Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 556 posts

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#511

Post by mfoy_ »

oliwarner wrote: post #480
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…

> YouTube content creators are now in the unenviable position where they need to actively moderate the comments section Why is that so wrong? I understand that it's often hard work. I understand that they might want to be making videos, or product-placing, or whatever it is any given creator wants to be doing, but they're the people at the hub of their own communities. They should have some responsibility over the co…

Can someone delegate other users to act as "moderators" in the comment section of their channel's videos?

If not, it's like saying you can run a forum, but you have to moderate the whole thing yourself.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#512

Post by ionforce »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #468
raxxorrax wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Looks to me like you guys are talking past one another. disillusioned is taking the position of The Internet. If we allow these things, things will just continue to get worse and worse. Standards exist for a reason, Gresham's Law, and the rest of it. (Including some wonderful pleas for civility and kindness that I completely agree with) raxxorrax is taking the position of The Human Species. We have survived and evolv…

> Looks to me like you guys are talking past one another.

Every Internet discussion ever. I'm glad you pointed it out! The world needs more reasonable posters.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#513

Post by theNJR »

zanny wrote: post #232
theNJR wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My conclusion, after writing and thinking about this a lot lately, is that the three mega platforms are unwise, but unavoidable, due to network effects. We are going to have to make a concerted effort to somehow fix this. Hyper-niched communities, like Hacker News, work so well because we are united around shared passions and goals. Mega platforms contain many ideologies which are at odds with each other, constantly…

Facebook et al go out of their way to silo its users into small cliques of influence. On Youtube if you watch gaming videos you get ads for gaming, get recommended gaming, and aren't going to see ads for makeup or power tools. Any open access community will attract hostile actors seeking to usurp it. The problem with Facebook / Youtube / et al is that these corporations are more interested in trying to find a technic…

It's not about user siloing, it's about silencing the speech of "other". When the other is anti-vax and flight earth, that silencing seems morally right. But there are some significant unintended consequences to that.

I just finished an article trying to put this all together: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19280858

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#514

Post by eropple »

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.

Why? Why is it absurd?

You are thinking at human scales, and that is understandable, but Google doesn't think at human scales and it's only "absurd" if you think that Google has the inalienable right to the smallest possible cost of goods sold, even if that means offloading their externalities onto everyone else.

It is probably obvious that I do not. You shouldn't, either.

At Google's scale, trained-but-unskilled workers are not expensive. They are not cheap, but they are not expensive. And Google makes a lot of money. This is a common throughline from large societally-threatening, socialize-our-externalities-but-never-our-profits companies from Facebook to Google: "doing something correctly, or even trying to, would just cost too much money, so we should continue our societal-termite ways!" Until these unwatched monsters--and that is, I stress, the default state of the corporation, it is only the threat of the society that grants them their charter taking it away that adds even a speck of decency to them--prove, prove, that they somehow just can't survive by reducing incomprehensible net revenues to merely gigantic, then I will continue to operate on the understanding that they don't want to. Which I tend to think is a much, much more realistic thing.

I don't care. They fix their product or YouTube delenda est. Either is preferable to the current situation.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#515

Post by matz1 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #510
matz1 wrote: post #507

This the time for someone to make alternative platform that have different policy.

Oh yes, I imagine that a video site whose raison d'être is "we allow comments on videos of children" will be a real bastion of high-level discourse.

They don't have to stated it out blatantly.

Beside making other platform, what are other alternative though?

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#516

Post by toufiqbarhamov »

dexen wrote: post #450
toufiqbarhamov wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi dang, I’m given to understand that you’re one of the moderators here. I’ve tried to contact you three times in theee weeks through email, and this is my third time trying to get your attention in the comments, so far without a response. Is there a better way to contact you? I don’t feel good about inserting my comment in an unrelated post like this, but I’m unsure what else to do.

I've had good results sending messages to mailbox named "hn" in the "ycombinator" domain, in "com" TLD.

I’ve tried that for three weeks without a response.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#517

Post by oliwarner »

mfoy_ wrote: post #511
oliwarner wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> YouTube content creators are now in the unenviable position where they need to actively moderate the comments section Why is that so wrong? I understand that it's often hard work. I understand that they might want to be making videos, or product-placing, or whatever it is any given creator wants to be doing, but they're the people at the hub of their own communities. They should have some responsibility over the co…

Can someone delegate other users to act as "moderators" in the comment section of their channel's videos? If not, it's like saying you can run a forum, but you have to moderate the whole thing yourself.

You can. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7023301

And again, nobody is forcing you to enable comments. If you can't handle the workload, the arguments, the very worst of humanity, etc, just turn them off.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#519

Post by _Understated_ »

oliwarner wrote: post #508
JohannesH wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If youtube can determine when to delete a channel due to bad comments wouldn't they also be able to just delete the comments?

Sure, but getting people to keep their bedrooms clean serves as an additional metric for YouTube. You can see who's putting in the time and effort to keep things clean, as well as another metric to rate the content they're uploading. If you upload videos of kids and you're sitting back and letting paedos write this weird shit, you probably shouldn't be making, let alone uploading videos of children. Just as if your c…

I dunno... I see what you are getting at but it also lets Google off the hook here.

In my mind it's the Broken Window Theory [0].

It's Google's house. Google's windows. I think they need to take more responsibility for cleaning up.

It's not the creator's fault if pedo's show up and comment on their stuff at a scale they can't possibly control.

There's another side to this coin!

There is a part of me that asks "Why are parents uploading pictures and videos of their children to the internet for the public to ogle over?".

The cynical part of me says "What did they expect to happen?"

It all comes back to money though... Google have had this problem for a while but their bottom line wasn't threatened until recently... let's face it: They don't really give a shit until money's involved.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#520

Post by FilterSweep »

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…

This is a company that recommends you nazi videos just for watching anything political.

I think they’ve given up on ethics and the greater fight for what’s right long ago.

Post reply on HN