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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

#451

Post by riffraff »

raxxorrax wrote: post #447
disillusioned wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that there's an element of validation and indoctrination that is a serious concern here. In addition to an overall significant lowering of the discourse around things by allowing garbage quality trolls and other horrible comments, and in addition to bullying, aggressive behavior, stalking, and other things that are broadly considered unpleasant, this kind of behavior breeds more of this behavior. Consider som…

I think there is no evidence of the mechanisms you describe. That could have been a text written about books shortly after Gutenberg. The kids will flee the garden eventually anyway and "allowable discourse" is quite subjective. You will never create a child-proof youtube. Those kids will eclipse your abilities and understanding at some point. It would be better to create a separate platform

don't we have decades of evidence from online communities showing that?

From usenet to reddit, many communities that tolerate abusive conduct degenerate, as the "bad behaviour" is normalized and becomes accepted.

The fact that you can't create a child-proof YT doesn't mean you shouldn't strive to keep negative behaviour at bay.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#452

Post by sgt »

It seems YouTube is doing a lot these days to the detriment of creators and vloggers. YouTube is by far the best platform out there for posting videos, but are there any viable alternatives? I think we need another YouTube. Vimeo comes to mind but it's a bit fringe (mostly weird videos), and I'm specifically looking for creator videos. Maybe this is a startup opportunity for an eager HN-er, although I suspect running a video site is insanely expensive.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#453

Post by codetrotter »

raxxorrax wrote: post #447
disillusioned wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that there's an element of validation and indoctrination that is a serious concern here. In addition to an overall significant lowering of the discourse around things by allowing garbage quality trolls and other horrible comments, and in addition to bullying, aggressive behavior, stalking, and other things that are broadly considered unpleasant, this kind of behavior breeds more of this behavior. Consider som…

I think there is no evidence of the mechanisms you describe. That could have been a text written about books shortly after Gutenberg. The kids will flee the garden eventually anyway and "allowable discourse" is quite subjective. You will never create a child-proof youtube. Those kids will eclipse your abilities and understanding at some point. It would be better to create a separate platform

> I think there is no evidence of the mechanisms you describe.

Which part? If we are talking about this part:

>> I think that there's an element of validation and indoctrination that is a serious concern here.

Then I think there is evidence of that being true.

Take for example “incels”. They gather in online forums where they construct a worldview built entirely on misogyny, entitlement and hate. The ideas they are spreading among themselves are much worse than probably most of those people would come up with on their own. In their echo chambers they validate these ideas to one-another and make them seem acceptable.

https://www.ft.com/content/d71f3156-f94d-11e8-af46-2022a0b02...

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#454

Post by keerthiko »

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #445
keerthiko wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not the first person to think this, and some even put it into practice [0] hoping it would frontload forum moderation, but couldn't follow through with it [1]. As another commenter pointed out, facebook (and facebook-based commenting) has plenty of trolls in public comment sections. Anonymity is not what makes people jerks. More real reasons why internet forums enable trolls include: - the asynchronicity of n…

RL involves ... I would add the most powerful (because most feared) form of feedback available in face-to-face communication: physical violence.

I intentionally didn't list that, because that's something else that's often cited as a reason why people aren't jerks in real life compared to the internet, but I don't think that's true in most civilized cultures.

If I'm a jerk in public, outside of racist/prejudiced violence or a mentally unstable antagonist, I'm not at serious risk of being physically attacked unless I start breaking laws or pose a notable threat to someone else. Because about 90% of the less edgy side of trolling (just being annoying or verbally mean, mostly) won't really draw physical violence in meatspace, you'll just be treated like a jerk or risk being politely asked to shut up or leave by an authority figure. Yes there's a risk of physical violence, but it's overplayed as a reason why people aren't trolls in real life as much as they are online, and I think it's significantly superseded by the things I mentioned, and probably other things too, which stop people from being jerks far before physical violence needs to be brought to the scene.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#455

Post by coldtea »

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.

