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

YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 293 posts

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#181

Post by ses1984 »

luckylion wrote: post #104
ses1984 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally any algorithm that simple is easy to abuse, you need to integrate any algorithm with fraud detection and user trustworthiness assessment.

Either Twitter figured that they don't care enough, or it's not that easy. Mass-flagging is still a thing they haven't solved, and what are you going to do? Kick out your users because they're trying to manipulate your powerful algorithm to do their bidding? There's easier ways to make your audience find a new platform.

It's not that easy, the cost of doing it right is astronomical and most users don't care.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#182

Post by diminoten »

seattle_spring wrote: post #164
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.

> 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. Just like people got what they wished for when Voat was spawned from Reddit?

Yeah, I'm all about the idea behind letting people express themselves without being censored, but the stark reality is that the people pushing the envelope here are saying some pretty damaging things about other people in a hurtful and escalating way.

I don't know how to square these two thoughts.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#183

Post by lilactown »

themacguffinman wrote: post #168
lilactown wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, those should be prohibited by law. I think that genocide should also be on that list. And youtube can (and IMO should) continue to prevent the rest. Death, gore, genocide, fascism, violence, etc. do not belong in general public discourse. There's always some other website to post snuff porn. I don't agree with the way that youtube has applied their guidelines for removing content in general, but I do generally…

> Yeah, those should be prohibited by law Then try to get it passed. Write to your representative. If it's so obvious that it should be prohibited by law, then you should have no trouble finding support. I suspect what you'll find instead is that people don't think it should be prohibited by law, and prefer to instead threaten and pressure a more vulnerable and less democratic entity like YouTube into carrying out th…

I think the things I've outlined are pretty popular TBH.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#184

Post by ABCLAW »

stcredzero wrote: post #169
marbletiles wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Christchurch shooter had no more right of access to a privately-owned live-streaming platform with an audience in the millions than he had right of access to a broadcast TV network. Saying so (which I suspect is what OP intended) is not "throwing out Free Speech" You can tease apart the right to say something with the right to have it signal-boosted along the way, and if you want to save Free Speech you're going…

no more right of access to a privately-owned live-streaming platform with an audience in the millions than he had right of access to a broadcast TV network If the government now has the right to say, "piece of content X -- not allowed" arbitrarily and with no process and rational standard, then Free Speech is simply broken. An event of that magnitude is now history. A free society should not be rewriting history. Peo…

>If the government now has the right to say, "piece of content X -- not allowed" arbitrarily and with no process and rational standard, then Free Speech is simply broken.

The key part of this is the word arbitrary. You can't take 'anything down for no reason', but you certainly can take things down. Even the most robust version of free speech protections have carve outs.

The government can prevent you from branding your email product 'Gmail', they can censure you for shouting fire in a crowded theater, they can go after you if you issue a tweet which lies about how many cars your car company is going to build in the next quarter, etc.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#185

Post by ABCLAW »

stcredzero wrote: post #170
enitihas wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowhere did I say Government should be able to throw out free speech. I am just acknowledging what I have observed. If you think my observations are incorrect, please feel free to go through the relevant HN threads (e.g, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19414591 ) You will find a lot of comments saying such censorship is needed. I agree with you that free speech is important, and I think this contradiction betwee…

Suppressing Free Speech creates more radicalization. If certain radicals are really bad, then more Free Speech ultimately gets rid of them. Suppression just gives them more ammunition. This is the lesson from across just about all of history. In 2019, governments and big tech have essentially been tricked into replacing societal backlash against nonsense with societal backlash against suppression. What governments an…

>Suppressing Free Speech creates more radicalization.

Most quantitative reviews on deplatforming and and other social moderation efforts have shown the opposite.

Maybe in the long-term social view of the issue you're right but on a platform by platform basis this doesn't seem to be the case.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#186

Post by canada_dry »

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…

> best solution is to simply use actual humans

Gee, how many humans might it take to review the >400 hours of video uploaded every minute? (source: https://www.tubefilter.com/2015/07/26/youtube-400-hours-cont...)

