[HN Gopher] YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD resear...
___________________________________________________________________
YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2
vulnerability
Author : decrypt
Score : 741 points
Date : 2021-04-14 10:05 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reddit.com)
| black_puppydog wrote:
| FWIW the video in question seems to be this one from ~1y ago:
|
| https://peertube.sunknudsen.com/videos/watch/182e7a03-729c-4...
| Aissen wrote:
| FYI, this is the video:
| https://peertube.sunknudsen.com/videos/watch/182e7a03-729c-4... ;
| the links in the description:
|
| KRACK Attacks: Breaking WPA2 https://www.krackattacks.com/
|
| KRACK - Key Reinstallation Attacks: Forcing Nonce Reuse in WPA2
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOgJswt7nAc
| koheripbal wrote:
| Are these new attacks? The video in OP only seems to indicate
| the ability to attack content on a Wifi connection of other
| connected clients if you're already connected.
|
| It doesn't give you the ability to "crack" a WPA2 network
| without the password.
| kypro wrote:
| YouTube's content policy is bizare. Children in my family seem to
| watch videos of Spiderman dry humping Elsa or grannies kicking
| people in the nuts, but then they remove stuff like this.
|
| I guess this is what happens when advertisers are the main
| priority and the moderators have all been replaced with robots.
| Content that may actually harm the development of children is
| considered fine, while someone posting a slightly edgey political
| take or a research paper about something which triggers a bot is
| removed.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Knowing that that's what the kids are watching, why are you
| still allowing them to have access to YouTube?
| hansel_der wrote:
| i kind of get where you are coming from but denying access to
| knowledge/reality is not helpful.
| Minor49er wrote:
| What knowledge/reality is gained from videos of Spiderman
| dry humping Elsa or grannies kicking people in the nuts?
| This is the typical kinds of content that YouTube has lined
| up for children. Do you really expect a cesspool like this
| to harbor anything of quality or value for developing
| minds?
| t-writescode wrote:
| You're speaking of a specific instance and declaring all
| instances bad. This is unhelpful.
|
| If that specific video exists and if it's common, this
| conversation could be had; but, it's relatively uncommon,
| making it a surprise.
|
| The real answer, as someone else has alluded to, is that
| YouTube is something that parents should watch or be
| aware of with their children.
|
| There is a great deal of valuable information on YouTube
| and cancelling it wholesale is absolutely the wrong
| approach.
| Minor49er wrote:
| You realize that this comment section is in response to a
| story where YouTube is suspending educational content,
| right? Someone else already mentioned Elsagate which is
| still an ongoing problem as noted by the GP. YouTube is
| not interested in providing healthy material, which is
| not surprising since they are owned by the world's
| largest advertising company. I would advocate that
| parents should look for better alternatives altogether
| rather than use it as source of education or
| entertainment, even with supervision. It's simply the
| wrong place to go for that sort of thing.
| re wrote:
| > If that specific video exists and if it's common, this
| conversation could be had; but, it's relatively uncommon,
| making it a surprise.
|
| It is common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
| yarcob wrote:
| our kids are not allowed to watch youtube on their own
| because youtubes algorithms surface the worst of the worst
|
| Youtube is not something kids can use without supervision.
| ranieuwe wrote:
| And for those pointing out YouTube Kids: it is only
| slightly less bad. It's still full of questionable
| material.
| shakezula wrote:
| YouTube will robot-moderate themselves into the ground. Too
| many people are leaving the platform. It's just a trickle now
| but soon it will be a flow.
|
| It's the inevitable result of moderation based only on who's
| paying you.
| 3minus1 wrote:
| > Too many people are leaving the platform
|
| A quick google search shows the platform has 2 billion
| monthly active users[1]. A number that has only been growing.
| Why do you claim people are leaving? Is it because of a
| handful of high-profile cases, or maybe you live in a
| hackernews/techie thought bubble where everyone is annoyed at
| youtube? The claim that people are leaving, or will leave is
| just completely baseless imo. This reminds me of the saying
| "there are 2 types of programming languages: those that
| people complain about, and those that no one uses".
|
| [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/
| dmos62 wrote:
| I too don't see people leaving. We can complain all we
| like. Nothing will change until there's an alternative.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| We've all seen mighty platforms fall. Myspace at one time
| could've made the same argument.
|
| You're not wrong, but that logic doesn't hold forever.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| Where are people escaping to? Are people publishing their own
| content on Gopher or BitTorrent nowadays? These platforms
| have a perfect balance of usability and freedom. They can
| take over the world.
| Balgair wrote:
| It seems like they are making their own sites. Nebula is
| one such place where a few of the higher quality content
| creators are going. I've no idea if it'll work, but they
| are trying.
|
| https://watchnebula.com/
| CameronNemo wrote:
| The problem with these techniques is discover ability.
| How do you build an online audience without paying google
| for advertisements?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Then perhaps the solution isn't for politicians to demand
| that YouTube be separated from Google/Alphabet, but
| instead demand that users on YouTube be able to discover
| videos on other sites.
|
| I see no reason why the search feature within YouTube
| couldn't return videos that people were hosting on their
| personal sites or on competitors to YouTube (including
| Twitch VODs and livestreams). Even subscriptions and
| recommendations could work across platforms.
|
| YouTube could still run adverts in/on the videos, and the
| revenue from that would be split with the site where the
| video was actually published. For a greater share of the
| ad revenue, YouTube could also offer to stream (a copy
| of) the video from their own servers.
|
| Even if sites (or Multi-Channel Networks) had to pay a
| $1000 fee to be included in this system, and YouTube kept
| its rules about moderation and demonetisation, it would
| still greatly improve discoverability and hopefully
| competition generally.
| leereeves wrote:
| With a $5 monthly fee and no way to upload your own
| videos, Nebula is most directly competing against
| Netflix, not YouTube. A few top creators might be able to
| make that work, but most won't.
| timbre1234 wrote:
| And no free trial w/o giving credit card info. Yeah, hard
| pass.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Use privacy.com. It's a godsend.
| bradlys wrote:
| That is very normal. It's to prevent people from just
| creating accounts multiple times to never have to pay.
| clankyclanker wrote:
| A $20 gift card is great for those things. Then, it
| doesn't matter whether you remember to cancel.
| [deleted]
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The author receiving a strike can mean two things: a) the
| policy prohibits this b) a mistake was made.
|
| The author seems to consider the latter more likely.
|
| Likewise, Spiderman dry humping Elsa staying up can mean either
| that the policy allows it, or, much more likely, that they just
| didn't manage to identify and take it down yet.
| t-writescode wrote:
| The problem is, how difficult is it for the average, non-
| special YouTube producer able to fix "b) a mistake was made."
|
| ?
|
| And, how long are they refused earnings during that time?
|
| It's similar to the copyright infringement stuff, where real
| livelihoods can be put in jeopardy from these sorts of
| decisions.
| sagolikasoppor wrote:
| Google being google. Its funny that once I used to lookup to this
| company and now I view it as a threat to society.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself
| become the villain." - Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight
|
| It's funny that I really appreciated Google when I first signed
| up for Gmail. Now that I've had it for 16 years, I resent the
| fact that I can get deplatformed for any reason, and there's
| really nothing I can do to prevent that.
| Jukg7e3AFyskdj wrote:
| export all of your email to Protonmail and stop sucking on
| that Google breast
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| buy your own domain and only use the email addresses you
| fully control.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'm seriously considering it, but I'm a heavy IMAP user.
| When you enable IMAP in ProtonMail, it's no different than
| any other mail provider, security wise.
|
| This is the dilemma for me.
| Jukg7e3AFyskdj wrote:
| I used to be also but now use the protonmail app on my
| phone. And this on my desktop
| https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail
| decrypt wrote:
| It is for this reason I am moving away from ProtonMail to
| Migadu. Literally any IMAP-offering email service would
| do. All that we need is a custom domain.
| dunnevens wrote:
| Other people have made good points. Just wanted to add:
| you'll feel better knowing you're no longer vulnerable to
| Google. It's a nice feeling of relief knowing Google
| could cancel my account tomorrow and I wouldn't be hurt
| in any substantial way. Definitely worth the effort to
| move your email to an independent provider.
| infamia wrote:
| I don't think you can connect to your email via IMAP
| without ProtonMail Bridge (which encrypts traffic between
| your email client and ProtonMail).
| bayindirh wrote:
| AFAIK you bypass 2FA when you use IMAP. I don't see many
| advantages of using Proton (over any other independent
| e-mail provider) without 2FA.
|
| The thing is, I connect all my accounts to a single mail
| application and handle everything from there, including
| their automated backups for ~15 years or so.
|
| The jury is still out for me, we'll see.
| social_quotient wrote:
| Technically no different but you have cast a small vote
| to behavior you no loner tolerate or support (socially).
| Even if it's a fraction of a dollar. In aggregate they
| add up.
| bayindirh wrote:
| That's another point to look at it, you're right.
| PhilosAccnting wrote:
| Whenever I hear "algorithm" anymore, I see it as the "statistics"
| of the past. This entire thing is a product of math washing[1].
|
| [1]https://www.mathwashing.com/
| enriquto wrote:
| > I am a privacy and security researcher and content creator on
| YouTube and PeerTube.
|
| > I am no longer able to post content for a week.
|
| Honestly, they had it coming.
|
| While "regular people" can be understood to use overtly shitty
| platforms like youtube, somebody who is a security and privacy
| researcher has no excuse. They should just avoid platforms with
| such callously hostile policies. Moreso when there are plenty of
| sane alternatives like peertube and others.
| giansegato wrote:
| If you're interested in reaching out the mainstream public to
| increase its exposure to a topic you care about, there's no way
| around YouTube and the like
|
| It's obviously and evidently not about uploading videos, but
| rather to build and reach a community
|
| Also, it's wrong to accept that these platforms have this kind
| of influence and we should just avoid them. They're part of the
| social fabric of our time, and it's our duty to make things
| better.
| zentiggr wrote:
| I see that "duty" as avoiding using YouTube and encouraging
| others to do so as well, until YouTube goes the way of
| MySpace and Yahoo and every other service that's lost their
| way.
|
| Eventually even Google in general.
|
| MySpace was part of the social fabric, too, at one point.
|
| No one is too big to fail or at least become irrelevant. No
| one is sacred.
| grumple wrote:
| > If you're interested in reaching out the mainstream public
| to increase its exposure to a topic you care about, there's
| no way around YouTube and the like
|
| Is this true? There's almost no discoverability on YouTube
| imo. You could just push people towards your privately hosted
| platforms.
| enriquto wrote:
| > If you're interested in reaching out the mainstream public
| to increase its exposure to a topic you care about, there's
| no way around YouTube and the like
|
| This kind of attitude only serves to entrench the problem and
| make everything worse. Even if you are not personally
| affected by youtube's damaging policies, just using the
| platform is an insulting lack of respect towards other people
| who are. What ever happened to "be the change you want to see
| in the world"? Any such change must be led by knowledgeable
| people like this security researcher. I hope that this ban
| serves Sun Knudsen (who already publishes their videos on
| peertube) to lead more and more people out of this and other
| user-hostile platforms, until these platforms finally turn
| into a cesspool of content-free "influencers".
