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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

#331

Post by AnthonyMouse »

rndgermandude wrote: post #248
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There aren't a billion content creators on Youtube, and even fewer who would be good targets for blackmail like this. Your treating the instant case as the common one, but it's not. And you don't know that until after you've done an investigation, which means you don't know it when deciding whether to allocate resources to an investigation. It's trivial to game subscribers and views. If having more gets you somethi…

>It's trivial to game subscribers and views. If google cannot even make a bot to detect fake views and subscriptions, then why the hell do advertisers give them money at all if only those bots watch the ads anyway? And why would they think that a ban bot - which has far reaching consequences - is ok, if they cannot even prevent view gaming? It's not trivial to game subscribers and views. Such gaming is a problem, and…

> If google cannot even make a bot to detect fake views and subscriptions, then why the hell do advertisers give them money at all if only those bots watch the ads anyway?

Because the ad slots are sold at auction. If 20% of the views are bots then the price should go down and advertisers get 20% more ad views (and the same number of real ones) for the same dollar. Assuming the advertisers are rational and informed; if not then the explanation for why they do it is that they're irrational or uninformed.

> And why would they think that a ban bot - which has far reaching consequences - is ok, if they cannot even prevent view gaming?

One thing doesn't appear to have anything to do with the other.

They have a ban bot because people keep trying to sue them or threaten them with adverse legislation if they don't take stuff down fast enough.

> And everytime I dare use a public VPN google/YT puts big fat captchas in front of me

Because you're doing the opposite of what scammers do. You're using the one IP address with a terrible reputation. They use a million IP addresses with good reputations, e.g. from a botnet full of machines that were innocent users last month.

> If they cannot distinguish between one coming from e.g. Sony vs one coming from e.g. then what the hell are they doing? There is such a thing as reputation.

You would think so, except that a ton of the erroneous takedowns come from the biggest senders, because they use garbage automated methods to send them.

Meanwhile if they give privileged access to major companies then everybody else would be complaining that they're discriminating against small content creators by not honoring their takedowns like they do for Sony.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#332

Post by causality0 »

antpls wrote: post #226
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.

Aren't YouTube's customers the advertisers paying to have their ads displayed? YouTubers are not customers. At best, I believe they are "partners" (like with Twitch)

Youtube Premium subscribers are customers.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#333

Post by AnthonyMouse »

x0 wrote: post #256
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alphabet could pay for proper customer service, though. It's not as if they're doing badly. Come on, 40b in revenue and nearly 7b profit last quarter [0]. Unfortunately it won't happen unless they're forced to. [0] https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/1909764/alphabet-google-pr...

Absolute numbers are useless. How much of that profit is from YouTube rather than search, and how much is that per-user? When the answer comes out to be something like $1/year, how much customer service does that buy?

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#334

Post by SXX »

disiplus wrote: post #241
SXX wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I had very much opposite experience with Google Ads support. For the person who buy ads it's exceptional and with available phone support even if you only buy ads for $100. They can literally explain how every single thing work on their system, giving advice on how to improve campaigns or fix something. It's very much opposite when it's come to AdSense, but again they don't really care when some webmaster…

that's not true in my experience. the rep had no direct answer and sometimes it would take a couple days till they reached somebody that knows the answer. and for everything else that i asked that they did not know directly the answer was "it's algorithm, even when i found the answer later somewhere deep in forums or faq". i have dealt with google europe, i even visited the offices in dublin but i do not have a confi…

   > i have dealt with google europe, i even visited the offices in dublin
I guess I should be perfectly honest: ads is obviously no my specialization and I only worked with Google Ads for small businesses with quite a small budgets not more than $10000-$20000 a month.

So obviously my impression might be limited to quite superficial questions or problems. It's very much possible that if you work with something actually complex their support isn't anywhere as useful as it's for entry-level customers.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#335

Post by Dylan16807 »

yuliyp wrote: post #201
Dylan16807 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.…

> All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up.

I don't know about that. Just a few bad actors going after a small site can be an utterly ridiculous percentage when compared to the abuse a site like youtube gets.

> If you have one person [...] If you have 10000

All of that sounds sub-linear to me. If 10000 support staff require 1000 direct managers and 200 people working on policies and training and 100 people working on development and 100 upper managers, that's still O(n).

> All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up.

