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YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

bbc.co.uk

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Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#181

Post by pwython »

pgrote wrote: post #148
40acres wrote: post #122

Does YouTube even need comments? I can't remember any meaningful discussion happening in the comments, it's mostly meme type stuff. Long term I can see this being the final resolution for toxic comments.

The most useful comments I've found on youtube are for home improvement or repair. People chime in with other ideas or better ways of doing things.

Exactly, on a lot of technical/tutorial videos you'll see helpful discussion, like people asking questions that weren't covered, pointing out flaws, etc.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#182

Post by [deleted] »

pjc50 wrote: post #175
_wmd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ramifications of this are profound, at least: - shake the money stick at them and they will dance (thanks, of all people, Nestle!) - they've admitted a serious problem exists that they were unwilling to deal with until external pressure forced them to (i.e. they can't be trusted to self regulate) - they've all but admitted they can't fix this in reasonable time, if at all This is the first time I can think of whe…

Do I want Nestle deciding what video content is worthwhile? No. Do I want edgelords and abusers all over my screen? Also no. At this stage I'll take any attempt to do something, even if it is deeply corporate. At least Nestle you can argue with without getting death threats. (Not always true of e.g. Shell...)

[deleted]

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#183

Post by wizzard »

Sargos wrote: post #25

What a ham fisted reaction to the controversy. Now all content creators have to ensure that no kids are ever in their videos, which includes background footage and movie clips. I think this is a major problem with our current centralized model of the internet where giant corporations make all the rules. Large corporations have no ability to rationally judge situations or inject nuance into discussions. They simply ta…

Ham-fisted is right. This is going to kill family vloggers, or even just vloggers who happen to have a family in the background. YouTube is a lot less engaging when you don’t feel like you can interact with the creators or other viewers. I know everyone trots our the “YouTube comments are a toxic cesspool and provide no value” trope, but almost every video I watch on YT 1) has a kid in it somewhere, 2) has worthwhile and positive comments.

It’s like the joke about nuking your house from orbit because you saw a spider. Personally I’m far more concerned about the creepy videos aimed at kids than I am about pedos leaving hobo signs in the comments. As another commenter said, they’ll just move to a separate site to link to videos. You can’t stop them from watching videos and sharing them with other people unless you shut the site down completely.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#184

Post by jjjensen90 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #115
goshx wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The search alone wasn't sufficient, but was enough to start it all. In YouTube's cases, there are plenty of comments that demonstrate someone is a sexual predator. In my view, if someone "tipped them off", it would be the exact same scenario.

"A random person on the internet is posting creepy comments" is likely not probable cause, especially as you'd have to convince someone national like the FBI to care without a specific location. "Someone I know personally is posting creepy comments, and I've always gotten a bad vibe about their interactions with kids" is probably enough to get local cops interested enough to knock on a door.

I hope not. Unless there is evidence of a crime that has occurred or evidence that a crime is planned, they have no business (constitutionally) bothering a citizen based on that kind of tip. This is how lives are ruined when there are no victims.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#185

Post by derefr »

icebraining wrote: post #154
derefr wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let people discuss videos on other sites like twitter or reddit. Yes, exactly. I've never understood why content-host sites seem to think attaching first-party comment hosting directly to hosted content is a good idea. Why not just host what you host, and then let aggregator/discussion sites (various subreddits, various private forums, Usenet, Slack/Discord groups, etc.†) link to your thing-that-you host and host c…

The community is the valuable part; creators want people to find their stuff, users want to find interesting channels and its fans, etc. If you evict the community to an outside site, will someone care if the video links starting point to Vimeo or another video hoster instead of YouTube? Probably a bit, but not that much. Why would YouTube makes changes that make them more into a replaceable part?

I didn't suggest that you remove the community. Users have a stream of liked content, a list of subscriptions, etc. That's valuable on its own—just ask Pinterest. You don't need comments to make the experience social.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#186

Post by zanny »

l33tbro wrote: post #103
Sargos wrote: post #25

What a ham fisted reaction to the controversy. Now all content creators have to ensure that no kids are ever in their videos, which includes background footage and movie clips. I think this is a major problem with our current centralized model of the internet where giant corporations make all the rules. Large corporations have no ability to rationally judge situations or inject nuance into discussions. They simply ta…

[flagged]

If Youtubes ad revenue were negligible to the value proposition of the platform they would not be profitable and they would not give away the service for free.

> I just don't see how you get 24/7, 4k streaming without it being monetised by a centralized corp

For popular video, the cost center is bandwidth, not storage. In that case, webtorrent and ipfs are both capable answers - as long as you can overcome the initial viewership bandwidth early viewers of most online video are power users that will stay around and can be used to seed said video to the broader audience, and as the popularity wanes its likely user availability to act as seeders would also wane.