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I think the "oh no human moderation would cost us too much"
| defense is a distraction. It's a good one, because it is working,
| but it is still a distraction.
|
| Let us suppose we have a program which checks for orthodoxy
| according to the YouTube Terms of Service against each video
| submitted.
|
| Nothing but a lack of having done the work prevents YouTube from
| adding to its "rejected" flag the following:
|
| 1) A list of timestarts and durations of the portions of the
| video violating the ToS. 2) For each item in that list, make it a
| tuple and add a _reason_ -- which clause was violated?
|
| Then outputting that to the owner of the rejected video.
|
| Nothing stops them from doing this. _Some_ set of words or images
| happened somewhere in the timestream -- the orthodoxy program has
| that timestamp as it churns through the video. And a specific
| clause was violated -- a particular word in a wordlist as an
| example, because there 's no simple, non-composite function that
| just says "good or not good."
|
| This is really not a particularly high bar as an ask.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| That will never work.
|
| If you tell the user exactly what they did wrong, they will
| keep trying by changing very little in the original video until
| it gets past bots, but still keeps the illegal or "forbidden"
| message.
|
| I think youtube should not be allowed to remove videos for
| their content unless for legal reasons. Meaning it's a
| violation of the law, in which case they have to send the
| information to the police as well. And that, of course, should
| require a human stamp of approval. Of course, Youtube should be
| allowed to remove videos if they are too long, wrong format
| etc., but NOT for their content.
| tumetab1 wrote:
| > If you tell the user exactly what they did wrong, they will
| keep trying by changing very little in the original video
| until it gets past bots, but still keeps the illegal or
| "forbidden" message.
|
| I think there's a possibility to implement that handles the
| issue you describe.
|
| It's trivial to detect an user trying to circumvent content
| controls if he's trying that from the same account. When that
| is detected the user account can be put into manual mode
| review or automatically block new uploads for a while.
|
| If circumvent is tried with different accounts the current
| system already doesn't prevent that so nothing is lost.
| slt2021 wrote:
| this will make it very easy to develop adversarial algorithm
| and avoid detection by youtube's system
| at_a_remove wrote:
| That would literally beat the current situation by a country
| mile. The goal isn't to perfect the YouTube flagging algo,
| after all ... an adversarial algo is a small price to pay.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| >That would literally beat the current situation by a
| country mile.
|
| I don't think google agrees.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Google likely only agrees with whatever choice makes them
| the most money. Whatever decision they make will always
| be jaded by how they think it will affect their stock
| price.
| m_a_g wrote:
| >Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating at
| a human scale.
|
| >Using algorithms to flag content is totally fine... problem is
| when humans cannot interact with humans anymore and AI gets to
| chose what is right and wrong.
|
| Can't agree more.
| agilob wrote:
| That's exactly the point, this issue was known as a problem in
| 1977 published in Computers Don't Argue, but developed in 2010s
| as a feature
|
| https://archive.org/details/bestofcreativeco00ahld/page/133/...
| lolthishuman wrote:
| Only way is probably population reduction
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| This ignores human bad actors.
|
| There is no "rollback" for the existence of algorithms.
|
| Instead of whining (problems without solutions) spend some time
| contemplating what a sufficient algorithmic solution looks
| like.
|
| To be clear, that would be an algorithmic solution that "fights
| back" against issues like these (and not simply improving a
| failing solution).
|
| That may not be a competing product. Maybe it's an algorithmic
| whistleblower?
| jrumbut wrote:
| The algorithm can exist, but to run it at scale requires
| buildings and large teams and bank accounts and therefore the
| companies that use these algorithms are susceptible to
| regulation.
|
| Otherwise it seems like an enormous waste of talent and
| resources playing cat and mouse, when we can just give them
| guidelines and fairly often they'll be followed.
|
| Of course bad actors can exist, but that's not a reason to
| give up on social solution to problems.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| > give up on social solution to problems
|
| Everything is a trade-off.
|
| Sure humans can be used for moderating spam.
|
| I'd prefer if they performed real social work, instead.
| b3kart wrote:
| The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the
| consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait
| for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for
| upload to YouTube? Would that work with the current society's
| attention span?
|
| Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based
| moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of
| human moderators and/or a drastically reduced scale as a
| result?
|
| I don't know, but I have my doubts.
|
| Yes, moderation/suspensions can be a pain, and pointing out
| embarrassing mistakes is important to add pressure on Google to
| put more resources into it. At the same time, YouTube is full
| of great content and content creators. Anyone can upload a
| video and make it viewable by billions, _instantly_. I think we
| shouldn 't forget how amazing this actually is.
| izacus wrote:
| What if... instead of YouTube you'd have several intereset
| based sites which could actually handle their moderation and
| workload instead of being a giant uncaring behemoth?
| rapnie wrote:
| You mean, like the open standards-based Fediverse, where
| there are also no ads and algoritmic feeds optimizing for
| engagement?
| b3kart wrote:
| Isn't that basically how reddit operates? And last I heard
| they have their native video hosting as well. Sounds like
| this could work, but doesn't quite at the moment. Is
| YouTube handling content discovery better? Network effects
| maybe?
| judge2020 wrote:
| Reddit is interest-based but gets free labor from most
| subreddit moderators that remove bad content for them.
| Reddit is also much less lucrative of a content platform
| given you have limited ways to make money (usually
| limited to linking to your patreon), so the content is
| constrained to whatever people do with no expectation of
| money.
| adrianN wrote:
| Who pays for the moderators? You still need a lot of
| manpower if you don't want algorithms, regardless of
| whether you have one Youtube or a thousand
| SpecialInterestTube.
| tclancy wrote:
| Without disagreeing with your point, I do think there's
| something to be said for the more specialized sites the
| Internet used to specialize in. Places that foster a
| sense of community tend to wind up with users who are
| happy to pitch in when something doesn't look right (or
| get overrun by spammers if the community isn't able to
| deal with the issues). I am happy to pull weeds in a
| community garden in a way I will not at some factory
| farm. This approach isn't a utopia; people are people and
| everything is political, but at smaller scales, saying
| "Well, just start your own [niche] video site" isn't
| snark, it's a realistic thing and perhaps both sites
| contribute to the marketplace of ideas. YouTube is the
| marketplace of the unthinking.
| foepys wrote:
| Tech is very special in a way where they can get away
| with claiming that quite a lot is not possible at their
| scale. Imagine this for other industries.
|
| "We cannot do quality control before sending products
| out. We make too much stuff."
|
| "We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many
| people."
|
| "Cleaning the entire building is not possible. It's too
| much space."
| anticensor wrote:
| "We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many
| people."
|
| This happens in some public transport operators already.
| manigandham wrote:
| There's a massive difference between centralized
| production of physical goods vs user-generated digital
| assets. Scale itself becomes the challenge.
| ghaff wrote:
| And those things are paid for. It would be perfectly
| reasonable if you had to pay per minute for uploading
| video and people had to pay for a subscription to watch
| it. That's just not what is expected for a mass platform
| today.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Vimeo has an "uploader pays" system (of sorts), and,
| while it prevents garbage on the platform, it stops
| creators from wanting to use it when YouTube is free.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes. It's of course a perfectly valid (and widely-used)
| model to pay for hosting. But, by and large, only
| "serious" users who probably otherwise have a business
| model will do so. And there will inevitably be far less
| content on the platform.
|
| On the one hand, I think it's sort of unfortunate that so
| much of the Web has come to be about "free" access
| (though paying for access with attention and time) but
| that does come from the perspective of someone who would
| be able and happy to pay with money instead.
| adrianN wrote:
| There are few other industries where users expect to get
| everything for free.
| b3kart wrote:
| All the examples you provide have to do with tangible,
| physical things. Tech _is_ in some sense special because
| we 're dealing with intangibles. It costs a bad actor
| next to nothing to upload the same video with harmful
| content to YouTube a thousand times, a million times
| even. And YouTube has to deal with all of this.
|
| That's why they still use physical ballots in most
| elections: as soon as you're dealing with physical things
| the costs for a bad actor to do bad things at scale
| balloon up.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| But a bad actor can only do so much if manual reviews are
| involved. If they're a completely new account because
| their previous accounts have been banned, accessing on a
| new device because their previous Alphabet-surveilled
| fingerprint had been banned, or on a VPN because their IP
| has been banned, YouTube could just implement manual
| review which would slow such a bad actor down. And if the
| intent is to clog up the manual review process with
| whatever copies of a single illegal video Alphabet we
| already have technology that is used to automatically
| identify specific videos or images and remove them,
| usually for purposes of preventing the spread of illegal
| depictions of children.
| adrianN wrote:
| IPs are very cheap. Botnets are huge and residential IPs
| are easy to come by.
| water8 wrote:
| If you change the MAC address on your cable modem you can
| get tons of different IPs. Same thing with cellular
| networks. With raspberryPis so cheap, fingerprints don't
| work that well for all devices.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| There are relatively few people capable of doing this
| compared to the population of the world that uses
| YouTube, and there's even fewer people who, even with
| capacity, will be doing this just to upload illegal
| content into YouTube. I think this sizes down the problem
| of manual review quite easily.
