I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next • Hacker News Board

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#151

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:08 AM UTC

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.

People have tried it, that's how we know it doesn't work.

Refusing your pet idea isn't a refusal to do anything at all.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#152

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

NoPicklez wrote: post #109

donmcronald wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be something between the best customer service and things like letting shitty "AI" ban accounts without any human intervention. How hard can it be to augment crowd sourcing and "AI" with some actual humans? If the "AI" is so crappy that it can't figure out an established, popular account is worthy of human support, what problems can it actually solve? I also wonder why we can't just pay $X to get a human…

It's easy to say "there has to be something between the best customer service and things like letting shitting "AI" ban accounts" as an armchair hackernews user. But maybe, there isn't, currently. Maybe there simply isn't a solution at the scale of companies like Google.

'scale' is often used as a cop-out.

If you double your customer count, and double your revenue, then you can double your customer support resources. O(n) does not become impractical just because the number gets really big.

If they can't deal with something, the fundamental design is wrong, and would fail even if they downsized a thousandfold.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#153

Post by acituan » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:16 AM UTC

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…

> When you are as big as Google, very improbable failures happen all the time, pointing them out doesn't tell the story of how well they're doing unless your expectation is constant perfection

Just a thought experiment, does Youtube need to be as big as it is? Can’t Youtube say “given the current accuracy/precision of ML based solutions and how much our manual operations can scale, we are going to rate limit the content that circulates to match our ability of giving the best judgment on what videos to take down and what videos to keep”. Physical stores have maximum occupancy limits, and with coronavirus some even shown proactive rate limiting to say “hey, we can’t ensure transmission control above a certain density”. Those are corporations too, those also have fiduciary duty.

I think “growth at all costs” is a major driver of these types of failures, especially when costs are externalized and distributed to the userbase; one annoying notification, one abuse feature change, one harmful policy decision at a time.

> Go find rates, not anecdotes, then you might have something

Youtube has near perfect knowledge of the warm data of their operations, and use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it, while we only get to know others are being abused when news make it to Hacker News. The inability to find the rates is inherent to the problem. Short of sneaking into Youtube data centers, there is only so much data you can find without Youtube’s say so. Which brings the question, for such a massive policy layer operation, why is this data not made transparent?

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#154

Post by brokencode » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:21 AM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #140

csallen wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s a pretty indifferent attitude to take. Do things because you want to? A lot of people make these videos for a living, and have no choice but to feed the advertisement machine. The business model of the internet is not something most content creators have any control over, and it’s pointless to criticize them for it. The only players who might be able to do that are the big tech companies controlling the platforms, which is why they take a lot of flak for how things are going.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#155

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:22 AM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #144

paulmd wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It isn't. You can't possibly manually review every new version of every app in detail.

You can do it for every app with a hundred thousand installs, though. And they could manually review support tickets from youtube partner channels of similar size.

They can't vet everything, but the bare minimum of what they should be vetting is a lot closer to apple levels than their current levels.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#156

Post by stopping » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:26 AM UTC

ShroudedNight wrote: post #128

stopping wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Allow me to clarify: The word "charity" is used in the perverted capitalistic sense, where Google's predominant "duty" is first and foremost to its shareholders. The capitalist incentive structure requires no more than the bare minimum of customer service from Google.

I agree that Google has a moral duty to take care of the people who choose to put their trust in their platforms.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#157

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:28 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #148

thrwaway69 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

10 billion is a lot. And that's 10 billion that is not making them any more money. From google's perspective, none of these blackmail or customer support issue is an actual issue, because you, the customer, is gonna use google's services regardless. The business case for paying support personnel is non-existent. Even if you're a paying customer, the overhead of hiring more personnel is not an effective use of capital…

The reality is that watching all the videos all the way through is an extreme strawman of the actual amount they would need to do to have competent moderation, and yet even that strawman is within their budget!

Even watching every video that hits 1000 views would be a huge overkill, and that would already cut your budget by a factor of multiple thousands.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#158

Post by Natsu » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:29 AM UTC

WantonQuantum wrote: post #94

whotheffknows wrote: post #66

Hi so this is illegal. Call the FBI. Extortion and coercion are felonies in all 50 states.

Can the FBI do anything if the culprit is not in the US?

Sort of... sometimes they will lure them to the USA or catch them while they're here if the victim has enough clout. Some here may remember when the FBI arrested Dmitry Sklyarov, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#159

Post by int_19h » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:38 AM UTC

movedx wrote: post #70

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…

> 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…

My suggestion would be to avoid growing to 1 billion customers, until you have support that is capable of handling that many.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#160

Post by lowdose » Wed, May 27, 2020, 2:41 AM UTC

NoPicklez wrote: post #112

RHSeeger wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The call queue for that company never dropped below a constant 200-300 on hold and emails took days to even get to. If those are the stats and you're still not actually solving many customers' problems; if tons of people are being hung out to dry with no recourse, then you're doing a bad job. If you don't have enough people to do the job, then hire more people. If you can't afford to hire more people, then don't do…

The problem with customer service is that quite often the problem is larger than a single person can fix. It requires other people both within the company and outside of the company to fix an issue. There is also the scenario in which there is no solution and you need to balance the cost of investigating to the point where you're 100% certain there isn't a solution and efficiently deciding there isn't one. One thing…

A bad company devides available work in so many different departments and job titles the actually people with authority that is able to execute is by design very thin spread. This company could also pay higher salaries, give better training and enable more call agent autonomy because that is what is takes to deliver a frictionless delightful customer service.

That's why every mom and pop store outranks every Fortune 500 on customer service expect Amazon. Most still haven't learned to put customers central to their business but treat it as an after thought.