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YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

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Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#251

Post by MiddleEndian »

vkou wrote: post #223
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.

> Having one company be the sole gatekeeper for the overwhelming majority of the web's video content is not a solution. Anecdotal experience: Most people discover most videos they watch through hyperlinks/word of mouth, not YT recommendations, and nothing is stopping you from self-hosting a video. YT is not like a social network (which become quadratically more valuable, and exclusive, with their number of users). Th…

Exactly. The ideal alternative to YouTube is the internet itself. Given the choice, I'd rather visit worldclownhistory.com than visit the worldclownhistory YouTube channel.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#252

Post by noego »

fzeroracer wrote: post #250
noego wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "bad actors" that you're referring to on YouTube aren't harassing anyone or inciting violence or breaking the YouTube community guidelines in any way. They are simply espousing opinions that you dislike and disagree with. Sure, YouTube is allowed to do anything they want. But suppressing an open marketplace of ideas isn't in society's best interests. If unpopular opinions were suppressed in the past, the movement…

I'd like you to take a minute and go visit sites like Voat or Gab. Just, hover around there for a bit if you haven't. Those are sites that are exactly what you want: A pure and open marketplace of ideas without any sort of censorship or rules. This is to prove a point. Which is that an open marketplace of ideas has no value in itself, because the marketplace can be very easily taken over by bad actors if you don't ex…

Clearly YouTube has been extremely valuable even before they felt the public pressure to penalize "low quality content".

Your comment about an "open marketplace of ideas having no value in itself" is very curious. The very idea of freedom of speech being a good thing is predicated on the idea that an open marketplace of ideas is a good thing. If it isn't, you may as well lobby the government to ban any and all speech which you consider corrosive.

"When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas--that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment."

― Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#253

Post by ABCLAW »

BigBlueBanjo wrote: post #201
ABCLAW wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Sure, censoring racists on YouTube means less racists on YouTube. But it does NOT mean less racists in the world.

>But it does NOT mean less racists in the world.

I don't think we have the data to make a conclusion on this point, but why is the lack of success in respect of the second point sufficient to make us want to stop the first point?

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#254

Post by krapp »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #196
seattle_spring wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Voat isn't just what you get with no censorship. It's what you get when you're a new alternative to a large incumbent: you are populated almost 100% by people banned by the incumbent. Nobody else has a reason to join your platform. It's a phenomenon that makes it even harder to compete with an incumbent social network.

Voat also isn't what you get with no censorship, because Voat censors illegal content.

Every site draws a line somewhere.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#255

Post by danans »

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…

"Free speech" as you are using that term (vs. it's actual meaning as a guard against government suppression of speech) was suppressed for decades by the media industry.

You couldn't publish the extreme content you see on the internet today in traditional newspapers and television. Mass radicalization didn't occur for all those decades.

The freedom to publish anything you want over a mass medium is something that is only as old as the internet has been generally available to the public, and the tools to amplify and target its reach are only as old as social media.

Whatever right to publish on mass social media that you think is threatened today is only a few decades old at best, but really only since lay people figured out how to use the technological tools of amplification.

You can still shout whatever you want in the town square, but you aren't entitled to the audience of any particular publisher. If those who want to see your content are displeased with that publisher's editorial decisions, they can move to a publisher that has content they want. If there are enough of them to matter, the publisher will either have to change its tactics or lose relevance.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#256

Post by CM30 »

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)

Well, the answer depends on what kind of system it is.

If its federated, by being split into such small pieces that the regulations don't really affect any particular one of them, since they're either unaffected or can remove content easily while washing their hands of what other people/communities say.

If it's decentralised, by being literally impossible to shut down, block or go after users for using. That's always been the end goal for many of these systems.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#257

Post by CM30 »

bitL wrote: post #46

Quality content takes time to create; many of the past changes in YouTube algorithms explicitly pushed for churning out low-quality content frequently and rewarded it, while seriously disadvantaging irregular quality content (that moved elsewhere in the meantime). You get what you reward.

Not just YouTube algorithms either. Almost all social media site algorithms and search engine ones (like say, Google's) seem to put a heavy emphasis on regular content rather than quality content.

And it's the main cause behind both journalism going through a massive decline in quality and so much low effort content showing up everywhere online.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#258

Post by themacguffinman »

claudiawerner wrote: post #178
themacguffinman wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 why hasn't it entranced the majority of non-liberal-arts majors? Perhaps a possible explanation is that such speech is already disallowed on many popular networks - Reddit, Twitter or Facebook, for instance. This leads to a secondary effect in which people who have never actually seen antisemitic arguments believe (rightly) that it's something they wouldn't have wanted to see anyway, so they are fine getting rid…

> Perhaps a possible explanation is that such speech is already disallowed on many popular networks - Reddit, Twitter or Facebook, for instance.

Antisemitism isn't new, it predates Reddit and Facebook and Twitter and we've already been through periods of history where antisemitism had widespread exposure in the public discourse yet democracy still defeated it. Antisemitism (and discrimination in general) is a bad idea for reasons that ordinary people can understand, and practically every democracy agrees. Evidently, we didn't need YouTube to save us from the magical techniques of persuasion that Sartre describes.

> the support shown for this conspiracy theory shown through posts and upvotes on those posts serves to show this is not as marginal of an opinion.

I don't doubt that certain places have a "healthy" amount of antisemitism, but it has no serious grip on democracy, mainstream society, or its chosen laws. There will always be people who believe in things that others consider harmful. I find it difficult to believe that you can or should realistically stop that with censorship.

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#259

Post by themacguffinman »

minikites wrote: post #187
themacguffinman wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

> 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.

I understand the distinction you were trying to explain, but I don't see how it's relevant. You're still saying "we as a society" can't do the critical democratic task of making good choices based on available information, because we're "unskilled" at information or something.

To repeat noego's original question: If that's how you feel about the average person, why do you still favor democracy?

> It is winning, hate crime rates are climbing

That's a pretty broad definition of "winning". Antisemitic ideas and actions have gone from a small minority far from the mainstream, to a slightly less small minority far from the mainstream. This is the catastrophe that you're willing to sacrifice freedom of speech to avert?

Re: YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

#260

Post by dredmorbius »

driverdan wrote: post #174

There are so many simple rules that would improve their recommended content. Examples: 1. Lower rank for clickbait titles 2. Lower rank for listicle / compilation / clip videos 3. Delist listicle / compilation videos with stolen content (most of them) 4. Lower rank for clickbait thumbnails 5. Lower rank for YT drama videos 6. Increased rank for 100% original videos

Channel blocking, with recommendation weighting.

If I get recommendations from a channel producing shit, I should be able to block the entire channel.

Sufficient good-faith blocks dock that channel's recommendation weighting.

The fact this isn't available even when logged inremoves all incentive I have to log in to YT.

(Which is already near nil.)

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