subscriber count threshold or partner status that, once crossed, flags extra steps that mean a new violation is escalated for a closer look first?
How do you know they are not doing that already?
Because MKBHD isn’t tweeting about this all the time.
In case of a popular channel: maybe the subscribers to a channel could be 'polled' in order to vet a channel's content?
If the majority of subscriber's vote confirms the content then the channel owner could be given a 2nd chance?
Just an idea off the top of my bald head.
If the majority of subscriber's vote confirms the content then the channel owner could be given a 2nd chance?
Just an idea off the top of my bald head.
What are the reasons the creator could not just re-upload the video as a new video?
I don't use Youtube as a creator, so I can only guess.
Links to it from outside of Youtube? 'Millions of views' type of stuff? Ad revenue? Getting their account perma-banned?
I don't use Youtube as a creator, so I can only guess.
Links to it from outside of Youtube? 'Millions of views' type of stuff? Ad revenue? Getting their account perma-banned?
It seems like we are seeing the limit of "infinitely scaling business models". It is definitely going to be interesting to see what the future of content distribution / monetization brings!
Just want to stress, that the root of the problem is the evil extortionist, not Google.
Google can and will try to do a better job, but as long as such people are around (i.e. forever) those problems will persist.
Google can and will try to do a better job, but as long as such people are around (i.e. forever) those problems will persist.
With every new "takedown" please refer back to past reinstatements by Youtube. That's all I can contribute from my experience. Good luck!
Some comments/ideas/takeaways:
1) According to this video, it is very easy for some troll living in another country, who has a bot network, to extort money from YouTube creators by gaming YouTube's takedown request system:
"I'll get your video taken down unless you pay me" (Sounds a whole lot like patent trolls -- but applied to videos).
2) YouTube (or any other video sharing site, present or future), should conduct a thorough investigation as to how their system for user requested takedowns -- could be gamed by bot networks / multiple phony user accounts requesting takedowns -- and what could be done about it, using what happened here as a baseline for that investigation.
Note that this also applies to non-video sharing sites where user takedowns can be requested, i.e., craigslist -- if that process is automated in any way, it should be thought about from the perspective of "how do we protect against swarms of automated bots / fake user accounts, requesting takedowns?"
3) Any ML/AI algorithm that is used in the takedown determination process should consider the reputation of the user whose videos are being requested to be taken down.
This includes such things as 'how long has the user been a user', how many other videos have they uploaded, how many likes they've received over the years, how many video views, and how many real legitimate complaints, verified by an actual YouTube human staffer -- have occurred on that account over the years (feeding that data in only after human YouTube staffer review, etc.)
4) It wouldn't be a bad idea (if YouTube is short of staff), to create another tier of users, "review users", that is, these users would be / could be called upon to review content that was flagged for removal/deletion for one reason or another. If enough "review users" (randomly selected) collectively vote that the content should be removed, THEN and only then it gets queued for a human being staffer at YouTube for final review... otherwise it's not banned, and sticks around... but this would hopefully save a lot of work for human YouTube staffers -- much in the same way automated voice assistants do for human telephone operators or receptionists... any AI/ML algorithms could be the gatekeeper for this tier of users; if the AI/ML has a problem with the content -- escalate it to this tier of users for further review...
5) To implement #4, User accounts, agreements, and YouTube's suggestion algorithm -- would have to be modified (basically you're adding another user account type and another agreement type) to support the functionality.
6) No matter how great YouTube is, it's a human created system like all others, and as such, subject to failure. As the old expression, "Don't put all of your eggs in one basket" goes, similarly:
Don't host all of your videos on one and only one video hosting site.
Just like you wouldn't store your important files in one location only, without making/having backups...
1) According to this video, it is very easy for some troll living in another country, who has a bot network, to extort money from YouTube creators by gaming YouTube's takedown request system:
"I'll get your video taken down unless you pay me" (Sounds a whole lot like patent trolls -- but applied to videos).
2) YouTube (or any other video sharing site, present or future), should conduct a thorough investigation as to how their system for user requested takedowns -- could be gamed by bot networks / multiple phony user accounts requesting takedowns -- and what could be done about it, using what happened here as a baseline for that investigation.
Note that this also applies to non-video sharing sites where user takedowns can be requested, i.e., craigslist -- if that process is automated in any way, it should be thought about from the perspective of "how do we protect against swarms of automated bots / fake user accounts, requesting takedowns?"
3) Any ML/AI algorithm that is used in the takedown determination process should consider the reputation of the user whose videos are being requested to be taken down.
This includes such things as 'how long has the user been a user', how many other videos have they uploaded, how many likes they've received over the years, how many video views, and how many real legitimate complaints, verified by an actual YouTube human staffer -- have occurred on that account over the years (feeding that data in only after human YouTube staffer review, etc.)
4) It wouldn't be a bad idea (if YouTube is short of staff), to create another tier of users, "review users", that is, these users would be / could be called upon to review content that was flagged for removal/deletion for one reason or another. If enough "review users" (randomly selected) collectively vote that the content should be removed, THEN and only then it gets queued for a human being staffer at YouTube for final review... otherwise it's not banned, and sticks around... but this would hopefully save a lot of work for human YouTube staffers -- much in the same way automated voice assistants do for human telephone operators or receptionists... any AI/ML algorithms could be the gatekeeper for this tier of users; if the AI/ML has a problem with the content -- escalate it to this tier of users for further review...
5) To implement #4, User accounts, agreements, and YouTube's suggestion algorithm -- would have to be modified (basically you're adding another user account type and another agreement type) to support the functionality.
