Here is a graph of how this thread trended: http://hnrankings.info/20709563/ .
Why would it do that? Did some moderator intervene?
YouTube’s LGBTQ Problem Is a Business-Model Problem
91–100 of 180 posts
Re: YouTube’s LGBTQ Problem Is a Business-Model Problem
#92There's an assumption if you use human raters, you won't have false negatives or positives, but even human beings disagree over how to categorize speech, what's homophobic, what's legitimate sarcasm or irony, what is violent content. In fact, on top of human raters exhibiting classification problems in the face of ambiguity, there is also the issue of bias. Radiolab on NPR had a great series on Facebook's human censo…
The extreme/disgusting outliers (about which we reasonably can agree on) can be caught by an computer. That way, human beings can assess the (arguably) many gray areas.
Re: YouTube’s LGBTQ Problem Is a Business-Model Problem
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
We may be hitting the point where societal impact is great enough that people don't necessarily accept "We can't do that at scale" as an out.
Indeed. Given the vast wealth Google etc have accumulated its clear that actually, they could afford to do it, and still make good, but not astounding, profits. The rationale “we can’t make as much money as we’d like to if we followed the law” just won’t wash.
> Given the vast wealth Google etc have accumulated its clear that actually, they could afford to do it, and still make good, but not astounding, profits.
Citation very much needed.
Re: YouTube’s LGBTQ Problem Is a Business-Model Problem
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
All countries already have laws regulating speech to various degrees of freedom. Google's need to comply with these laws is part of the genesis for the moderation (e.g. copyright protection, child pornography). In fact, aggressive government laws for censorship are why Google chooses not to operate in China. The topic at hand is about monetization of ads -- the "acceptability" of the content is determined by the ad b…
Google was operating in China just fine even with censorship, they left because China started hacking gmail accounts. Some countries have much more rule of law than others.
I think that's an oversimplification of the history. After the email hacking, Google decided to stop censoring in retaliation, and redirected traffic to HK. Eventually, they were blocked, and a few years layer, practically all Google services were blocked. It's not like Gmail was "pulled" from China, the GFW blocks it.
Sooner or later, even if Search was still being censored, the other services would probably be blocked, or have unacceptable conditions imposed on them. The amount of effort to make YouTube and Gmail bend to PRC desires I think would have been a bridge too far. Once Xi Jinping took office especially.
I mean, I've seen super mild videos on Bilibili, where say a Mainland athlete or contestant loses to a Taiwanese one get removed. YouTube would be overloaded quite quickly by 50 cent army takedown requests.
Re: YouTube’s LGBTQ Problem Is a Business-Model Problem
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google was operating in China just fine even with censorship, they left because China started hacking gmail accounts. Some countries have much more rule of law than others.
I think that's an oversimplification of the history. After the email hacking, Google decided to stop censoring in retaliation, and redirected traffic to HK. Eventually, they were blocked, and a few years layer, practically all Google services were blocked. It's not like Gmail was "pulled" from China, the GFW blocks it. Sooner or later, even if Search was still being censored, the other services would probably be bloc…
YouTube was already blocked when google left China (to say, it was never in China), gmail was never hosted in China and the hacking occurred on servers in Hong Kong.
There is some pretty crazy stuff on Chinese video sharing platforms, censorship in China is arbitrary and selective. That alone would make it very difficult for a western company to operate a media company in china.
Re: YouTube’s LGBTQ Problem Is a Business-Model Problem
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
We may be hitting the point where societal impact is great enough that people don't necessarily accept "We can't do that at scale" as an out.
Indeed. Given the vast wealth Google etc have accumulated its clear that actually, they could afford to do it, and still make good, but not astounding, profits. The rationale “we can’t make as much money as we’d like to if we followed the law” just won’t wash.
That's a very naive approach to understand how company valuations work.
They also need to not censor so much that it's a publisher and maintain themselves as a platform legally.
Re: YouTube’s LGBTQ Problem Is a Business-Model Problem
#97Paywall
Re: YouTube’s LGBTQ Problem Is a Business-Model Problem
#98This problem wouldn't exist if there was no "moderation" (which is censorship) at all.
I hope after ditching war on drugs, war on sex/nudity will be next.
The censorship artist has to do on their creations just to pass FB moderation is ridiculous. Like they are literally blurring the nipples only. Whom does it help? It just destroys the art.
And I still cannot wrap my head around why nudity is so vilified and violence so glorified. It should be the other way around.
Re: YouTube’s LGBTQ Problem Is a Business-Model Problem
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What about crowdsourcing efforts? Why are user flags insufficient? Because this will devolve into different groups flagging their opponents' videos. This will especially hurt the voices of minorities and other vulnerable populations.
What about attaching a 'reputation' score to the flagger? E.g. something like: - if there are sufficient flags, trigger a moderator review - flaggers who correctly flagged content get +1 score or -1 score if not that would make it harder for people to consistently flag content maliciously. Like age-old moderation systems such as calling 911 or police. If you abuse calling 911, you can get fined. I imagine this has be…
People were asking such questions since at least 1997. Slashdot had the (imo, great) idea of rotating various voting privileges randomly. Raph Levien's Advogato used a network of trusted users and certification which was designed to be resistant against attack. Kuro5hin also had some novel ideas about what was needed to create robust high quality discussion (which turned out to be an obvious failure, but potentially something one could learn from).
But at some point, sites decided that experimenting with stuff like that was unimportant compared to just bringing in more users. Letting everyone vote all the time obviously has huge issues, but it's emotionally satisfying to downvote, so it keeps users engaged.
The people most prone to dominate the site with voting on everything and coordinating efforts, are also the ones which will complain most loudly if they don't dominate the discussion. So just give them what they want.
It worked. Experimenting with self-moderation mechanisms went extremely out of fashion.
Re: YouTube’s LGBTQ Problem Is a Business-Model Problem
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. Given the vast wealth Google etc have accumulated its clear that actually, they could afford to do it, and still make good, but not astounding, profits. The rationale “we can’t make as much money as we’d like to if we followed the law” just won’t wash.
> Given the vast wealth Google etc have accumulated its clear that actually, they could afford to do it, and still make good, but not astounding, profits. Citation very much needed.
You need citation to prove that Google is rich?