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I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

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Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#121

Post by csallen »

colinmhayes wrote: post #113
colechristensen wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're living in fear go find a paid platform where you are the customer instead of the product. If you aren't making enough money on YouTube to be able to afford paying someone to host your content and provide better, paid customer service, then you have to consider that the risk of being on a mostly automated, poorly supported platform is the only thing keeping you from losing money, or in other words, is the so…

Youtube has locked viewers in. If a content creator leaves youtube no one consumes their content, so this isn't really an option.

It's quite possible to create content that survives and thrives without depending on some large, proprietary platform like YouTube. Happens all the time.

Of course it's not easy. You have to figure out growth for yourself, and most indie businesses and projects fail. Then again, so do most YouTube channels. So it's up to you to choose the indie path or choose YouTube.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#122

Post by Klinky »

colechristensen wrote: post #111
tekkk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they are really doing their best. If other Google's support forums are any indicator of their effort, they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this. Which makes sense from the SV software engineer perspective, but really is unfathomable to the normal user who then has to live in fear if some malicious teenager decides to ruin their channel. I…

If you're living in fear go find a paid platform where you are the customer instead of the product. If you aren't making enough money on YouTube to be able to afford paying someone to host your content and provide better, paid customer service, then you have to consider that the risk of being on a mostly automated, poorly supported platform is the only thing keeping you from losing money, or in other words, is the so…

How does one find ban/review rates for YouTube? Wouldn't this be internal data? Can you provide a link to a public datasource that shows shows outcomes of YouTube's banning/takedown and review processes?

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#123

Post by colinmhayes »

colechristensen wrote: post #119
colinmhayes wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube has locked viewers in. If a content creator leaves youtube no one consumes their content, so this isn't really an option.

Then complain about Google's monopoly, not its moderation inadequacies, and consider that creators unwilling to leave are the source of the monopoly, not necessarily its victims, especially if they're not even trying other platforms. I guess I don't like the entitlement/blame cycle where people who help create a problem complain about the consequences.

The monopoly is due to threshold of creators being on youtube. A single channel leaving would make no difference. I'd love to see a movement away from youtube, but that would require a movement with serous organization, which creators mostly aren't capable of doing.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#124

Post by UncleMeat »

autokad wrote: post #49
gkoberger wrote: post #12

This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem. I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1] It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge…

I dont feel sorry for them at all. > "I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough" I dont want these companies touching false/immoral take downs. who are they to decide? sorry, I dont want these people in charge of the moral police. illegal stuff, like revenge porn makes sense. > "YouTube is doing it's best to blend automa…

> HIRE SOME PEOPLE. they have huge margins, it would take very little for these companies to hire some people to review content.

How many people? Youtube is probably the biggest nexus of complaints, but apps on Play and the Chrome Extension store are also up there.

Consider what it would cost to manually vet all apps on Play against even the most uncontroversial malware and data abuse policy. Malicious authors are clever and apps are big. It'd take a trained reverse engineer days to truly vet a single app. How many millions of apps are on the app store? How many different versions of those apps are there? You are looking at an army of people being paid six figures to figure out if apps are doing nasty things.

Now consider how pissed people get that things like domestic abuse apps (often hiding as child monitoring apps) exist on the app store. Or plenty of other objectionable crap. If you want to tackle any of this (you don't but lots of people do) then now you've got a whole set of complex contextual problems for enforcement.

It would take a lot more than "very little" to review content.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#125

Post by UncleMeat »

craigds wrote: post #80
jdminhbg wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three hundred hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute [0]. There's no amount of "excessive profit" that can scale humans to review it all. [0] https://merchdope.com/youtube-stats/

No one's saying not to have algorithms involved at all. Humans don't have to review all of the content, just the stuff the algorithms are unsure about, as well as takedown/review requests.

That's already how it works.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#126

Post by rezonant »

tekkk wrote: post #59
gkoberger wrote: post #12

This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem. I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1] It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge…

I don't think they are really doing their best. If other Google's support forums are any indicator of their effort, they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this. Which makes sense from the SV software engineer perspective, but really is unfathomable to the normal user who then has to live in fear if some malicious teenager decides to ruin their channel. I…

I completely agree with your sentiment here, and having read the other sibling comments to mine, I'd like to note that I have dealt with high volume customer support, I work closely with YouTube so I know their reps/support/processes pretty well and I'm also a software engineer who thinks about these challenges quite a lot.