YouTube comments is the only real democratic and open dialog on the web.

Everything else is one's or another's ideas for "right" dialog imposed.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#456

Post by parasubvert »

dbdjfjrjvebd wrote: post #412
colechristensen wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the reasons I think anonymity on the Internet is a bad thing. Not that I am saying it should be banned, but it should not be the norm. Much of the toxicity simply would not happen, could be prosecuted, or could be filtered if a "real person" attribute was widely available.

Ironic you would say this on a low toxicity anonymous forum.

HN has some pretty toxic behavior, depending on the topic. it’s not as egregious as others due to moderation and flagging but definitely not low.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#457

Post by parasubvert »

coldtea wrote: post #455
xfitm3 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

YouTube comments is the only real democratic and open dialog on the web. Everything else is one's or another's ideas for "right" dialog imposed.

That’s pretty obviously false. I think you mean “anarchic”.

Democracy would allow the majority’s idea for “right” dialogue and would censor minority ideas. Which is what moderation does.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#458

Post by pferde »

themacguffinman wrote: post #433
eropple wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are pressuring YouTube to hire and train moderators to competently and soberly evaluate context and take intelligent action. Nobody is pressuring YouTube to blow channels away because one of their ML algorithms hit a probability threshold.

It's simply absurd for YouTube to manually moderate comments at the scale they currently operate. If you force them to do that, it won't be profitable, and you'll end up with YouTube blowing channels away because they can't afford to host them anyway.

So, quality instead of quantity? How horrible.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#459

Post by cribbles »

theon144 wrote: post #439
Posibyte wrote: post #261

This seems like a ham-fisted solution does it not? Channels like ChadTronic play on the nostalgia of being a kid back in the '80s and '90s, yet AFAIK has been unable to enable comments on any of his videos. The weird, funny comments are a big part of the experience in those kinds of videos. Some tropes of the show itself have been built around the comment section. Would it make more sense to instead target the patter…

>Would it make more sense to instead target the patterns used by predatory commentators rather than shutting down the system completely? Terrible, terrible idea. Transfer this to the "real world", and see how it plays out - let's build a system that will analyze people's behavior and penalize them on whether it classifies them as pedophiles or not! This will surely protect the children. Moderation is a notoriously to…

>Transfer this to the "real world", and see how it plays out

This isn't the real world though. This is, tentatively, "pattern match on videos uploaded by non-verified creators with little or no uploaded content, featuring primarily or entirely children, with an unusual level of timestamps in the comments, in an unusual number of playlists that also fit this description."

The main challenge here is more meta: how do you discover these videos before the engagement identifies them as such. I think that's why YouTube went with the overreaching "throw a NN at the problem and just flag anything with kids" solution.

Probably wasn't the best solution from an engineering perspective, as many here have pointed out. But it may have been the smartest thing to do from a PR perspective.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#460

Post by dbdjfjrjvebd »

odessacubbage wrote: post #373
colechristensen wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the reasons I think anonymity on the Internet is a bad thing. Not that I am saying it should be banned, but it should not be the norm. Much of the toxicity simply would not happen, could be prosecuted, or could be filtered if a "real person" attribute was widely available.

you need only look as far back as the covington incident to see that 'real people' are hardly inhibited from vile and abusive behavior just as long as they believe themselves to be on the right side of the mob. this has been the case since time immemorial. in my admittedly anecdotal experience, fully anon communities are far more respectful & a have a better standard of decorum than communities with high standards of…

Not sure why this was flag killed. The Covington incident is a good example. A controversial event occurred and everyone from every 'side' was inflammatory and no one maintained civil standards.

EDIT I guess flagging indicates part of the problem. Society is so busy screaming at ourselves that the only thing reasonable people think they can do is check out of controversial topics.

EDIT Would any downvoters care to engage about why they disagree?

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