If some of your customers are higher revenue, and some are lower revenue, I'm not sure if that's really a scaling problem. But even with that consideration, it's not an excuse for being unable to give proper support to paying google customers, or youtube accounts with 100k subscribers.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#336

Post by monadic2 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #114
monadic2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Do you have an example? These seem like inherently contradictory values. You can either make a safe platform or one that treats its tenants well. Like many of its products, google has not made it clear which set of…

You've got to be joking. Zuckerberg testified to congress about this. It's gotten huge national attention, especially after russia interfered with our elections by posting fake content on social media.

Wait until congress hears about the influence Charles Koch wields. If you think I trust Koch more than Putin you’re out of your damn mind.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#337

Post by crazygringo »

chongli wrote: post #320
crazygringo wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's another false extreme. That's what algorithmic detection (together with user flagging) and removal at scale is for. That prevents them from growing out of control. The combo of algorithmic detection at scale, combined with small amounts of manual intervention and customer service where most needed, is how YouTube is able to operate.

The combo of algorithmic detection at scale, combined with small amounts of manual intervention and customer service where most needed, is how YouTube is able to operate. This article is evidence that the process is breaking down. It's an old maxim in computer security that attacks become more sophisticated over time as knowledge of the system grows and spreads among attackers. That is what we are seeing here. YouTub…

> This article is evidence that the process is breaking down.

No, the article is a single instance. If it becomes common, YouTube will create systems to prevent this type of attack.

> YouTube has built a system which is ultimately unsustainable at this scale.

There's just no evidence of that -- that's pure conjecture. And given how Google has seemed to manage abuse and spam at a commercially successful level in plenty of other products (not perfect, but maintaining the platform), I would bet on YouTube continuing to succeed here.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#338

Post by yuliyp »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #335
yuliyp wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up. I don't know about that. Just a few bad actors going after a small site can be an utterly ridiculous percentage when compared to the abuse a site like youtube gets. > If you have one person [...] If you have 10000 All of that sounds sub-linear to me. If 10000 support staff require 1000 direct managers and 200 people working on policies…

> All of that sounds sub-linear to me.

All of the things I mentioned are things that you can get away without but eventually scale forces you to tackle. Each of those things brings with it additional cost without increasing the throughput.

This shouldn't be too novel an idea: consider a normal supply curve: cost per unit tends to go up with volume.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#339

Post by vageli »

unreal37 wrote: post #65
vageli wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability to transact anonymously online shouldn't be understated.

Also, Bitcoin is not anonymous. https://www.elliptic.co/our-thinking/bitcoin-transactions-mo...

The parent said "cryptocurrency", not "Bitcoin".

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#340

Post by Dylan16807 »

yuliyp wrote: post #338
Dylan16807 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of this while marginal revenue per customer declines as your scale goes up. I don't know about that. Just a few bad actors going after a small site can be an utterly ridiculous percentage when compared to the abuse a site like youtube gets. > If you have one person [...] If you have 10000 All of that sounds sub-linear to me. If 10000 support staff require 1000 direct managers and 200 people working on policies…

> All of that sounds sub-linear to me. All of the things I mentioned are things that you can get away without but eventually scale forces you to tackle. Each of those things brings with it additional cost without increasing the throughput. This shouldn't be too novel an idea: consider a normal supply curve: cost per unit tends to go up with volume.

> All of the things I mentioned are things that you can get away without but eventually scale forces you to tackle. Each of those things brings with it additional cost without increasing the throughput.

That doesn't mean it costs more than O(n).

Let's say you start off with 100 workers providing 100 units of support, and 20 workers of overhead.

Let's say doubling support means you need double the existing workers, plus double the existing overhead, plus 20 more workers to handle new kinds of overhead.

So 120 x 2 + 20 = 260 workers for 200 units of support.

Then 260 x 2 + 20 = 540 workers for 400 units of support.

The percentage of overhead grows every single time we double the number of workers.

And yet if you do the math, you see that the overhead never goes over 40%. And it was already 20% when we started, so that extra amount isn't hard to afford at all.

Despite growing every stage, it's still O(n). The dominating factor is linear.

Obviously those numbers are just an example. But the point is that you have to look at how much the costs increase. Even if it's theoretically faster than linear, if the overhead only grows a moderate amount as you grow from a thousand support workers to a billion support workers then it's not an excuse. It's within a small fudge factor of linear for all real-world numbers.

> This shouldn't be too novel an idea: consider a normal supply curve: cost per unit tends to go up with volume.

Only in the short term. In the long term, production ramps up until the price is pretty close, and on top of that economies of scale drop the price by a significant amount.

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