None of that changes the fact that Google is indeed "treating it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust". That's basically their MO, and they put wayyyy too much stock in the results. Saying that Google doesn't do this is crazy. This is why the Podcast Addict thing happened; they were trying to crack down on the misinformation from "plandemic" weirdos and Podcast Addict and many other apps were hit with the spray of the shotgun blast. Is their original intention worthwhile? Yes. Do I think a human "reviewed" Podcast Addict before they took it out for linking to content about literally the world's most talked about story while at the same time Google Podcasts did the exact same thing? Absolutely not. If a human reviewed that case and decided that Podcast Addict (the #1 podcast app on Android) needed to be suspended, then something is broken. Maybe someone needs to be fired, but there's no someone in the chair. You can't fire the AIs at this point- You can only tweak and rework them and hope they take out less innocent bystanders.

All this said, is it hard? Yes. Is there too much content to really do this right? Yes I believe there is. Could Google do a better, more efficient and transparent job of cleaning up the mess when their scripts misfire? Oh absolutely yes.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#127

Post by UncleMeat »

squarefoot wrote: post #83
movedx wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HIRE SOME PEOPLE https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23317390

A well implemented karma system might be a thing: employees don't scale, trusted users do.

Except people (including HN) hated the Youtube Heroes program.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#128

Post by ShroudedNight »

stopping wrote: post #107
droopyEyelids wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think your point passes a back of the envelope math test. Right now Google makes the second most profit per employee of any large enterprise on earth: $269,000 in profit, annually, per employee. I know of other- successful!- companies that make less money per employee, because they hire people to do customer support. To start your argument, I think you have to explain why Google can not hire more CSRs, even t…

IMO, Google's profit per employee isn't an indicator of Google's obligation to increase its customer service headcount. Taken to it's logical conclusion, we should let poorly-performing companies off the hook for having awful customer service. The rest of this comment is going to be somewhat critical of Google criticism and seemingly apologistic. Please assume positive intent. I agree that Google certainly could do m…

> Any extra service that Google provides beyond those required for profit maximization ... is purely charity.

Duty is not charity. It would be perfectly reasonable for society to determine that YouTube incurs a duty to its content creation partners, and at no point should that be considered requesting a favour.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#129

Post by colechristensen »

Klinky wrote: post #122
colechristensen wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're living in fear go find a paid platform where you are the customer instead of the product. If you aren't making enough money on YouTube to be able to afford paying someone to host your content and provide better, paid customer service, then you have to consider that the risk of being on a mostly automated, poorly supported platform is the only thing keeping you from losing money, or in other words, is the so…

How does one find ban/review rates for YouTube? Wouldn't this be internal data? Can you provide a link to a public datasource that shows shows outcomes of YouTube's banning/takedown and review processes?

Comb through public support forums, do public asks for reports of inappropriate moderation outcomes, find someone with significant enough financial losses to justify a lawsuit and use the legal discovery process to get internal stats or ask Google's representative on the stand, ask your state or national representative to support legislation requiring publishing of such statistics... there are a few ideas. All of them would require action to try to get data, I wouldn't know of any existing data because I haven't looked.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#130

Post by colechristensen »

colinmhayes wrote: post #123
colechristensen wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then complain about Google's monopoly, not its moderation inadequacies, and consider that creators unwilling to leave are the source of the monopoly, not necessarily its victims, especially if they're not even trying other platforms. I guess I don't like the entitlement/blame cycle where people who help create a problem complain about the consequences.

The monopoly is due to threshold of creators being on youtube. A single channel leaving would make no difference. I'd love to see a movement away from youtube, but that would require a movement with serous organization, which creators mostly aren't capable of doing.

Cue the Simpsons clip "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".

If one is not willing, capable, or even interested in trying to solve problems they help create, as an individual or a group, I have very little interest in sympathy for their difficulty.

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