YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#151

Post by fireattack » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 5:44 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #101

skilled wrote: post #51

The Trending page has been listing the same people over and over and over again for the last 3 years. It's shameful, pathetic, and makes the platform feel extremely biased. Seriously though. This is unacceptable and overly controlled. Not to mention that those people over the last 3 years post borderline brainwash content without any connection to a real audience. It's pretty sad to see YouTube turn into something li…

> The Trending page has been listing the same people over and over and over again for the last 3 years. Skytube (android app for YT that I like because it allows shutting off the screen while playing) does call it "Recommended", and that feels more accurate. I agree that the Trending page is terrible. When I was more active on youtube, I hid it from my browser because I often couldn't resist the temptation to open it…

Not sure what you mean by "Skytube [...] does call it ('Trending') 'recommended'", because YouTube have both "Recommended" and "Trending" and they're two different things.

Does Skytube not distinguish them?

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#152

Post by jdietrich » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 5:44 PM UTC

legohead wrote: post #27

These 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…

YouTube already have a huge staff of human moderators, probably in the tens of thousands. Moderating content in a consistent and fair manner is essentially impossible, largely because nobody agrees on what should be kept off the platform.

Is the image of a female nipple pornographic or empowering? Is the image of a murder victim terrorist propaganda or reportage? Is a political rant hate speech or free speech? There is no universal answer to any of these questions, least of all when we consider the huge difference in cultural attitudes across an international user base.

I can highly recommend the documentary The Internet’s Dirtiest Secrets: The Cleaners, which illustrates these paradoxes with brilliant clarity by intercutting between the moderators and the moderated.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#153

Post by sschueller » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #19

Frankly, I hope YouTube (and Google in general) dramatically overdo it with the censorship, "curation", and deplatforming of "irresponsible" content, purely so that it forces an independent, non-corporate model to be developed. Having one company be the sole gatekeeper for the overwhelming majority of the web's video content is not a solution.

Solutions are being worked on like peertube: https://joinpeertube.org

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#154

Post by blihp » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #52

bitxbit wrote: post #25

Please just give us the ability to blacklist channels. That’d increase usability by 10x for me.

AFAIK you can do that? Hit the menu on a video recommendation, "Not Interested" -> "Tell Us Why" -> "I'm not interested in this channel". IMO, though, blacklisting has been mostly proven to be insufficient. If you block, say, noted chud Sargon of Akkad, that doesn't mean that another half-dozen "Rationalist" "Thinkers" Who Just Happen To Be Chuds won't be recommended to you as well.

Not sure if my experience is typical or not but that hasn't helped me one bit. When I tried the various signals you listed, that just seemed to encourage YouTube to show me even more videos/channels similar to the ones I wasn't interested in. It seemed to be more a signal of 'hey, this person will help us identify more videos like this' than 'let's not show this person any more of this type of content'

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#155

Post by stcredzero » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

Mirioron wrote: post #115

krapp wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube is so capricious with demonetizing user content that it's become a meme, and content creators have to resort to merchandise and Patreon to survive. They're definitely not giving away anywhere near half of their ad revenue.

YouTube takes 45% of the ad revenue in a video, the creator of it takes 55%. If a video is demonetized then it won't have ads on it. This means that YouTube won't make any money on that video. It's in YouTube's best interests not to demonetize videos. They do it, because they want to avoid bad PR and avoid advertisers from doing yet another boycott. I don't see how YouTube is not giving away half of their ad revenue.…

They do it, because they want to avoid bad PR and avoid advertisers from doing yet another boycott.

A part of YouTube has been captured by activists, and a lot of that policy is warped to their ends. Often, this is political. Often, it's arbitrary abuse of power in service of this or that "Internet slap fight." Either way, it's looks bad to someone who can see the big picture.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#156

Post by stcredzero » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #132

kzcqt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A competitor would need to operate at youtube's scale for it to be considered a serious competitor. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation, given that websites like Dailymotion and Vimeo exist, but no "youtube stars" use them.

I don't really think so. A turnkey "host your own video site" would pretty much qualify a competitor -- I'm far more loyal to the people I watch on YouTube/Twitch than the platforms themselves. If they moved to their own site it wouldn't matter too much to me assuming I still had a way to get it on my TV.

But in the long term, virality, discovery, and monetization matter a great deal. YouTube could simply wait for current creators to become stale, and absolutely control the future of discourse.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#157

Post by cowwithbeef » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

enitihas wrote: post #87

keiferski wrote: post #19

Frankly, I hope YouTube (and Google in general) dramatically overdo it with the censorship, "curation", and deplatforming of "irresponsible" content, purely so that it forces an independent, non-corporate model to be developed. Having one company be the sole gatekeeper for the overwhelming majority of the web's video content is not a solution.

I don't think any new platform is going to be able to compete with YouTube at all with the current regulations. How will any new platform comply with new EU copyright laws, or remove unlawful videos as quickly as YouTube? (e.g the unfortunate New Zealand terrorist attack)

I already prefer bitchute to youtube overall. Somehow they're staying alive. There's no need to get completely black pilled on the future of video hosting. We have hope.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#158

Post by stcredzero » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 5:49 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #99

kzcqt wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitch is not a competitor of youtube. Twitch is specialised in live shows. They don't let you upload videos, and they delete old videos of past broadcasts pretty often.

If user attention is split between Twitch and Youtube then they are a competitor. Same for Netflix. Same for Pornhub. Same for Vine when that was a thing.

If user attention is split between Twitch and Youtube then they are a competitor. Same for Netflix. Same for Pornhub. Same for Vine when that was a thing.

But if you focus attention to political commentary specifically, then YouTube is clearly the dominant giant. In that context, they are a defacto monopoly.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#159

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 5:49 PM UTC

enitihas wrote: post #96

Mirioron wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't. I suspect that that kind of regulatory capture is the point of these laws in the first place.

I don't think so. Most people ( and a lot of people on HN) really believe that online platforms should be able to suppress such unlawful videos. And it's not a completely unreasonable position.

[deleted]

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#160

Post by gmiller123456 » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

jatsign wrote: post #4

I wonder if they could look at groups of users who up vote "bad" videos (as marked by their own internal reviewers), see what else they up vote, cluster those videos, and down promote them in their algorithm. IOW use the users who like "bad" videos to help find other "bad" videos via an algorithm.

This really only works in a low volume situation. There's about 500,000 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every day, so employees would only be able to actually watch an insignificant fraction of that per day. Additionally, they're unlikely qualified to judge whether a video is actually good or bad. They can judge the sound quality, or videography, but unless you're well versed in the field the video is about, it's pretty much impossible to determine if a video is actually offering novel or good information.

Additionally, the bots upvoting content are going to have several thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of bots. So detecting the circle is going to be very difficult. Even more so if you consider a lot of legitimate users will have the same taste and watch a lot of the same videos.