| sgift wrote:
| But Tech also enjoys the benefits of this. You make a
| product once, sell it thousands of times. Or allow
| thousands/millions of people access without much
| overhead. I'm simplifying here of course, but compared to
| e.g. a machine which you have to produce new for each
| customer I think we are in a very good situation. And
| with that advantage comes a price tech should be forced
| to pay.
| BigGreenTurtle wrote:
| "We cannot do quality control before sending products
| out. We make too much stuff."
|
| Ever buy strawberries?
|
| "We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many
| people."
|
| Train conductors often check tickets after the train has
| started moving.
|
| "Cleaning the entire building is not possible. It's too
| much space."
|
| Climate change. Dirty streets.
| da_chicken wrote:
| Very much so. Tech companies have a way of confusing
| "this is difficult" with "this is impossible," or "this
| is impossible" with "this isn't free," or "this is
| impossible" with "we don't want to."
| LegitShady wrote:
| They are incentivized to have that confusion. So no
| surprise.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It is impossible is the polite way of telling you that
| your idea is incredibly illbconsidered and contrary to
| the actual purpose of the program and please fuck off and
| get cancer. Linus Torvalds was one of the few who
| operated under that style. Sadly for transparency and
| clarity it is the diplomatic ignore the elephant in the
| room which has become the standard. I blame all of the
| professional emotional manipulator sophist whiners who
| don't even try to understand reality. "Do it yourself
| then." is embedded in it as a message to fuck off because
| everyone knows they either cannot do it because they
| asked in the first place in those terms.
| viraptor wrote:
| I think it's much less work on SpecialInterestTube. On
| YouTube there's a huge amount of decisions and ideas the
| moderator has to take into account. The other one can
| filter a large amount of spam with "the first 5 seconds
| make it clear it's not SpecialInterest".
|
| For example comparing to HN, I can go on "New" and see
| "Places to Spray a Fragrance on for a Long Lasting
| Effect-Ajulu's Thoughts" - I know it's immediately
| flaggable, even if it could be a valid post on another
| website. (and require a full review there to check it
| doesn't break some specific rules)
| [deleted]
| tinco wrote:
| Google had a revenue of $180B in 2020, and their EBITDA
| was $55B. I'm no accountant but that sounds like an
| absolutely insane profit margin. 8-12% would seem much
| more palatable, so that means they have over 25B of
| excess profits they could spend on 500.000 middle class
| incomes for content moderators.
|
| YouTube represents 10% of Google's income BTW, so the
| other 90% of middle class incomes could do moderation for
| their other services.
|
| Is that naieve?
| izacus wrote:
| I usually frame it this way - Mazda Motor Corporation, an
| order of magnitude smaller company can provide me with a
| several salons in my < 2mil population country where
| there are physical people that will fix my problem.
|
| And Google, the mighty megacorporation, can't even clear
| a basic phone support bar, much less a local user support
| office in each region? Something normal for other
| corporations?
| adrianN wrote:
| Mazda earns several hundred to several thousand dollars
| of profit from the sale of a car to you. Google earns an
| order of magnitude or two less per user.
| foepys wrote:
| Thousands of dollars are only possible with luxury cars.
|
| VW, one of the two largest auto makers, makes around
| 300EUR profit per vehicle sale (excluding luxury brands).
| For some models it's even less than 100EUR. You can
| calculate around 1% profit for a car sale, often less.
|
| The actual money is in leasing and financing, which is
| why almost all automakers own a bank.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>VW, one of the two largest auto makers, makes around
| 300EUR profit per vehicle sale (excluding luxury brands).
|
| Seeing as it's absolutely trivial to negotiate 10%
| discount on any new VW car, I struggle to see how that's
| true? Unless you mean that VW makes 300 euro and the rest
| is the profit of the dealership?
|
| Even if that's true, VW makes an absolute mountain of
| money through financial services. Yes, they will make
| very little profit selling you a PS12k Polo, but VW
| Financial Services will make PS2-3k just providing you
| with a financial agreement for it.
| foepys wrote:
| I don't see how you are contradicting me? That's exactly
| what I said. The dealer doesn't matter here, it's just
| about the manufacturer.
| gambiting wrote:
| Oh it's not about contradiction, I'm just curious where
| the 300EUR value comes from.
| tinco wrote:
| Mazda spends several hours in pre- and after sales on
| each car. Google could automate 99.99% of moderation, and
| spend literal seconds on 90% of all further moderation
| per user. A magnitude or 3 less human attention than
| Mazda's sales pipeline spends on a user would be worlds
| better than what Google does now.
|
| I've seen YouTube channels with thousands of dollars of
| monthly revenue be closed over issues that would've taken
| a trained human less than 10 minutes to resolve.
| YouTubers with that kind of revenue are literally one in
| a million users or so.
| izacus wrote:
| They also had to source parts, manufacture it, transport
| it via boat and train, then pay someone to show me
| through all the buttons, clean it and then offer service
| at least once every year.
|
| Besides that they also provide 24 hour support for
| breakdowns and plenty of other services.
|
| And at best, they made 10% (!!) gross margin on my car -
| which is of a range of 2500$. Meanwhile Google has 45-60%
| (!!) profit margins while not giving a crap.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Let people have the detestable YouTube TV for free as
| mods.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's definitely not just a money thing, because even
| major channels that bring in lots of money can't get
| someone to review their cases.
| atat7024 wrote:
| Hackaday.com does just fine.
|
| YouTube was fine before Google.
|
| Stop centralising.
| judge2020 wrote:
| YouTube was bought in 2006 - not much time to even think
| about having a content problem or adpocalypse.
|
| 0: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15196982
| amelius wrote:
| What if... people could make their own websites and host
| their own videos, and people could link to each other's
| content?
| criley2 wrote:
| >What if... instead of YouTube you'd have several intereset
| based sites which could actually handle their moderation
| and workload instead of being a giant uncaring behemoth?
|
| What if... the average viewer was willing to pay for video
| content instead of requiring a free, unprofitable service
| run as a "Free add-on" to an Ad Empire?
|
| Youtube may finally be profitable in the past few years but
| the first 90% of its existence, the entire rise to power,
| it was unprofitable and run at a loss. There aren't other
| major providers because no one else wants to lose that much
| money
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Have you forgotten abour Netflix and the innumerable
| streaming services out there as every studio and their
| dog's mother wants to claim 100% of the pie? The money
| isn't an issue - it is a freudian slip that either you
| want it to be like cable or are blindly repeating the
| words of someone who does.
|
| If you don't like youtube's free service you can get your
| money back.
| [deleted]
| JoBrad wrote:
| That will end up just like paywalls on news sites. It's
| the best way forward (with tweaks), but ultimately will
| fail unless everyone participates.
|
| Services like Brilliant and others are attempting what
| you're suggesting, though.
| b3kart wrote:
| > What if... the average viewer was willing to pay for
| video content
|
| That would solve all of our problems, wouldn't it? Too
| bad there's likely always going to be someone willing to
| offer the same service for free + ads and/or selling
| users data. Unless people start valuing their
| privacy/data much more than they do at the moment (or
| regulation comes in), it's just wishful thinking.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It would solve a couple problems. I don't see how it
| would solve this problem.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| That may have worked in the pre-iPhone Internet, where it
| took effort to become a part of communities, and everyone
| implicitly understood that. Now, it's a rock vs. a hard
| place: the masses want centralized platforms, but those
| centralized platforms are proving cancerous to society.
| api wrote:
| The masses don't want centralized platforms or
| decentralized platforms. The masses don't care how things
| work. What the masses want is an easy to use, fast
| platform. Centralized systems have been the best at
| providing that because they are easier to engineer and
| because there is an economic model via ads and
| surveillance.
| doublejay1999 wrote:
| The answers to all your questions is no, which is precisely
| the point the author is trying to make.
|
| If we made the case for operating "at human scale" Youtube
| would be amongst first casualties.
|
| to your last point :
|
| > Anyone can upload a video and make it viewable by billions,
| instantly. I think we shouldn't forget how amazing this
| actually is.
|
| By the same reasoning, COVID-19 is similarly amazing.
|
| Opinions move on : Youtube is 15 years old now. It's a
| practical monopoly, being the worlds 2nd most visited
| website. I wont deny it's utility - but it's a gross
| centralisation who's modus operandi present significant
| questions - chiefly, Is it right that it has for years
| circumvented nearly all regulation applied to other media,
| and should it remains largely unaccountable to any elected
| power ?
|
| So the challenge it seems is thus : how do preserve the good
| things that self published video content has done for us, but
| prevent or limit the consequences and attendant injustice
| caused by a service so infeasibly large. it's impossible to
| administer ?
| ehsankia wrote:
| Do you have reason to believe it can be done better than
| how Youtube does it? Again, there are two approach:
|
| 1. Limit who can post content
|
| You'll end up with only the powerful being able to push
| content, you're taking the voice away from the masses.
|
| 2. Try to gradually improve content moderation and live
| with the rare false-positives or false-negatives.
|
| This is the current approach, and while not perfect, I
| personally much prefer it to the former.
| doublejay1999 wrote:
| I dont think it could be done better much better than
| youtube aat the scale youtube does it, but i would insist
| they need to be plugged in to existing national media
| regulators and bound by the same standards- flawed as
| they are.
|
| > You'll end up with only the powerful being able to push
| content, you're taking the voice away from the masses.
|
| i think the algorithms already do that. the channels with
| the most followers have the loudest voice
|
| >. Try to gradually improve content moderation and live
| with the rare false-positives or false-negatives.
|
| its better than it was, and will likely improve but it's
| still drowing in shills and scammers. i think this would
| be rooted out by more community centric model. exactly
| how that looks, i dont know - but i think self policing
| would play a part.
| superjan wrote:
| One problem is that there is a single process for all.
| Certain types of journalism and research should be able to
| ask for pre-approval of videos without risking a ban. The AI
| can still deal with the bulk of those requests.
| skybrian wrote:
| There are often problems with Reddit moderators, but at least
| you know who they are (sort of) and can talk to them. It
| seems like this there is a better relationship between
| moderators and a community when the moderators are part of
| the community, versus being an anonymous horde of
| interchangeable personnel.
|
| (And of course there is Hacker News for another example,
| combining some automatic stuff with manual control.)
