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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

#131

Post by paulmd »

UncleMeat wrote: post #124
autokad wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cl…

> Consider what it would cost to manually vet all apps on Play against even the most uncontroversial malware and data abuse policy

I believe this is precisely what Apple does, is it not? So perhaps not as impossible as you're casting it to be.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#132

Post by wayoutthere »

causality0 wrote: post #84

Google has an absolute fetish for making the ratio of profit to employees as large as possible. They will do it at any cost. There is no Google service without horrific customer support. Youtube, Google Fiber, Google Fi, doesn't matter. They refuse to accept that having 2x as many customers requires 2x as many support personnel.

I’m a big fan of looking at annual reports to understand a company.

Google is not subtle about where its priorities lie. There is a section in their 10-K titled “How we make money” and the two sub-bullets are “Performance advertising” and “Brand advertising”. The rest is a footnote.

Their revenue breakdown tells a similar story. Google as a whole had revenues of $161B in 2019, and $134B of that was direct revenue from from ad sales. “Other bets” (inclusive of consumer product things like Fiber, Fi, etc) is less than $1B — a rounding error in the scope of their overall business.

I know it’s flippant to say “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” but it’s particularly true in the case of Google. They are a B2B advertising company, not a B2C products company. It’s just not part of their business model to provide support to anyone who isn’t an ad buyer. It honestly ends up thwarting their ambitions in the product space because the kind of customer support required to succeed just isn’t in their DNA.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#133

Post by rezonant »

novok wrote: post #100
movedx wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service I've worked in high volume customer services. It's not easy for the agents doing the work or the companies operating them. I've worked in multiple call centers dealing with calls and tickets. I've worked in companies in which I dealt with mobile phone bill queries and hardware issues right up to Cisco networking problems and then eventually enterprise g…

They might have 1 billion free users, but they definitely don't have 1 billion partners or 1 billion paying customers. Google's customer service is horrible even for organizations that pay them +$10k/month or make them +$10k/month for ad sales, and that is a far smaller number. You would think they could at least scale customer support properly for that much smaller number, but they don't because culturally they do n…

Yes, Google has never been good at customer service. They believe that providing feedback tooling is the better approach. I think Google has succeeded _despite_ this not because of it

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#134

Post by Klinky »

colechristensen wrote: post #129
Klinky wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Ok, so the answer is: no. This information isn't publicly available or easily accessible.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#135

Post by thrwaway69 »

jdminhbg wrote: post #64
ssss11 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should hire more humans to do a proper job and provide actual customer service, using their excessive profits. The AI/automation stuff is just cost cutting and its lowering the quality of service.

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/

So about 270000 assuming they have 4 monitors each.

If they hire from low cost countries from contractors. They will only have to pay 10k per headcount + additional 10k for various stuff.

That's only around 5 billion. Let's just double that, 10 billion dollars. That's it. Google can easily pay it.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#136

Post by MagnumPIG »

UncleMeat wrote: post #125
craigds wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How could this type of blackmail happen if someone was already reviewing the videos manually? Takedowns being automated is fundamentally at odds with free speech.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#137

Post by donw »

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…

It seems that part of the solution here is to require meatspace authentication.

Here's a thought experiment:

Imagine you are a global platform which needs to deal with inappropriate behavior (posting of copyrighted materials, etc.)

Flagging content requires a verified account, where you must authenticate your meatspace identity: a small monthly payment via a traceable payment mechanism; a text to your phone number; a postal address verified by sending you a postcard; a photo of your government-issued ID; and webcam photo of yourself.

None of this information is for public exposure! It merely ties your account to you, as a person, as tightly as possible. Nor is it required to use the service -- only to engage with the moderation system.

All of these can be automated from the side of the service provider.

For companies:

If you are working on behalf of a company, your company membership requires similar verification. You are also limited to flagging only IP-related issues raised by your organization (copyright infringement, etc.)

For individuals:

You must be endorsed by three other verified users.

False flags beyond a certain threshold will erode the weight of your flags, up to the point where your the moderation system will outright ignore you, with a periodic (automated) review to see whether or not your flagging behavior has improved.

Endorsing a certain number of false-flaggers will also cause your account to silently lose the ability to flag.

This mimics real-world behavioral modification for groups of people.

Thoughts? Where does this go wrong?

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#138

Post by Noos »

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.

If viewers would actually pay for content they like, this wouldn't be an issue. The problems are that tech companies are 1. dumping product well under cost while 2. training customers not to pay anything.

At some point, people need to realize what constantly wanting things for free is costing them and the people they watch.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#139

Post by colinmhayes »

colechristensen wrote: post #130
colinmhayes wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is writing blog posts not trying something? Seems pretty clear to me that content creators are trying to create outrage to force youtube's hand, which seems to me to be the only successful strategy other than getting laws changed.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#140

Post by colechristensen »

csallen wrote: post #121
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.

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.

You can also do things because you want to do them, share ideas because you want to share them. This advertising fueled content filled Internet is pretty toxic.

I don't remember any of the Internet idealism of the 90s mentioning the great progress of sharing information involving the creator of every piece of data available making a fraction of a cent every time it was consumed.

I don't mind people getting paid to do things of course, but I do mind a culture dominated by selling each other's attention to advertisers in exchange for creative output, or creative output solely for the dopamine shot from attention and likes.

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