6) No matter how great YouTube is, it's a human created system like all others, and as such, subject to failure. As the old expression, "Don't put all of your eggs in one basket" goes, similarly:
Don't host all of your videos on one and only one video hosting site.
Just like you wouldn't store your important files in one location only, without making/having backups...
I'm sorry. I didn't really understand what was happening. What's the mechanism by which the attacker convinces Youtube to take down this guy's video?
Hi so this is illegal. Call the FBI. Extortion and coercion are felonies in all 50 states.
"Hello, FBI? This random guy on the Internet is extorting me."
FBI: 'Go away and come back when you have a name and address, and can prove the guy is under our jurisdiction.'
FBI: 'Go away and come back when you have a name and address, and can prove the guy is under our jurisdiction.'
Fortunately the FBI doesn't dismiss illegal activities of you lack this kind of information. They will investigate and can arrest individuals on US soil as well as consenting countries. Additionally a country's own law enforcement may cooperate and the perpetrators can be extradited for trial.
Can the FBI do anything if the culprit is not in the US?
Sort of... sometimes they will lure them to the USA or catch them while they're here if the victim has enough clout. Some here may remember when the FBI arrested Dmitry Sklyarov, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.
Not for an individual, they won't.
They don't work for you.
They don't work for you.
Is there a legitimate, distinct, unique use case for cryptocurrency to weigh against it's use as an enabler for extortion??
It's in the post - the author was able to put the taken-down video back up on lbry.tv, which is a cryptocurrency-based decentralized media platform.
It's very useful for international money exchange. Really wished I knew about the technology when I was living overseas and needed to send money to my family. Took more than a week IIRC plus having to have 2 to 3 different banks take their cut for a simple wire transfer overseas via Western Union. Sent via blockchain they could have had it within a few minutes with a negligible fee.
There's a bunch of valid use cases for easily being able to send and receive money rather than relying on banks for everything when there are viable alternatives.
There's a bunch of valid use cases for easily being able to send and receive money rather than relying on banks for everything when there are viable alternatives.
The ability to transact anonymously online shouldn't be understated.
Also, Bitcoin is not anonymous.
https://www.elliptic.co/our-thinking/bitcoin-transactions-mo...
https://www.elliptic.co/our-thinking/bitcoin-transactions-mo...
The parent said "cryptocurrency", not "Bitcoin".
(but Monero is)
Transact for what? What am I more likely to need bitcoin for than to pay off some script kiddie?
It's a strange thing to condemn an entire concept because you lack imagination.
ACH takes days to transfer between bank accounts in the same country. Maybe you want your money to get somewhere faster than that.
Maybe you need to take money with you when leaving the country and don't want the border agents to nail you with civil asset forfeiture.
Those are off the top of my head. If that's not sufficient, I'm really not sure why umbrellas exist - it's not raining on me at the moment.
ACH takes days to transfer between bank accounts in the same country. Maybe you want your money to get somewhere faster than that.
Maybe you need to take money with you when leaving the country and don't want the border agents to nail you with civil asset forfeiture.
Those are off the top of my head. If that's not sufficient, I'm really not sure why umbrellas exist - it's not raining on me at the moment.
Somehow I doubt account->bitcoin->different account is faster and cheaper than ACH or venmo.
Your second case is also either no issue, or you now have the issue of how to turn bits into cash in a foreign country, which doesn't seem easier.
I may lack imagination, but I am also not subject to the paranoid delusions that seem to surround this stuff.
Your second case is also either no issue, or you now have the issue of how to turn bits into cash in a foreign country, which doesn't seem easier.
I may lack imagination, but I am also not subject to the paranoid delusions that seem to surround this stuff.
I pay with bitcoin basically whenever I can.
I don't have a credit card. A site can either support Paypal (ugh), or support our nice secure local payment system (marginally likely), or they can support Bitcoin and then a Bitcoin payment provider has to support our nice secure local payment system, which is much more likely. Either way, once the money is in Bitcoin, I am the only one responsible for the security of my wallet, and if I lose that I'll at least know it's my fault.
I don't have a credit card. A site can either support Paypal (ugh), or support our nice secure local payment system (marginally likely), or they can support Bitcoin and then a Bitcoin payment provider has to support our nice secure local payment system, which is much more likely. Either way, once the money is in Bitcoin, I am the only one responsible for the security of my wallet, and if I lose that I'll at least know it's my fault.
In theory, anything you'd like without fussing around with bank accounts. In practice, my local head shop has a bit coin ATM. That's about the only legitimate place I've seen that accepts bitcoin.
The biggest problem imo is that its unrooted, its value is purely speculative. At least the USD has the petrodollar system to keep it in check.
The biggest problem imo is that its unrooted, its value is purely speculative. At least the USD has the petrodollar system to keep it in check.
A bulwark against fiat debasement and the government basically draining the people dry of any wealth.
>Is there a legitimate, distinct, unique use case for physical cash to weight against its use as an enabler for virtually all crimes?
Just because something enables crimes doesn't mean it needs to be stopped. Even though many don't use bitcoin, the ideas that bitcoin (and physical cash) represent outweigh their capabilities for committing crimes.
Just because something enables crimes doesn't mean it needs to be stopped. Even though many don't use bitcoin, the ideas that bitcoin (and physical cash) represent outweigh their capabilities for committing crimes.
I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1]
It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge porn is left up. YouTube is doing it's best to blend automation (fast but inaccurate) with human curation (more thoughtful but slower), and sometimes it gets it wrong.
I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly. YouTube is dealing with two opposing issues, and is constantly doing its best to find a fair middle ground.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316660