|
| To get this at scale, though, it seems like you need a larger
| social network to be divided into many smaller ones in some
| logical way that's understood by by everyone involved.
|
| It seems like the inherent hierarchy (authors versus
| subscribers) and subdivision of Substack is likely to work
| out well for them.
| [deleted]
| kodablah wrote:
| I think the argument is framed as wanting a human during take
| down dispute, not pre-approval. There's no need to treat this
| as an absolute. Why are human contact and reasonable
| expediency considered mutually exclusive? There is a lot of
| room in the middle. Can allow human dispute resolution for
| non-free accounts (i.e. paid or earning). Can limit upload
| frequency site wide while dispute/abuse queues are backed up
| (knowing YouTube would be incentivized to prevent backup).
| Can have non-profit reviewer company that charge very minimal
| amounts for human review. Etc.
|
| Let's be clear, the lack of humans anywhere in the pipeline
| for uploaders is because they don't have to, not because it
| is impossible. Having said that, I really hope we do not see
| government intervention here.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Let's be clear, the lack of humans anywhere in the
| pipeline for uploaders is because they don't have to, not
| because it is impossible.
|
| The real problem here is that people are envisioning human
| interaction as something that can produce better outcomes,
| but the cost of that may not be economical.
|
| You can hire a generic human to look over a flagged video
| for 15 seconds and render a verdict, but the verdict is
| going to be _bad_. That 's not enough time to make an
| accurate evaluation.
|
| Suppose you have an epidemiologist on YouTube making a
| claim about virus propagation. It gets flagged because
| there is a CNN article reporting that the CDC said
| something contradictory. The epidemiologist argues that the
| CNN article is a misinterpretation and if you look at the
| original CDC publication, that's not really what they said.
|
| At this point for YouTube to get it right they've basically
| got to hire their own M.D. to study the CDC publication in
| enough detail to understand the context. That is
| prohibitively expensive. But the alternative is often
| censoring an epidemiologist who is trying to _correct_
| misinformation being disseminated by CNN.
|
| And science is a moving target. The infamous example was
| the CDC in 2020 telling people not to wear masks. But there
| was a point in time when scientists were publishing studies
| on the health benefits of tobacco consumption. Challenging
| the established orthodoxy is inherently necessary for
| progress.
|
| The underlying problem here is that YouTube isn't competent
| to make these determinations. They're attempting to do
| something they have no capacity to succeed in.
| posguy wrote:
| What stops the YouTube reviewer from calling or emailing
| the CDC to render a verdict on which interpretation of
| their public information is accurate?
|
| When it comes to government agencies, they are
| contactable (usually with a simple email). You might not
| get an immediate response, but a few hours to a few days
| later you can expect to hear back.
| vokep wrote:
| Why would youtube be trying to make a determination like
| that? Individuals are the arbiters of truth, not
| organizations. Ministries of truth are not desirable.
| eecc wrote:
| So true. Automation cannot infer nuance. It's ok to
| strike down obvious spam and troll but the but this
| pretense that private actors should spend their resources
| to cultivate a sane public space in just a broad-spectrum
| reflex reaction to micro-targeted disinformation.
| Nonsense.
| b3kart wrote:
| Agree wholeheartedly: there's definitely a spectrum between
| what Google are doing atm and full human moderation. I am a
| strong believer in using AI to augment humans, not replace
| them. Nudging Google towards putting more humans in the
| pipeline is what I am hoping posts like this are achieving.
| prox wrote:
| When was the last time Google listened to the public? In
| spirit, not because there was a backlash? It's a techno
| conglomerate with no human face. Google was cool and
| interesting in 00's, but nowadays all they create is
| fodder for those sweet ad dollars.
| thu2111 wrote:
| What's with the assumption here that there aren't humans
| involved in this decision? The linked post literally quotes
| Google saying:
|
| _" Hi Sun Knudsen, Our team has reviewed your content,
| and, unfortunately, we think it violates our harmful and
| dangerous policy."_
|
| Google has always had humans in the loop. Not for every
| decision but certainly the more impactful ones that affect
| user generated content. When I worked there, there were
| even humans reviewing requests for account un-suspensions
| (yes, really! they didn't do a great job though, needless
| to say).
|
| Also, it's quite hard to understand what sort of algorithm
| could result in this sort of suspension. What training data
| would give it hundreds of thousands of examples of infosec
| discussions labelled as harmful? But it's very easy to see
| how a large army of low paid humans given vague advice like
| "don't allow harmful or dangerous content" could decide
| that linking to hacking information is harmful.
|
| The problem here is not AI. The problem here is Google
| allowing vague and low quality thinking amongst the ranks
| of its management, who have decided to give in to political
| activists who are determined to describe anything they're
| ideologically opposed to as "harmful", "dangerous",
| "unsafe" etc. When management give in to those radicals and
| tell their human and AI moderators to suspend "harmful"
| content, they inevitably end up capturing all kinds of
| stuff that isn't political in nature, simply due to the
| doublespeak nature of the original rules.
| devmor wrote:
| "Our team" is quite often a lie. Why do you assume that a
| human was involved? Especially when it comes to Google,
| who notoriously skimps on human support staff.
| water8 wrote:
| It's a bad idea to give liars the benefit of the doubt
| dbuder wrote:
| They lie both ways too, whenever there is a public
| kerfuffle they always blame the algorithm / the AI.
| thu2111 wrote:
| Because I worked there and back then, when Google claimed
| content had been manually reviewed, it had been. It might
| have been by a low wage worker in India or Brazil and
| they might have spent 20 seconds on it, but there _was_ a
| person in the loop.
|
| That's why I turned this around. Why do you assume
| they're lying, without evidence?
| SirSourdough wrote:
| Why wouldn't we assume they are lying? Interacting with
| their dispute process doesn't have any human qualities,
| so what would make us think that humans are involved?
|
| They are a massive monopoly and just the other day it was
| reported that they manipulated their own ad markets for
| their own profit. They constantly inaccurately accuse
| people of malicious intent and copyright infringement,
| often massively hindering peoples' careers and generally
| providing zero recourse. To not assume lying and at best
| self-serving intent given Alphabet/Google's position in
| the world would be foolish.
|
| On top of that, is it really that different to use
| inaccurate AI or to use humans who are intentionally not
| given the time or tools to do human-quality work?
|
| The problem is obviously with the overall quality of
| moderation, and the level of power exerted by platforms
| over users. Whether a non-skilled human reviewer or an AI
| is handling the broken process hardly matters given the
| results.
| hervature wrote:
| Choosing to die on that hill of technicality seems like a
| silly choice. People say "human" but they really mean "a
| person who diligently considered the content, probably
| watched the video more than once, understood what they
| were watching, and possibly has a chance to debate with
| another human". Or, you know, a reasonable definition for
| "human in the loop".
| admax88q wrote:
| It seems you're defining "human in the loop" as "Google
| makes what I consider to be the correct decision in this
| case." I believe the point that thu2111 is trying to make
| is that there _are_ humans in the loop, and having them
| is no insurance against unilateral decisions that you
| disagree with or even just plain stupid decisions.
|
| The point is that involving more humans in the moderation
| decisions at YouTube does not guarantee nor is there any
| evidence to suggest, that it would result in better
| moderation.
|
| Somebody with the technical and industry knowledge to
| know that talking about security vulnerabilities like
| this shouldn't be removed can probably find a better job
| that YouTube video moderation.
| tremon wrote:
| _Google makes what I consider to be the correct decision
| in this case._
|
| I'll settle for "Google makes a well-informed decision
| and will communicate the weighted pros and cons that led
| to that decision."
| kelnos wrote:
| I would accept that Google will sometimes make the wrong
| decision, but it's unacceptable that the care given
| toward making that decision stops at a low-wage worker in
| another country spending 20 seconds on the decision.
|
| There's a very wide chasm between "an AI decided" or
| "someone spent 20 seconds on it", and "we hired an expert
| in every possible field and they thoroughly research the
| facts at hand before making a decision".
|
| The latter is obviously not feasible, but there are many
| options in between that will give markedly better
| outcomes than the status quo while not making YT
| moderation economically infeasible.
| [deleted]
| hervature wrote:
| There are plenty of cases where I disagree with the
| outcome of companies I interact with. When I spend 30
| minutes chatting with an agent via text with Amazon or
| airlines, I might leave the conversation disappointed,
| but I never doubt their conscientiousness. I highly doubt
| United beat me at the Turing Test.
| kodablah wrote:
| > What's with the assumption here that there aren't
| humans involved in this decision? The linked post
| literally quotes Google saying [...]
|
| The post literally quotes Google as saying that for the
| _last_ time this happened. Then the post literally states
| they appealed and never heard back. There is nothing
| concerning a human for this instance, though I suspect
| once the uploader reaches out (were it not for the
| popularity this is gaining), one could expect similar
| dismissal. That there are barely humans involved, and in
| a poor way when they are, doesn't mean there are never
| humans involved, true. But for many, the bare minimum of
| assistance is indistiguishable from no assistance.
| thu2111 wrote:
| Appealing and not hearing back doesn't mean the original
| decision was entirely automated, it means they ignore
| appeals. Plenty of people would love nothing more than to
| argue with Google employees all day about every decision
| the firm makes - just think about webmasters and SEO
| alone - so the fact that YouTube actually has such a
| process is already kind of remarkable.
| kelnos wrote:
| You seem to be arguing that because their dispute process
| everywhere else is reprehensible, a slightly-less-
| reprehensible process should be celebrated.
|
| It shouldn't, and we need to hold Google and others to a
| much higher standard here. I'm not sure how we do that,
| but the status quo is garbage.
| jscipione wrote:
| Louis Rossman had his YouTube account temporarily
| suspended for posting a video entitled "An angry clinton"
| which was a video of his pet cat Clinton meowing. Human
| moderation is needed in cases like this. There is
| obviously no analysis of the video content, the algorithm
| looks for keywords in the video title. The keywords used
| by the algorithm are centered around protecting
| Democratic politicians from criticism. There is no
| advanced AI going on, the algorithm is simple pattern
| matching.
| hoppla wrote:
| Knowledge is empowering, and one can also argue that lack
| of it is considered harmful. Not being able to link to
| resources that can help you understand how something
| works can lead to (in the big picture) that only
| criminals will gain access to that knowledge.
