211–220 of 305 posts
Google is a private company. It's fully within their rights to remove any video they don't like, for whatever reason. It comes with the territory if we want Google to be able to censor hate speech and misinformation. You can always use a competing site, or build your own.
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It seems like they are making their own sites. Nebula is one such place where a few of the higher quality content creators are going. I've no idea if it'll work, but they are trying. https://watchnebula.com/
The problem with these techniques is discover ability. How do you build an online audience without paying google for advertisements?
I see no reason why the search feature within YouTube couldn't return videos that people were hosting on their personal sites or on competitors to YouTube (including Twitch VODs and livestreams). Even subscriptions and recommendations could work across platforms.
YouTube could still run adverts in/on the videos, and the revenue from that would be split with the site where the video was actually published. For a greater share of the ad revenue, YouTube could also offer to stream (a copy of) the video from their own servers.
Even if sites (or Multi-Channel Networks) had to pay a $1000 fee to be included in this system, and YouTube kept its rules about moderation and demonetisation, it would still greatly improve discoverability and hopefully competition generally.
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With a $5 monthly fee and no way to upload your own videos, Nebula is most directly competing against Netflix, not YouTube. A few top creators might be able to make that work, but most won't.
And no free trial w/o giving credit card info. Yeah, hard pass.
Google is a private company. It's fully within their rights to remove any video they don't like, for whatever reason. It comes with the territory if we want Google to be able to censor hate speech and misinformation. You can always use a competing site, or build your own.
Thanks for joining HN just to tell us this.
What many do not realize is the 'build your own' is going on (I can name at least 4 YT replacements, some better than others). But they are dismissing them with the same reasons they are kicking the creators off the 'mainstream' sites. So you see a lot of YT refugees and many existing YT creators 'splitting the difference' basically they upload it to both YT and several other sites. There is almost zero downside in doing so really.
Eventually someone will click it all together in the right way and create a decentralized uncensorable thing. At that point the internet will become a lot more like 4chan.
The old adage is 'the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it'. It just does not happen overnight though.
>Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating at a human scale. >Using algorithms to flag content is totally fine… problem is when humans cannot interact with humans anymore and AI gets to chose what is right and wrong. Can't agree more.
I think this is a distraction from the real problem, which is that YouTube censors/demonetizes/deplatforms videos at all. The problem is very widespread, ranging from censorship of political content to firearm videos to COVID related content. Most recently YouTube banned a panel held by the Florida governor with medical experts from Stanford and Harvard ( https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2021/04/12/des..…
Advertising is the problem.
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It's not a "psyops", YouTube, like every gigantic corporation is motivated entirely by money, and they would be happy to monetize every video on the site if they could, but advertisers pay the bills, and since advertisers are sensitive to their public image, YouTube goes out of their way to appease them. The problem here is the ad model, not AI or YouTube's values.
That's an outdated view. Youtube now bends to activists and political winds.
Society gives PR departments far too much power. We should be electing governments that enforce reasonable standards, not relying on what is essentially DDoS to achieve social mores.
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The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? Would that work with the current society's attention span? Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of human moderators and/or a drastically reduced sc…
What if... instead of YouTube you'd have several intereset based sites which could actually handle their moderation and workload instead of being a giant uncaring behemoth?
Off topic: is there an YouTube equivalent in China? I'm just curious.
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Except the sheer scale of Google is hair-raising. (Sleep tight dear FTC). If Google loses a YouTube creator, it has almost no impact on their bottom line. If a creator gets kicked out however, their livelihood is threatened. I would argue this is the perfect scenario for a creator's union (of course, it should use some other platform to communicate).
> If a creator gets kicked out however, their livelihood is threatened No. There are numerous providers that can host your videos. For a small fee. This mentality is what gives Google such pseudo-power.
Do the alternatives hold up in terms of things like market reach, $ performance, and not banning the same users?
One of the largest and most profitable companies in the world can't hire enough low-paid humans to do content review. They already have some of the highest margins in history and they still can't figure out that sacrificing less than 1% of profits could solve this problem?
Paying less attention to YouTube also solves this problem. People still can't figure out that not watching YouTube solves all moderation problems? Google doesn't care about those posting on YouTube. They care about advertisers pulling their money if whatever content infringes on THEIR priorities.
I think Odysee is a good alternative. PeerTube doesn't really seem to be a great option here as it seems to have been down during this time.
> Google doesn't care about [...]
Mostly true, but also kind of not relevant. Google isn't doing anything here besides making poorly trained AI models that try to solve this problem for them. It's more negligence than it is malice, IMO.