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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

#201

Post by yuliyp »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #152
NoPicklez wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These things are not linear. As your scale grows, the amount of attention from bad actors you receive goes up (from what could basically be 0 for something small). Coordination also becomes more difficult, as does managing the fleet of customer services resources.

If you have 1 person doing support, they can deal with the weird cases themselves. If you have 2 people, they need to share information between themselves. If you have 10 people, they might need to set up some sort of escalation system. If you have 100 people, you'll probably set up some sort of routing system (multiple languages/specialization). If you have 500 people, you probably need some sort of internal abuse / anti-bribery effort to catch bad apples. If you have 1000 people you've now got a separate team working on setting up policies. If you have 5000 people you've got a training and evaluation system set up for your customer service staff. If you have 10000, you've got customer support staff in multiple countries around the globe and need to deal with conflicting and ever-changing laws in the countries you do business in.

All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up. So yes, in addition to it being costlier per customer to provide the same level of support as your customer base grows, you have a smaller budget per customer to do it in.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#202

Post by badsectoracula »

sergiotapia wrote: post #97
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?

https://lbry.tv/ - they also recently launched paid videos, so you can get paid if you make premium content.

Why lbry instead of peertube?

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#203

Post by CamperBob2 »

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 feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem.

(Shrug) They have an almost-infinite amount of money and resources to tackle those problems. It's not unreasonable to expect better results.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#204

Post by lazyjones »

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 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 looks more like YT is busy censoring content for political/ideological reasons and doesn't care too much about porn, complaints about censorship and attacks such as reported by the OP.

If some fanatics still don't get their way of censoring content they don't like quickly enough, that's not really an excuse for YT's bad service.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#205

Post by RandomTisk »

wayoutthere wrote: post #132
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 fro…

Does this mean that Google is basically using all their services like Stadia or Fiber to keep people's minds aware of their presence, essentially using these services as their own advertisement outreach while hoping they also return a profit on their own advertisement?

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#206

Post by anonymousab »

drivebycomment wrote: post #101
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.

And how do you know that's not what Youtube is doing already ?

A sufficiently poorly done job is indistinguishable from nothing being done at all.

It's possible that it's impossible to do any better than they currently are, but as we don't have access to all of the data that they do, we cannot make that determination.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#208

Post by AnthonyMouse »

vorpalhex wrote: post #200
NoPicklez wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then your company doesn't get to scale. Sorry, but you can't skip support because it's not cost effective, just like you can't skip financial regulations or data regs. You don't get to use the excuse of "Sorry we are too busy making billions, maybe we wouldn't have to cut corners if we weren't so successful."

The problem isn't scale. Scale is just how they made a lot of money. If you make a dollar a billion times you made a billion dollars.

The problem is that good customer support costs more than $1. It costs more than what they make from the average user, so the average user can't have it. That would still be true if they had 100 times less users. It's a result of the service being free, not the service being large.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#209

Post by catalogia »

Freeboots wrote: post #194
scottlawson wrote: post #4

I think this is called extortion, not blackmail.

Right?! This annoyed the hell out of me when i saw the vid on youtube. It sucks his videos are getting taken down, but to my mind he loses intergity by playing it up as blackmail. Extortion is bad enough, why not call it like it is?

You perceive one to be dramatically worse than the other? I don't.. I don't think he's using incorrect terminology to play up the severity of what happened. It's more likely he simply made a mistake.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#210

Post by JSavageOne »

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…

There are relatively way more people complaining about their videos being erroneously taken down then people complaining about "immoral" content. In fact, I've never seen anyone claim that "immoral" content should be taken down, most people tend to favor freedom of speech outside of obviously the obviously wrong (eg. torture, doxxing).

I've never seen a revenge porn video on Youtube, where are you coming up with this?

Just look at the robotic tone of their emails, they don't care. I've had a channel taken down and all my old videos deleted due to some nonsense. There is no appeals process.

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