| insert_coin wrote:
| Apple reviews each app update manually. Not only each app,
| but each and every one of its updates too.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| Why not allow the majority of YTers with a legit posting
| history to post videos as they wish? You wouldn't have to
| wait days or weeks for these folks, they are trustworthy
| already. The vast majority of channels I care about wouldn't
| need moderation, they're hobbyists like woodworkers,
| musicians, etc. with dozens of posts already.
| ttt0 wrote:
| > The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the
| consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait
| for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for
| upload to YouTube?
|
| Or they could just stop doing that and go back to how it used
| to be. Let people upload videos and review them only after it
| was flagged. Novel idea, I know.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| The media companies made sure that'll never happen again :/
| That's how we got ContentID: to prevent music and video
| piracy.
| syshum wrote:
| That is why we need Copyright reform to take the teeth
| out of media companies.
|
| Return copyright in the US back to the original
| constitutional limits
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Never'll happen.
|
| "Congress shall have power... to promote the progress of
| science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to
| authors and inventors the exclusive right to their
| respective writings and discoveries."
|
| As I read it, the law should be formed to maximize
| progress, not to maximize value of an idea.
|
| But, a large amorphous group of citizens will never
| overcome a small, highly-concentrated self interested
| group. I doubt you'll ever see the copyright-opening
| version of the NRA or SPCA.
| syshum wrote:
| Well the google case put a huge dent in the prevailing
| idea that Maximum value / profit is the constitutional
| purpose.
|
| The court clearly held that profitability alone should
| not be a factor.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I doubt you'll ever see the copyright-opening version
| of the NRA
|
| Corrupt influence-peddling charlatans milking the rubes?
|
| Or was there something else intended by this analogy?
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Simply that the power of a highly focused group can be
| remarkable. Substitute 'NRA' for Big Pharma trade
| organization or Teachers' Union if you like.
| ttt0 wrote:
| That's its own thing and it's just as absurd as this, but
| this person got a strike for "violating harmful and
| dangerous policy".
|
| I don't upload any videos, but if their AI for reviewing
| videos is as bad as their AI for reviewing comments then
| both should be completely scrapped. Because it's not a
| regex matching or whatnot, but AI, it's impossible to
| predict which comment or a livechat message will get
| through. In practice it's virtually random. And the worst
| part is that they don't even bother to mention that your
| comment was 'problematic' to them, you have to have two
| windows open, one for posting and one on private mode to
| verify which of your comments actually showed up.
|
| Just as a disclaimer, I haven't tried it in a while, so
| maybe it's somewhat better now, I don't know.
| feanaro wrote:
| Why is it a foregone conclusion that we cannot unmake
| this?
| Karunamon wrote:
| Something I never quite understood... couldn't Google
| have just said "no" and required them to submit DMCA
| takedowns? The law doesn't require the level of broken
| proactivity that Youtube has.
| sigstoat wrote:
| google wants the content up. it is in their interests for
| there to be as much mundane fluffy ad-watch-generating
| content as possible.
|
| having it DMCA'd down is a problem for youtube. content
| id is how most of the material can stay up, the riaa can
| stay happy, and google can sell ads.
| ttt0 wrote:
| They don't care about your average Joe user. Just look at
| their search results and see what comes up. What they
| want is to transfer the 'legacy media' to their
| platforms.
| MereInterest wrote:
| They absolutely could have, and have been entirely within
| the rules of the DMCA. My best guess is that the
| ContentID system is either (a) a bribe to get media
| companies to partner with youtube's paid streaming, or
| (b) a bribe to convince media companies that it isn't
| worth lobbying yet again for stronger copyright
| monopolies.
| bg24 wrote:
| > Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based
| moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of
| human moderators and/or a drastically reduced scale as a
| result?
|
| I am curious about the cost of a process that establishes
| human reviews for conflict scenarios, i.e. situations like
| this. Is that still the planet-scale numbers?
| tw04 wrote:
| >The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the
| consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait
| for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for
| upload to YouTube? Would that work with the current society's
| attention span?
|
| Why should they have to? Youtube makes BILLIONS of dollars,
| and they can afford to employs 10s of thousands of people to
| be human moderators, they just don't want to because that
| would eat into profits. If the video has X views or the
| publisher has X followers, it should be reviewed within hours
| by a real human.
|
| >Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based
| moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of
| human moderators and/or a drastically reduced scale as a
| result?
|
| Nobody is saying there should be 0 AI moderation, just that
| there should be a human that reviews a clip if AI flags it
| and the end-user clicks a button saying "this shouldn't have
| been flagged".
|
| The entire premise of google is kind of broken and both
| technical and non-technical people feel that way from what
| I've heard. The fact it's nearly impossible to get to a real
| human on anything, and if you do happen to get to a real
| human, half the time they aren't even empowered to undo
| whatever decision their AI has made... it's just not a good
| way to do business. There's a balance to technology and human
| interaction and Google (again IMO) has gone too far in the
| technology direction. Heck, humanity as a whole might need to
| find someplace in the middle if the studies about the current
| generation of 20-somethings struggling with stunted social
| interactions due to social media is to be believed.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Anyone can upload a video to their website and make it
| viewable to all. The hosting is not the issue. You could use
| dropbox, box, etc for easy video hosting and sharing.
|
| It's the discovery piece that cannot be replicated. If
| hosting happened outside moderation can move to automatic
| with a user/ml flag with manual approve process that follows.
| coliveira wrote:
| Your question is: would a company based on youtube be hugely
| profitable without AI? Answer: probably not, but who cares
| other than the shareholders of Alphabet? I don't really think
| I should base my decisions about software based on how much
| the owners of the company are making.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I'd say it's infeasible without AI moderation based on their
| revenue model. They will never make enough money off
| intellectual content in order to pay for enough humans to
| moderate their system. Content for the lowest common
| denominator is not only easy as hell for an AI to moderate
| but it makes orders of magnitude more revenue than anything
| about technology, science, philosophy, etc.
|
| The answer is to simply not rely on YouTube for anything
| besides lifestyle and self-help vlogs, marketing,
| instructions on how to put together your IKEA bookshelf, and
| of course cat videos. There are plenty of other video hosting
| sites that won't ruin your day as a creator because you
| accidentally used the word "doodie" or because the AI thinks
| your video on writing "hello world" in Rust is teaching
| people to hack computers.
| harpiaharpyja wrote:
| I think it would be great. There would be huge incentives to
| find other solutions, and a lot of what goes into YouTube
| would find other outlets. Especially since we've already
| tasted what's possible. It could be the end of the YouTube
| monopoly.
| bluecalm wrote:
| Maybe we could have that if the uploader is responsible, not
| the platform.
|
| Want to upload fast and not having your content taken down -
| deal with the legal issues yourself.
|
| Want anonymous uploading and/or some protection - deal with
| automatic systems as employing enough people is just too
| expensive.
| Silhouette wrote:
| _Maybe we could have that if the uploader is responsible,
| not the platform._
|
| Maybe we could have the uploader host their own content,
| and do away with hosting platforms and their gatekeeping
| altogether?
|
| I can see little reason today that well-established
| technologies and individual hosting arrangements couldn't
| offer similar value to whatever YouTube or some other
| centralised hosting service offers.
|
| We are talking about the World Wide _Web_. Linking to other
| people 's content is literally the central feature of the
| real platform here. For a long time, we did just fine with
| community-operated facilities and everyone linking to other
| sources of interesting content to help discoverability. We
| still do, really, but now the links and other community
| engagement tend to be locked up in places like different
| YouTube tabs for each channel, not the sidebar of someone's
| personal website. Of course, these days we also have entire
| sites (HN among them) built around sharing links to content
| that might be interesting to like-minded people. So I don't
| buy the usual arguments about centralised content hosting
| being the only way interesting content can gain exposure.
|
| Numerous individual content creators make demos or
| livestream games or present tutorials with decent-to-
| excellent presentation values. They often use specialist
| software to do it. I therefore don't buy arguments about
| the technical difficulty of self-hosting either. There
| could be hosting packages offered by ISPs or other hosting
| services on a common carrier basis if individuals didn't
| want to set up all the infrastructure themselves, and those
| who were good/popular enough to make it more of a regular
| income would still have the ability to do so but now on
| their own terms.
|
| Even at today's prices, you could serve tens of thousands
| of videos directly for less than a lot of people are paying
| for their ISP or mobile/cell phone plan each month. And of
| course, we know lots about how to efficiently serve
| interesting content via P2P networks that could be a big
| amplifier for popular content producers who were happy to
| share without wanting to monetise or otherwise collect
| large numbers of viewers on their own site for some reason.
| The available capacity and prices are surely only going to
| improve as the technology improves. So that's cost taken
| care of in most or all cases too.
|
| So, if individuals hosting their own content is technically
| and economically feasible, and if individual creators and
| community groups facilitating content discovery is a viable
| culture along with all the other interactions they tend to
| have anyway, I struggle to see why the likes of YouTube are
| so valuable or irreplaceable in our society today.
| Obviously if YT disappeared overnight there would be a gap
| tomorrow, but we've been adapting and filling gaps and
| finding better ways to do things on the Internet since some
| time in the last millennium, and I see no reason to think
| we wouldn't do so again.
| Goronmon wrote:
| _...if individual creators and community groups
| facilitating content discovery is a viable culture..._
|
| That's a pretty big if, and from my limited perspective,
| the most important problem content creators have and the
| most useful service Youtube provides.
