YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

> The web is already federated, YouTube just happens to be one of the most popular nodes.

The network layer of the web is federated, but the application layer usually isn't. That is, if you care just about who you send TCP traffic to, then yes, the internet alone is sufficient, but if you want to think about federation at the content level, the internet alone enables that but doesn't make it very easy. Something like PeerTube makes it easy. And you need to pull it up to the content/application level if you want to do things like implement content searching/filtering across a federated network of hosts.

> Fediverse systems like PeerTube are great, but they don't change anything

Disagree. Nobody can host their own YouTube server. That's the point of federated video hosting: (a) anyone can spin up their own host (or join a host they agree with if they don't have the tech skills) and (b) these hosts can network with like-minded hosts to build a YouTube-sized content library without any single entity owning the entire library. A world without PeerTube would not give typical users this option.

> in a world where something like PeerTube is as popular as YouTube we'd see the exact same complaints about the most popular node.

We are starting to see this problem a bit on Mastodon because people are piling into the most popular node and having their opinions about how it should run instead of understanding that the point is if they disagree with how a node is run, it's (relatively) easy to run one of their own (or bribe a technical friend into running one). But I'd argue this is a problem in the domain of user understanding/education rather than a problem built into the nature of Mastodon whereas centralized global-scale moderation is a problem baked into YouTube.

Don’t even care that it’s AI. It’s just that the AI-based products simply suck. Which is saying a lot considering all the money being thrown at it to solve simple problems.

This line of thinking leads to non-solutions. There are potentially many options beyond the dichotomy of crude AI automation and an army of human employees.

First, I think most of us would just like a relatively transparent method of escalating issues that will eventually get to a qualified human. Put some time delays and recaptchas to stop spammers from abusing it but if someone is willing to put in the time and effort to fight for a video, they should get a clear response as to why it was taken down and who made that determination.

Then there is the immense potential for crowdsourcing moderation. You can both get data by polling users (again with basic checks to prevent exploits) and promote certain users to a moderator role such that they can keep the community in which they participate reasonable. Especially for disinformation, how hard would it be to find volunteers to tell other people they're wrong on the internet?

And finally, if erroneous moderation has the potential to cause many problems, it is worth re-evaluating how much is actually necessary. For legal reasons there is some content that you really need an AI to quickly scan for, such as child porn, but in a lot of cases the harm in leaving up a video is insignificant.

There are a lot of sites on a similar scale to youtube that have substantially better (even if not necessarily perfect) content moderation despite working with substantially lower resources. If they can do it, so can Google.

For political content I was thinking more of qanon content. Also you can bury it in the recommendation sense but you can’t bury it in the search engine sense without removing it. The mere existence of qanon like content on the platform even if it requires searching causes a platform a lot of problems. Burying content in recommendation sense that is brand problematic but not actually that bad does already happen for these platforms. This may be content that is just too common on the platform otherwise to try to diversify available content.

Reddit is one of the very lax content platforms but has occasionally banned subreddits including political ones (Donald trump subreddit). Your phone example I don’t agree with as content platforms are fundamentally about curating a certain group of content. I think of them as closer to news media in terms of what they show. You would not expect New York Times to have much very conservative articles and opposite for Fox News. While content platforms have user generated content mostly that defines the available content pool not what they want to recommend. Actual percent of banned things is pretty low so they do mostly allow any content but there are certainly categories of content they spend a lot of effort on. As for another motivation for political banning one complaint tiktok often receives is as a Chinese related company it should not influence American politics. If it wants to be safe there then it having extreme content becomes legal risky itself. Not so much in the it is directly illegal sense but in the increasing chances of the platform getting banned which felt like a serious risk a few months ago. I think in general a lot of the political content restriction motivation is legal in origin in the sense of wanting to avoid issues that cause congress to do stuff to the platform. Similarly Facebook and all the Anti trust talks one way of being careful is trying to restrict extreme political content that otherwise senators may complain about.

There’s also related should political advertisements be allowed.

>It’s just a trickle now but soon it will be a flow.

And soon after that it will be a torrential exodus. Myspace died within the space of a few months during my time in high school. YouTube could easily face a similar downfall.

I'm not saying "YouTube will die in a year!" I'm saying if they don't fix their moderation problems, their auto-bans, etc... they will start to lose bigger and bigger customers more frequently.

I claim people are leaving _because they are_. Just because people are joining faster than they're leaving doesn't invalidate the point that people are leaving the platform for a place where their channels won't get completely demonetized for background music that an AI flagged. Youtube has a serious moderation problem, and it will be their bullet wound when another competitor comes along.