For unpopular video - esoteric, niche media - I don't think there is a good distributed answer. You want to use something like filecoin as a distributed incentivized data store but it isn't browser compatible. And nobody can come close to guaranteeing the availability of any video anyone wants to upload without resources like what Youtube has.

I guess theoretically you could have a distributed ecosystem of video hosts, akin to filecoin, but where members that have videos required act as http servers to serve the video directly. No central authority would host the video, and the actual host could be compesated by the relaying party. Of course then you are just making a really complicated bureaucratic way to effectively rent rackspace, but it would be at least a distributed one.

But at least half the Youtube centralization problem is solved, and as I demonstrated there are interesting ways to approach the later.

Of course all of these have the problem that western copyright is wholly incompatible with how digital information transfer operates, but thats a larger problem than online video, and its not really a problem you can solve with a technical solution besides repeatedly demonstrating the obsolescence and social / economic harm of the incumbent copyright regime.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#187

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

zaroth wrote: post #12

The fact that Google is ceding the fight against toxic comments on YouTube is actually pretty shocking. In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet…

I think this is indicative of their actual ability to meaningfully use this data. The hype around their algorithms and machine learning paints a picture that doesn't match reality.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#188

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

xfitm3 wrote: post #157
jawns wrote: post #9

Chris Ulmer, who runs the popular YouTube channel Special Books for Special Kids, said that comments were removed from his channel despite no evidence of unacceptable comments, and YouTube told him that if he turned comments back on, he risked his channel being deleted. [EDIT: Turns out, this is not actually the case. See child comments.] https://twitter.com/chrisulmer/status/1099366622329036801 "Last night I realize…

I might be in the minority here but I enjoy the low quality youtube comments. Most people dismiss them as cancer but the reality is a lot of people think in patterns that drive these comments. I would rather be in touch with and exposed to this rather than try to pretend it doesn’t exist. It won’t ever go away, it will just be hidden.

> I would rather be in touch with and exposed to this rather than try to pretend it doesn’t exist.

YT comments do more than just represent ideas that are out there. Sometimes they can serve as a means of disseminating harmful ideas.

Just yesterday I was looking at some YT videos about the history of the Balkan peoples and languages, where the speakers were internationally recognized historians and linguists (and who are from outside the region and don’t have a dog in any of the ethnic fights). However, the comment sections had become a place where people could post lengthy crackpot claims about their people’s history in direct contradiction to the authoritative scholar speaking in the video. Furthermore, it appeared that many people, when they came to the video, went straight to the comments section to read the other YT commenters, and thus absorb their crackpot ideas. They didn’t actually watch the video and learn any of the information in it.

I couldn’t help but feel that two decades ago, people similarly believed things that were baseless, but they had less capability to disseminate those ideas to other people.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#189

Post by derefr »

MBCook wrote: post #178
derefr wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let people discuss videos on other sites like twitter or reddit. Yes, exactly. I've never understood why content-host sites seem to think attaching first-party comment hosting directly to hosted content is a good idea. Why not just host what you host, and then let aggregator/discussion sites (various subreddits, various private forums, Usenet, Slack/Discord groups, etc.†) link to your thing-that-you host and host c…

I don’t think of Twitter for discussion as much as for feedback. Whether you liked the video, what you’d like to see the next video be about, etc. Relatively 1-way communication.

Twitter definitely works great for that use-case. But in the process, it also frequently blows up into a tire-fire of "hot takes", when [Alice from subcommunity "Skub"] takes a feedback thread between you and [Bob from subcommunity "Anti-Skub"], and retweets it to flame Bob, or to flame you for talking to Bob—and you, the content-creator, get pulled into the ensuing discussion as dozens of people keep @-ing you about it.

I think, if users couldn't see (or maybe just couldn't retweet) one-another's DMs to a checkmark'ed-account (or to any account that was "made for the purpose of feedback"—maybe we could have a separate icon for that?) it'd fix a lot of Twitter's current problems.

But really, if content creators want to get "feedback", they just need a thing that's essentially like email—a separate private channel between them and each audience-member—but where you can easily forward a whole email thread, after the fact, to the content host, and it'll appear below the content in an FAQs section. Sort of like how reviews work in some digital storefronts.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#190

Post by notatoad »

zaroth wrote: post #12

The fact that Google is ceding the fight against toxic comments on YouTube is actually pretty shocking. In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet…

What are their other options? Imagine they could, with great accuracy, predict whether somebody is going to leave a good comment or a bad one. Do they expose that to the commenter, saying they've been blocked from commenting because the algorithm thinks they're a shitty person? Imagine the optics of that...

The other option is the shadowban, where toxic commenters are hidden without notice. It sounds like a good idea, but just about led to a user revolt when Reddit tried it.

Simply turning off comment sections that have the potential to become toxic may not be the most technologically interesting solution, but it's the safest PR move.

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