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| > Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for
| their video to be approved for upload to YouTube?
|
| Well presumably Google being one of the worlds wealthiest
| corporations could hire and pay people a living wage to match
| the demand of users looking to upload videos to YouTube. It
| is in YouTube's interest as it only exists and makes money on
| this very user generated content.
|
| Yeah it's great YouTube exists and can market to content
| creators about its market capture audience, but maybe it
| would be a better system without the middleman as anyone can
| upload a video anywhere on the internet making it instantly
| viewable by billions
| [deleted]
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I'd be shocked if the best and the brightest that Alphabet
| can buy can't figure out a reputation system, manually-
| reviewed with AI assistance, or some other way to approve
| content in a convenient manner.
|
| Don't forget also that Alphabet is swimming in money. They
| can certainly afford the manpower to make it relatively
| seamless for the user. And I really doubt users can't be
| trained to associate a few hours' wait of a completely new,
| reputationless user, or a user who is using an unknown device
| or VPN, with a better quality of site experience because the
| videos are screened.
| water8 wrote:
| How about you don't believe everything you read on the
| internet. Even 5 star people are wrong too.
| MonsterBurger wrote:
| this! they could have a page entirely of "reported videos"
| by person or AI and the severity would rank how high on
| this page the content is.
|
| Things like timestamp of when in the video was reported
| might help for scanning "content" e.g. "50 people reported
| this 20 minute video in the 3-5 minute mark" or similar
| average.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| > The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the
| consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait
| for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for
| upload to YouTube?
|
| People will eventually be fine with however the system works.
| If that's how it works, they assume that's how it has to be.
| Most of users have no idea how this stuff functions. We're in
| it now because the expectation has been set for instant
| uploads, so there would be outrage, but eventually it becomes
| "the way things are." As an example see any change users hate
| - users complain, TPTB either concede completely (rare) and
| revert, make minor concessions but change little, or
| apologize for the inconvenience and do nothing. Eventually
| nobody cares anymore and forgets they were angry.
|
| Most of this stuff barely matters. Frankly it might be good
| if my nephews had to wait longer between any number of
| irritating youtube videos they binge and parrot.
| [deleted]
| swiley wrote:
| The problem is that all of humanities videos are going through
| a single organization. Peertube may provide a solution to this
| but people have to actually use it.
| gumby wrote:
| > >Using algorithms to flag content is totally fine... problem
| is when humans cannot interact with humans anymore and AI gets
| to chose what is right and wrong.
|
| > Can't agree more.
|
| Simply replaced a prior system in which humans cannot interact
| with humans anymore and certain humans get to chose what is
| right and wrong.
|
| The key problem is the inability to provide human feedback more
| than the mechanism for making the initial decision itself
| (which is a different problem). Not sure how to achieve that at
| scale.
| indigochill wrote:
| Federation is the answer at scale.
|
| You need dictatorship for effective moderation. But you also
| want those dictatorships small, uniform, and interchangeable
| so that the "citizens" of those dictatorships can easily pick
| the one that suits them best. Those dictatorships link up
| (federate) with like-minded dictatorships to benefit from
| network effects of sharing their content among themselves.
|
| If your content doesn't suit a certain dictatorship, it will
| suit another one.
|
| PeerTube does federated video already. No, it's not as
| polished as YouTube. But it is the answer to human-level
| moderation at scale.
| root_axis wrote:
| The web is already federated, YouTube just happens to be
| one of the most popular nodes. Fediverse systems like
| PeerTube are great, but they don't change anything; in a
| world where something like PeerTube is as popular as
| YouTube we'd see the exact same complaints about the most
| popular node.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I'm unfamiliar with PeerTube, but it appears to me that
| search and the recommendation engine is YouTube's secret
| sauce. Does PeerTube have that?
| water8 wrote:
| Or you could just be mature and not need to suck on the
| teat of authoritarianism and learn to tolerate
| offensiveness.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Moderation isn't just for offensive content.
| indigochill wrote:
| There's always going to be some line people are unwilling
| to cross. For instance, one might say Nazi rhetoric
| should be tolerated for its historical value, but I know
| zero advocates for allowing child porn.
|
| But how about adult porn? Acceptable to some, not to
| others (also depends on the context - even advocates of
| adult videos are generally not arguing that YouTube
| should host them). And there are shades of that.
|
| In the end, no matter how mature and accepting you are,
| unless you allow literally everything, you will need
| moderators who are empowered to be the final authority on
| that decision, which is what I mean by "dictatorship".
| e40 wrote:
| Baby steps to autonomous weapons.
|
| Bring on the disagreement. It was a few short years ago the
| idea of this would have seemed a really, really bad idea. Just
| like autonomous weapons do now. And, hey, it doesn't even have
| to be us (Americans). I'm not going to name the potential
| baddie. There are many, including us. FOMO will drive so many
| terrible things in our future. Inch by inch, march closer to
| the reality many say will never happen. FSM save us.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I think this is a distraction from the real problem, which is
| that YouTube censors/demonetizes/deplatforms videos at all. The
| problem is very widespread, ranging from censorship of
| political content to firearm videos to COVID related content.
| Most recently YouTube banned a panel held by the Florida
| governor with medical experts from Stanford and Harvard (https:
| //www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2021/04/12/des...).
|
| This is a company in the business of shaping political opinion
| and manufacturing narratives, not providing a neutral platform.
| Unless that fundamental issue is addressed, symptoms (like bad
| AI flagging) will continue to persist.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Advertisers asked to not have their ads on certain content,
| because normal people complained to them when they perceived
| the advertisers to be supporting the content they didn't
| like.
|
| Advertising is the problem.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > >Using algorithms to flag content is totally fine... problem
| is when humans cannot interact with humans anymore and AI gets
| to chose what is right and wrong.
|
| Youtube is in the same economic vice as Walmart. It's hard to
| be cheap and provide a human touch, especially as labor costs
| rise. Automation only takes you so far in a free economy.
| slt2021 wrote:
| walmart actually does have customer service in stores. amazon
| also tries it best to provide customer service (want a
| return, here is shipping label).
|
| the problem with youtube is that you are not youtube's
| customer, so the dont care about you. Only advertisers are
| customers and youtube cares about them only. I bet there is a
| big customer support department staffed with real people and
| serves only advertisers
| hodgesrm wrote:
| It's hard to argue that Walmart and Amazon are much more
| considerate of their "users" than Youtube. They are all
| trying to maximize margins, which are dependent on
| maintaining network effects and keeping costs as low as
| possible.
| intrasight wrote:
| I'm of the complete opposite opinion. I look forward to the day
| when our machine overlords make all decisions. Humans are
| assholes with their own nefarious agendas. Machines are not. Of
| course if the day comes where machines ask for bribes then I'll
| change my opinion ;)
| slt2021 wrote:
| and who do you think develops code for machines and whats
| their agenda?
| tertius wrote:
| Who controls the machines? Those people are a-holes too.
| intrasight wrote:
| If they are machine overlords, then they control themselves
| ;)
| MereInterest wrote:
| Except that machines aren't making some grand objective
| pronouncement, sent from on high and untainted by base human
| nature. Machines are programmed to carry out some particular
| human desire. They follow that single human desire, without
| any of the restraint or competition of other desires, no
| matter how deep that path may lead.
|
| Machines are assholes with nefarious agendas given to them
| either intentionally or unintentionally.
| intrasight wrote:
| We have a brief window to get this right before the
| machines take over. Let's not waste it.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Though I agree, I would phrase it as "before people with
| machines take over". The machines themselves are tools
| enacting the will of whoever controls them.
| sneak wrote:
| Why does content need to be "flagged"?
| esrauch wrote:
| So I actually think this viewpoint vastly overestimates the
| ability for human reviewers to come to the right conclusion. I
| can tell you thats not really the case: paid trained human
| contractors for content moderation very commonly make far more
| problematic errors than "wpa2 cracking info is a bannable
| offense, but not this case because it's a academic research".
|
| This is the kind of edge case that even after escalation to
| higher tier human contractors will often still get wrong. I
| don't really see how it's actually much less dystopian just to
| have humans in the loop with the same outcomes.
| [deleted]
| HenryBemis wrote:
| > Anyhow, I truly _believe_ humanity has to rollback to operating
| at a human scale.
|
| BYOReligion.. and Google believes that they need to increase
| 'engagement', increase profit, and decrease headcount.. so..
| there you have it dear Sun Knudsen.
|
| Edit: I don't care for the 'virtual currency' of 'karma'. I
| wonder though; the sky is blue, I point at the sky, I say "the
| sky is blue", and people frown (?) upon me for stating the
| obvious fact of life.. Or is it just Google-
| trolls/fanboys/fangirls that don't like the true being called
| out? My above comment is also applicable to any entity that
| automates "as much as possible" and maintains a small team to
| manage operations. Something tells me that their internal Finance
| team has "enough" staff to monitor the General Ledger. Because
| General Ledger is critical to their $$$$$. A 'content creator'
| though, is not as critical, thus gets far less attention, and
| <insert FAANG> will only be bothered to fix this, if said person
| yells loud enough. How is _this_ fact of life being downvoted?
| (not me.. I don 't grow taller/shorter based on the karma points)
| :)
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _I say "the sky is blue", and people frown (?) upon me for
| stating the obvious fact of life.._"
|
| Yes; exactly this. If you were out in a crowd and called
| everyone's attention to you - thousands of people quietened to
| pay attention to what you were going to say for a moment, and
| you announced the thing you yourself say is an "obvious fact",
| that the sky is blue, the crowd would be annoyed at you for
| wasting their time with obvious low-quality trivia.
|
| "company seeks profit" is the same low-value annoying thing to
| say. You're not being downvoted because it's _untrue_ , you're
| being downvoted because it's like a toddler going "hey, hey,
| hey, hey, look, look at this, watch this" "okay?" " _throws
| ball at ground_ ". Great, thanks for that, good contribution.
| nromiun wrote:
| Recently I also discovered that YouTube shadow bans comments for
| using banned words (e.g. kill, coronavirus etc) or external links
| (two of my comments got banned). I have seen some people asking
| for sources on YouTube comments and it turns out you literally
| can't do that. Maybe that's why only spam comments rise to the
| top, any long or thoughtful comment simply gets shadow banned.
|
| 0. https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/6273409?hl=en
|
| 1.
| https://support.google.com/youtube/forum/AAAAiuErobU70d28s1N...
| haolez wrote:
| Off topic: is there an YouTube equivalent in China? I'm just
| curious.
| [deleted]
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Stop buying into the "the AI did it" whitewashing. Youtube is
| selectively targeting more and more channels and videos for
| daring to be any sort of contrarian. Its psyops under any other
| name.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| "The AI did it" is the same cop-out as "A low level employee
| did it of their own volition" and should be rejected as an
| excuse for all the same reasons.
| root_axis wrote:
| It's not a "psyops", YouTube, like every gigantic corporation
| is motivated entirely by money, and they would be happy to
| monetize every video on the site if they could, but advertisers
| pay the bills, and since advertisers are sensitive to their
| public image, YouTube goes out of their way to appease them.
