Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

gamefromscratch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 362 posts

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#161

Post by underwater »

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…

> People don't scale at all.

Which is fine, because Google's customer base is made up of people, so Google should be able to scale their support in a linear way.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#162

Post by int_19h »

Findeton wrote: post #3

I keep reading these horror stories about YouTube. It must really suck, as there are alternatives, but they just don't have the audience YouTube has. I guess there just isn't much we can do about this apart from hosting elsewhere when necessary?

We could give teeth back to our anti-trust enforcement, for starters. That would ensure that there's more viable alternatives.

Notice that I'm saying "give back". That's because it was deliberately gutted: https://promarket.org/2019/09/05/how-robert-bork-fathered-th...

Imagine, instead, if we applied the same norms to establish "market dominance" as the court did in this case from 1961: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/#tab-opi...

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#163

Post by colechristensen »

acituan wrote: post #153
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…

> 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 cont…

>Just a thought experiment, does Youtube need to be as big as it is?

A few scattered moderation complaints compared to wholesale rate limiting of incoming content... I can only imagine the madness of content producers if YouTube tried that.

>Youtube has near perfect knowledge of the warm data of their operations, and use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it

YouTube content moderation isn't human spaceflight. Having a goal of never failing is, well, a very inexperienced way of thinking about failure. On the order of half a million hours of new video content a day goes on YouTube, or something like 6 million uploads.

Let's just pretend that the moderation decision is only made once on upload, you make 6 million decisions a day, how many ridiculous decisions are you going to make every day?

Do you think that number is ever going to be zero? The reality is that there is an exponential relationship.

Let's just say you can double your cost to cut failures in half. If it's not that relationship it'll be something like it.

You can just keep doing it. Doubling your cost over and over, and you're still going to fail all the time. When a "one in a million" chance means something happens several times a day, well, you have to have a different attitude about failure.

And when you're just about the only game in town, whatever you do to mitigate failure is going to attract people trying to screw with you to upset you and your users, to take advantage. Not only are you trying not to fail every day, you're trying to avoid people exploiting those attempts. It's just reality that you have a popular service, there is going to be some nonzero number of very upset users with just cause to be upset. That's just reality.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#164

Post by electro_blah »

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…

LOL maybe they should actually look into it before replying with their canned response.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#165

Post by pmiller2 »

stopping wrote: post #156
ShroudedNight wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You are implicitly assuming that the shareholder primacy theory of corporate governance is the only legitimate one. It is not. The business judgement rule allows corporate directors very wide latitude in how they choose to run the business. Google very much can hire more CSRs, exactly because they are insanely profitable on a per employee basis, but they choose not to, for reasons unknown, but likely out of concern for the stock price.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#166

Post by Silhouette »

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…

IMO, Google's profit per employee isn't an indicator of Google's obligation to increase its customer service headcount.

No, it isn't.

But the damage it causes to innocent parties through its choice of business models is.

It is easy to forget that not so long ago, the Internet giants of today were little startups too, and not so long before that, they didn't exist at all. They have reached the dominant positions they are now in through a combination of factors. Several of those factors involve absolving themselves of responsibility for things going wrong, even things that might have been (or might still be) considered illegal, because preventing them is difficult or practically impossible with a purely technological solution.

Well, guess what? There is no law that says they get a right to exist and be astonishingly profitable by relying on technology at the expense of anyone else who gets hurt by their action or inaction. There is no law that requires the existence of huge video redistribution services that allow anyone to upload content, including malicious content that may cause serious harm to others, with impunity. Laws that do protect these organisations, such as the safe harbour provisions under the DMCA and its counterparts around the world, were invented after the fact and it's far from clear that they strike a healthy balance (particularly when, as I can personally testify, the likes of YouTube do not always meet their obligations even under the very generous terms of those laws).

If these companies can't act as responsible corporate citizens using their current business models, maybe they shouldn't use those business models. It is disturbing that this simple idea now seems almost heretical, as if we are somehow beholden to these Internet giants and the world would fail without them, and so it's somehow OK that they also magnify harmful effects from spreading dangerous misinformation to invasion of privacy but as long as it's someone else uploading the content the hosting service is deemed innocent of all wrong-doing.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#167

Post by colechristensen »

brokencode wrote: post #154
colechristensen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 platfo…

>That’s a pretty indifferent attitude to take.

I don't see that at all. Encouraging people to do things for their own merit and not just to make money – and we have to be realistic here, most people trying to make money on YouTube or anywhere by creating content won't ever see a single dollar from it, so it's more like trying to win a crappy lottery.

It's this constant sense of entitlement or talking like people are forced into making videos for a living which bothers me. It's a crappy job that is pretty easy to know how it works before you get into it. I keep seeing "no choice", well you can always do something else.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#169

Post by colechristensen »

colinmhayes wrote: post #139
colechristensen wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the only thing you are willing to do about your problems is publicly complain about them implicitly hoping for an angry mob in response is... quite nearly the least you could do. I think I have expended the amount that I care about the issue.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#170

Post by stopping »

pmiller2 wrote: post #165
stopping wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are implicitly assuming that the shareholder primacy theory of corporate governance is the only legitimate one. It is not. The business judgement rule allows corporate directors very wide latitude in how they choose to run the business. Google very much can hire more CSRs, exactly because they are insanely profitable on a per employee basis, but they choose not to, for reasons unknown, but likely out of concern f…

Small clarification: I'm assuming that shareholder obligation is the predominant force upon corporate governance, not the only one.

But, point taken.

Post reply on HN