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#187

Post by minikites »

themacguffinman wrote: post #148
minikites wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren't dumb, but I think people have poor information literacy skills, which is linked to the decline in liberal arts education in favor of the emphasis on STEM education. The lack of these skills leads to people being unable to distinguish between "sound argument" vs "intimidate and disconcert" (again, not related to their intelligence, this is a developed skill). https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10858.html…

So not dumb-dumb, but dumb for all intents and purposes of making decisions in a democracy? What's the difference? At the core of your argument is the idea that people in a democracy aren't able to do their singular duty: make a reasonable choice based on available information, so they need to be coddled and only fed information that is "fair", "fair" as determined by liberal arts majors I guess. And if anti semitic…

>So not dumb-dumb, but dumb for all intents and purposes of making decisions in a democracy? What's the difference?

The difference I tried to explain is the difference between dumb and unskilled. We as a society don't value the skills of information and media literacy and those skills are withering in the population at large. We could easily address this problem if we chose to do so.

>And if anti semitic arguments are so unfairly effective, why hasn't it won?

It is winning, hate crime rates are climbing: https://www.hrc.org/blog/new-fbi-statistics-show-alarming-in...

>Bias-motivated crimes based on race, religion, disability and gender all increased. The FBI reported that anti-Black hate crimes increased by 16 percent, from 1,739 incidents in 2016 to 2,013 incidents in 2017. Hate crimes targeting Black people represented 28 percent of all reported hate crimes in 2017. Every other racial and ethnic group also saw increases in the number of reported hate crimes in 2017.

>Additionally, hate crimes motivated by anti-religious bias increased 23 percent, largely driven by a 37 percent increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes, which constituted the majority of religion motivated hate crimes. Hate crimes motivated by bias against people with disabilities increased by a disturbing 66 percent and hate crimes motivated by gender bias increased by 48 percent.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#188

Post by amelius »

sschueller wrote: post #153
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

Ok, but what happens when somebody uploads a video that (by accident or not) contains copyrighted content?

Who is liable? The original uploader? All the peers who are hosting it? The viewers?

And how quickly can the content be removed?

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#189

Post by marbletiles »

jimmy1 wrote: post #165
marbletiles wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Christchurch shooter had no more right of access to a privately-owned live-streaming platform with an audience in the millions than he had right of access to a broadcast TV network. Saying so (which I suspect is what OP intended) is not "throwing out Free Speech" You can tease apart the right to say something with the right to have it signal-boosted along the way, and if you want to save Free Speech you're going…

You conflate regulatory expectation with consumer expectation. Most people don't want to see things they don't like. So they don't tune into channels, (YT or otherwise) that play things they don't like to see. The marke corrects itself over time. Broadcast stations aren't refusing to show that content because of a law, but because they are making a business decision.

I think the problem is exactly the opposite: people are now getting way too much of the content they can’t help but like, and that in way too many cases turns out to be deliberately polarising and extreme content.

The marketplace of ideas no more leads to good content choices than the marketplace of food leads to healthy eating.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#190

Post by kadendogthing »

Well the reality is that you don't get quality content generally when you allow people to publish whatever they want. Everyone has an opinion and viewpoint. That doesn't make them qualified opinions or viewpoints, and definitely doesn't make them worth considering. People have significantly mistaken and waaay over estimated the benefits of mass media in the hands of your everyday person.

It's becoming pretty clear the cost is not worth any perceived benefits (because I don't think you can really point to any benefits such models have given us).

And no, moderating and editorializing content is not dystopian. Whenever someone has that talking point it's really a case of someone read 1984 (and sometimes didn't actually read it) and decided to apply it to everything with absolutely no discretion and absolutely no respect for what the book actually said.

Post reply on HN