| The problem here is the ad model, not AI or YouTube's values.
| seriousquestion wrote:
| That's an outdated view. Youtube now bends to activists and
| political winds.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Advertisers (and PR departments) are fragile to activists
| and political winds.
|
| Society gives PR departments far too much power. We should
| be electing governments that enforce reasonable standards,
| not relying on what is essentially DDoS to achieve social
| mores.
| president wrote:
| IMO bending to activists and political winds is within the
| same realm of what OP mentioned. There is a LOT of money to
| be made by following the trends and in today's world,
| activism and politicizing is the name of the game.
| root_axis wrote:
| So what is the activist political position on WPA2
| vulnerabilities?
|
| You see what you want to see, but YouTube hosts an
| overwhelming abundance of evidence that contradicts your
| claim.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Internal employee pressure is the cause of some things
| getting removed, but they are not behind everything. In
| this particular case it might bdriven by legal concerns
| or something. But it should also be seen in light of the
| status quo. When censorship being the new default, then
| it doesn't take a strong reason to add another thing,
| such as hacking-adjacent content to the no-go pile. The
| code is already written, and the routines are well-known.
| There is no freedom-of-speech reputation left to protect.
| So the cost of removing this content is very low, lower
| than the legal risk.
| root_axis wrote:
| Without any evidence this is just speculation. The
| reality is, there are many popular political YouTube
| channels that represent viewpoints all across the
| spectrum and this is an easily verifiable fact. I am yet
| to see any evidence that YouTube is motivated by anything
| other than money.
| [deleted]
| im3w1l wrote:
| I have seen evidence, but nothing I can share publicly.
| tomschlick wrote:
| > So what is the activist political position on WPA2
| vulnerabilities?
|
| Well we did just have a case with Twitter and IIRC
| Youtube where they redefined their "hacked material"
| policies to bend to the political will after the whole
| Hunter Biden laptop fiasco. So this may just be
| collateral damage due to those policy changes and the AI
| behind enforcing them.
| IronWolve wrote:
| >hey would be happy to monetize every video on the site if
| they could, but advertisers pay the bills, and since
| advertisers are sensitive to their public image
|
| Thats the excuse, but in reality, google still runs ads on
| demonetized channels. And there are companies that want to
| advertise on these other channels. Google is actually doing a
| disservice to stock holders by excluding profits, but many
| suspect that they want to be a cable network in the long run,
| siding with media corps.
|
| There are tiers of advertisers, lower tier companies will
| gladly pay to advertise on lower quality channels.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Are you claiming that Youtube is running psyops trying to cover
| up PhD research into WPA2 security? I don't want to distort
| your argument, I honestly don't get how you went from a WPA2
| video being accidentally taken down to "this is intentional
| psychological warfare"...
| t-writescode wrote:
| YouTube is? Or _we as a society_ are?
|
| The world of Fahrenheit 451 didn't arrive that way in a day, it
| probably took decades.
| mikaeluman wrote:
| YouTube (and others) appear to have lost the plot.
|
| I tend to avoid it and support other platforms to encourage
| content creators to migrate.
| throwaway120831 wrote:
| tube has been censoring folks left and right since the start of
| covid
| tacosaretasty wrote:
| The hypocrisy from Google here is palpable. First this content
| creator got a strike for showing users how GPG works and now for
| linking to academic research. On the other hand you have Google
| project zero who openly publish vulnerability research to the
| detriment of some software vendors.
|
| You can't have it both ways and as someone who works in this
| space I'm pretty upset by this ham fisted approach to censoring
| content.
|
| I look forward to google becoming the next AOL.
| crocsarecool wrote:
| I used to love Google - I can't believe I'm feeling the same
| way. Everything is so downhill for them. Searching isn't as
| great as it used to be. Popular services get killed to be
| replaced by replicas (thinking of messaging apps). What the
| heck is going on with Google? I used to think they were
| innovators, and now I feel like they're just Big Brother.
| FpUser wrote:
| I am sure it is ok to use AI to cheapen initial screening. This
| FAANG and the like set of companies are becoming vital for people
| to the point that sometime they can loose their income. I see
| nothing wrong with those that serve as a source of income being
| declared as utility type service with the mandatory staged
| conflict resolution process. Said process at the last stage (well
| before the actual lawsuit) would include being able to present
| proof to the actual human being/s who has the power to reverse
| the decision and is paid for but not employed by said utility. In
| case of utility failing to comply that watchdog should be able to
| levy fines. This should also help to prevent cases when the
| utility "moderation" is based on the political (other similar in
| nature) opinions of the owners.
|
| All this "I am a private company and do as I please" when it
| comes to a very big companies is baloney. They have way too much
| power and should be held responsible for how this power being
| used. Preventing them from being able to lobby governments should
| be of first priority as well.
|
| Since the companies of that type are international it is of
| course up to the individual governments to implement whatever if
| any measures they would see fit.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| AI is a great excuse for censorship. But many economic actors
| want censorship including the advertisers. So it seems more
| competition to Youtube is the only answer to censorship. But I
| don't see any credible competition on the horizon to Youtube for
| a while.
|
| The ultimate ironic censorship on the part of Youtube:
|
| https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-ce...
|
| And the discussion thread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217
| Jan454 wrote:
| Time to install GPT-3 on your own server and unleash it onto
| Google-Support, YouTube-Support, Alpha-Support, etc. to complain
| about your situation ;-) You just need to answer the captchas to
| keep it goin.
| joshxyz wrote:
| Combine that with 2captcha.com, what do we have? Lol
| abhishekbasu wrote:
| With AI-based support automation, it might end up like
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY
| pyronik19 wrote:
| It's disheartening that in the 2000s, people used to regularly
| talk about creating decentralized systems to prevent
| megacorporations and governments from being able to censor the
| internet, now the tech community that used to deplore such
| tactics actively supports mass AI censorship on entire host of
| topics where the only version of the truth that is allowed to
| stand is #thenarrative.
| Black101 wrote:
| I think that Google should hide all sites that display ads from
| the search results... because after all, it goes against AMP's
| principles of responsive websites.
|
| They definitely should also block Gmail... because it has become
| incredibly slow to load.
|
| I bet the CEO is laughing a lot when he sees all of this
| interacting together.
| Zenst wrote:
| Odd, more so given a whole video is upon YT about this from 2017.
|
| https://youtu.be/Oh4WURZoR98
| privatesgtrj wrote:
| Google is a private company. It's fully within their rights to
| remove any video they don't like, for whatever reason.
|
| It comes with the territory if we want Google to be able to
| censor hate speech and misinformation.
|
| You can always use a competing site, or build your own.
| danuker wrote:
| Except the sheer scale of Google is hair-raising. (Sleep tight
| dear FTC).
|
| If Google loses a YouTube creator, it has almost no impact on
| their bottom line.
|
| If a creator gets kicked out however, their livelihood is
| threatened.
|
| I would argue this is the perfect scenario for a creator's
| union (of course, it should use some other platform to
| communicate).
| freebuju wrote:
| > If a creator gets kicked out however, their livelihood is
| threatened
|
| No. There are numerous providers that can host your videos.
| For a small fee. This mentality is what gives Google such
| pseudo-power.
| derivagral wrote:
| At the end of the day, I'd guess this is less about
| alternatives and more about youtube being the best platform
| for your investment. Hosting isn't the problem, its the
| audience and traffic (and ad monetization from your vids.)
|
| Do the alternatives hold up in terms of things like market
| reach, $ performance, and not banning the same users?
| [deleted]
| EasyTiger_ wrote:
| Thanks for joining HN just to tell us this.
| rscoots wrote:
| That post really does read like a parody haha.
|
| Such a desire to shield mega-corporations from any moral
| culpability since they think it serves their personal
| sensibilities. Very naive.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| It seems to be a common opinion, I see a lot.
|
| What many do not realize is the 'build your own' _is_ going
| on (I can name at least 4 YT replacements, some better than
| others). But they are dismissing them with the same reasons
| they are kicking the creators off the 'mainstream' sites. So
| you see a lot of YT refugees and many existing YT creators
| 'splitting the difference' basically they upload it to both
| YT and several other sites. There is almost zero downside in
| doing so really.
|
| Eventually someone will click it all together in the right
| way and create a decentralized uncensorable thing. At that
| point the internet will become a lot more like 4chan.
|
| The old adage is 'the internet sees censorship as damage and
| routes around it'. It just does not happen overnight though.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| _Do_ we want Google to be able to censor hate speech and
| misinformation? You assume the answer is "yes", but I think
| it's at least an open question, with me personally leaning
| toward "no".
| PedroBatista wrote:
| YouTube, like most of the "Internet" these days it's just a
| shopping center. It appears to be the Universe because these
| sites/companies are so massive but at the end of the day it's
| their turf and they do what they want.
|
| Now, once they reach a certain scale, why are they allowed to
| operate like a "normal small company"?
| infogulch wrote:
| Leonard French recently reviewed a Supreme Court ruling on
| Knight Institute v. Trump that includes a concurrence statement
| by Justice Thomas that touches exactly on these issues (and
| maybe even net neutrality by proxy).
|
| https://youtu.be/IpkGzJYYQj4
|
| https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/040521zor_32...
