What a dystopian nightmare the internet is turning into. Anything that isn't in line with "right thought" isn't Responsible and is therefore hidden away? How did we end up here? How did Silicon Valley go from a place focused on ideas and building the future to generating systematic censorship and endless puritanical moral panic? We badly need some new blood guiding tech development.
YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content
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Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content
#22Honestly, it's pretty ridiculous that YouTube is being pressured to police the content on its platform. What worries me far more than extremist videos on YouTube, is the idea of a mega-corporation exerting outsized influence over the opinions we are exposed to. Is our democracy really so fragile that it cannot survive an open marketplace of ideas?
Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content
#23It this point, they should just be regulated by the various world governments. Though I don't like a world where google can override a given countries law, or googles tries to solve the issue for union of all the worlds government laws. I also don't like the possibilites of hidden metrics driving things that have such huge social implications.
Exactly. If things keep going at this rate Google and Facebook will be shaping and distorting reality for a large portion of the population.
If 95% of your internet traffic goes through a search box or algorithm... And you spend 6 hours a day on the internet... And you're not savvy to these issues (as our readers are)... That's almost 50% of waking life spent consuming manufactured data which your brain (on some level) interprets as "real" without question. Terrifying.
Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content
#24What a dystopian nightmare the internet is turning into. Anything that isn't in line with "right thought" isn't Responsible and is therefore hidden away? How did we end up here? How did Silicon Valley go from a place focused on ideas and building the future to generating systematic censorship and endless puritanical moral panic? We badly need some new blood guiding tech development.
Why is it a dystopian nightmare for Youtube to curate its content according to "quality", but it wasn't a dystopian nightmare for Youtube to curate its content to maximize engagement for ad revenue?
Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content
#25Please just give us the ability to blacklist channels. That’d increase usability by 10x for me.
Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content
#26What a dystopian nightmare the internet is turning into. Anything that isn't in line with "right thought" isn't Responsible and is therefore hidden away? How did we end up here? How did Silicon Valley go from a place focused on ideas and building the future to generating systematic censorship and endless puritanical moral panic? We badly need some new blood guiding tech development.
The internet has operated that way forever. Most hosts haven't allowed porn since the beginning of time. You're still free to make your own video hosting website if you'd like. Liveleak still exists.
Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content
#27These companies focusing so much on algorithms, when the best solution is to simply use actual humans.
I've done a fair amount of work on trying to detect and deal with spammers, fraudulent activity and such. Nothing beats a human eye.
My most successful approach has been to filter out the super obvious stuff, then send the rest to a queue that is kept an eye on by humans. A small staff can easily fight back against bullshit. Yes, YouTube is orders of magnitude above what I've dealt with, but I'm sure their smart engineers can filter out the majority of stuff.
It's painfully obvious that YouTube lacks human eyes on things. That, or they lack direction and empowerment of their employees.
Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content
#28What a dystopian nightmare the internet is turning into. Anything that isn't in line with "right thought" isn't Responsible and is therefore hidden away? How did we end up here? How did Silicon Valley go from a place focused on ideas and building the future to generating systematic censorship and endless puritanical moral panic? We badly need some new blood guiding tech development.
It’s not hidden away, I just don’t think most people care for it.
Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content
#29Honestly, it's pretty ridiculous that YouTube is being pressured to police the content on its platform. What worries me far more than extremist videos on YouTube, is the idea of a mega-corporation exerting outsized influence over the opinions we are exposed to. Is our democracy really so fragile that it cannot survive an open marketplace of ideas?
It's not an open marketplace and each side is is fighting a different fight:
>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content
#30> The video service generates most of its revenue through advertising and the business works best when as many people as possible are spending as much time as possible on YouTube. Hence executives’ obsession with engagement stats. Adding murkier metrics to the mix could crimp ad revenue growth. This is the core point of it. I've been critical of youtube for some time, but if they are willing to forgo some revenue gro…
I think a key thing overlooked is "human reviewers who would train its software..." which usually means throwing out it as a human interface task to mechanical turk and retrieving the result, then throwing the data into the input of the machine learning algorithm. This is not the same as having a human look at videos.