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Now, once they reach a certain scale, why are they allowed to
| operate like a "normal small company"?
|
| There was and is a push to make them behave more like a utility
| (i.e. a platform). Mainstream media, along with a major
| political party, are on a crusade to make these tech platform
| be more and more of an editor because they like that currently
| their competition (in case of media) and political rivals (in
| case of Democrats) are bearing the brunt of the censorship.
|
| And you can see this push even here on HN with constant
| references to how evil Facebook and Twitter is because memes on
| those platforms caused Hillary to lose in 2016, and therefore
| how misinformation is such a big problem that more censorship
| is needed. I don't know how you fix that. These platforms
| didn't want to do this. They got bullied into it.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| If I can uninstall YouTube from my Android I think that would
| be a good start towards a journey to a normal, if not small
| company..
| codeecan wrote:
| Google has long been manipulating content, look up "blue anon".
| You can compare searches between Bing and you'll find lots of
| content thats been "moderated"
| fencepost wrote:
| I don't see any mention of the other thing that would be a
| concern to me - don't ever be in a situation where any Google
| product is _critical_ to you, because the behemoth may casually
| destroy you as a side effect.
|
| What if instead of locking him for a week they'd canceled his
| account (and related accounts e.g. Gmail, plus linked accounts
| because 'bypassing ban')?
|
| And you don't have to be doing something like discussing security
| - maybe you're talking about Pokemon Go and they ban you for "CP
| videos" or you posted a bunch of red or green emoji in livestream
| comments for a gamer. Goodbye email, sites logged into with a
| Google account, Android phones (because they KNOW that phone
| number is linked to your identity), etc.
|
| And what are you going to do about it? Call customer service?
| _snrk_
| barbazoo wrote:
| > And what are you going to do about it? Call customer service?
|
| I know it's not perfect but I feel much better knowing I pay
| for my email service, online storage and password management,
| knowing I'll be a paying customer in someone's system deserving
| of at least some degree of customer service.
| Jan454 wrote:
| Maybe it's time for a public company-independent complains-
| platform where all companies are obliged by law to respond. Each
| complaint of course is hidden behind some anti-bot
| captcha/protection so that the companies themselve can't use AI
| to answer your complaints.
| astrange wrote:
| https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...
|
| I dunno, where's the evidence this case was even done by AI?
| People just say Google does everything with computers when they
| actually use armies of contractors.
| dgudkov wrote:
| A small claims court for the internet. I like that.
| qayxc wrote:
| That's basically what the author suggests when they say:
|
| > Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating
| at a human scale.
|
| It's impossible to operate a complaints-platform on a global
| scale if it's run by humans. According to GMI [0], 500 hours of
| content are uploaded every minute.
|
| Given an average video duration of about 12 minutes [1], that
| would be 2500 videos per hour. That's just too much to manually
| review and handle complaints.
|
| [0] https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-
| statis...
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-
| ca...
| ylere wrote:
| Is it though? Let's do a very rough estimate: 500 hours of
| content per minute in 2019, lets say 1 reviewer can review 3
| hours of video each hour (by increasing play speed/skipping
| etc.) and we have a global workforce in lower income
| countries working 3x 8 hour shifts + weekends. That's 500 _60
| /3_3 = 30000 reviewers, at a monthly cost of $1000 that's
| 30000 _1000_ 12*7/5 = $504m/year. Youtube had $15b in
| revenues in 2019, so this represents around 3.5% of revenue.
| Now this is assuming that we actually need to 100% review
| every video before releasing it (which is not the case) and
| one reviewer can probably review more than 3 hours of content
| per hour with the right AI assistance so the real cost would
| be quite a bit lower. Even then, spending less than 5% of
| revenues on content review, moderation and support sounds
| very reasonable to me.
| qayxc wrote:
| > Is it though?
|
| Yes, it is - because it's actually 2500 videos per MINUTE,
| not per hour, mea culpa. So your 30,000 reviewers would
| actually have to be at least 1.8 MILLION.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| They didn't use your videos per hour/minute figure; they
| used hours of content per minute, so it still comes out
| 30'000 reviewers.
| Thaxll wrote:
| The flaw is that you think humans would do a better job
| than AI which def not the case. Especially hiring 30k
| people in a low income country, what could go wrong... This
| is the kind of scale problems that can't be fixed by humans
| review.
| dTal wrote:
| It takes a lot longer to make a video than to watch it. It
| therefore stands to reason that if humanity is capable of
| _making_ all that content, humanity is capable of _watching_
| it - if it decided that were a priority.
| qayxc wrote:
| 2500 videos per minute doesn't equal 500 hours of
| _original_ content per minute, which is part of the
| problem.
|
| Just look at all the reaction channels and compilations
| that simply reuse the same content over and over again. You
| have one funny or shocking clip (often from 3rd party
| sources such as TikTok) and you'll find the same video
| snippet in at least 10,000 remix/compilation/reaction
| videos. Not to mention reuploads and straight up copies.
|
| Algorithms have a hard time catching up with this and
| cropping, mirroring, tinting, etc. are often used to
| confuse ContentID. Asymmetry is the problem. Bots and
| software can both spam and flag content at superhuman
| rates.
|
| The inverse - e.g. deciding whether a complaint is legit,
| fair use applies, whether monetisation is possible, etc. -
| is actually a really hard problem and therein lies the
| dilemma.
|
| Certain parties are gaming the system and the scale is just
| too much to handle manually.
| danhor wrote:
| *2500 videos per minute
| qayxc wrote:
| Yes, thanks.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Maybe we don't need to let people upload that much video
| content.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| I don't have any data to back this up, but i believe of those
| 2500 videos per minute, 2450 or so the AI could classify them
| as safe, not requiring human interaction. The other 50 are
| classified on a scale from 0 to 100 on a badness scale. The
| ones closer to "not that bad" (ToS and such) gets put through
| automatically waiting for a review. The illegal content
| (rape, gore, child porn) and such gets blocked automatically
| until reviewed by a human. Doesn't sound that far fetched to
| implement with 50B a year in profits?
| zentiggr wrote:
| I've thought that something like the spamassassin model
| would be sufficient - calculate a 0.0 - 1.0 range of
| likelihood to block, and set cutoffs on the 0 end to auto
| approve, and toward the 1 end to auto block, and moderate
| the middle.
|
| Was good for spam for a long time.
| qayxc wrote:
| But how would that help with complaints, ContentId and
| copyright claims, though?
|
| The problem isn't the automated review process, the problem
| is complaints and disputes.
|
| Even if only 1% of all videos had any issues of this sort
| at all, that'd still be 25 complaints per minute about the
| most complex topic in media no less - copyright law and
| fair use.
|
| The problem lies in the asymmetry - bots and automated
| flagging campaigns can scan, mark and take down thousands
| of videos per minute no problem.
|
| But it's impossible for creators to get their issue
| reviewed in time by a human, because we just don't have AI
| capable of handling such decisions yet. And even then it's
| often still not as clear-cut as one might think and both
| sides need to be heard, etc.
| roenxi wrote:
| What do you think this will achieve? We know what Google
| thinks; they don't want this content on their platform.
|
| Forcing them to state that in a specific forum as some sort of
| power play isn't going to help.
| Werewolf255 wrote:
| That sounds like something that the government should oversee,
| maybe they could also make some regulations so that , I dunno,
| corporations might need to be responsible for their actions.
| cl3misch wrote:
| Are we certain this was not because the vulnerability is called
| "KRACK" which is similar to the drug "crack"? Youtube has been
| very strict about such phrasing mishaps.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| If your argument is it would be reasonable for you tube to
| automatically ban anything that could be a mention of crack
| cocaine we're not going to find a lot of common ground on what
| is accidental moderation vs intentional censorship.
| Ian678 wrote:
| I remember a survey by google about security research and one of
| the questions was something like "What hinders learning/education
| in this topic?", and I remember answering exactly _this_
| behavior.
| jb775 wrote:
| Not a popular opinion here but selectively covering up research
| is a play straight out of the Communist Manifesto. This sounds
| more like concerns over the spread of hacking intel, but it's
| worth noting yet another example given big tech's selective
| censorship over the past year.
| williesleg wrote:
| Boycott google while you still can. Almost have world domination.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| One of the largest and most profitable companies in the world
| can't hire enough low-paid humans to do content review. They
| already have some of the highest margins in history and they
| still can't figure out that sacrificing less than 1% of profits
| could solve this problem?
| zentiggr wrote:
| Paying less attention to YouTube also solves this problem.
|
| People still can't figure out that not watching YouTube solves
| all moderation problems?
|
| Google doesn't care about those posting on YouTube. They care
| about advertisers pulling their money if whatever content
| infringes on THEIR priorities.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I think the reason most people are watching YouTube instead
| of traditional media is _because_ of this type of thing. Take
| this exact situation here as an example: this kind of content
| would never make it to traditional TV because it can't find
| an audience for such niche content, eg. people smart enough
| to warrant linking a PhD research paper in the description.
|
| I think Odysee is a good alternative. PeerTube doesn't really
| seem to be a great option here as it seems to have been down
| during this time.
|
| > Google doesn't care about [...]
|
| Mostly true, but also kind of not relevant. _Google_ isn 't
| doing anything here besides making poorly trained AI models
| that try to solve this problem for them. It's more negligence
| than it is malice, IMO.
| broknbottle wrote:
| We should start letting "AI" decide the outcome in any of
| Google's pending court cases. We could setup a twitter account
| and direct them to complain, I mean appeal by @ the twitter
| account and hope the bot gods decide their tweet is worthy enough
| for human review
| asimpletune wrote:
| The first part of the post, where they said the got a strike for
| teaching people how to use pgp...
|
| Wow, that's um, wild
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I believe it's still against US law to export pgp to certain
| countries, as it's considered munitions. Wild is a great
| description.
| arsome wrote:
| Didn't DJB v US pretty much end that? That would also impact
| things like Firefox for the record.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Pretty much, but export to "rogue states and terrorist
| organizations" is still technically illegal. I suspect it
| wouldn't withstand challenge though.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| It would be fun to do a quick survey of books breathlessly laying
| out the future of the internet from 20 years ago.
|
| Looking back, the evolution of social media/youtube was pretty
| obvious. Back then, not so much.
|
| 1) Begin with anything goes including illegal. Run at a loss,
| Grow baby!
|
| 2) Ads
|
| 3) Bitching from some important people causes some removal of the
| more flagrantly illegal stuff.
|
| 4) Employees and PR departments apply a POV to what is now close
| to a monopoly. Large scale censorship.
|
| What makes the modern era interesting is the POV angle. I can't
| imagine Rockefeller's Standard Oil restricting sales to people
| with conflicting politics. Of course, there are people spending a
| lot of time each day on r/politics and what used to be
| r/thedonald shouting joyous insanity at each other...that's the
| modern pool of workers.
| Aunche wrote:
| This is what people choose when they decide to angrily tweet at
| advertisers into pulling away ads whenever YouTube doesn't take
| down bad videos quickly enough. It tells Youtube that they should
| tune their moderation to be overly aggressive. This is true
| regardless of how much human moderation they use.
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