Basically the article confirms what I wrote back when the shooting occurred (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16754438): Youtube (and the other social networks!) desperately need a customer support that actually deserves to be called a support.
When you have a service where people's livings depend on, and you take away their income source (in corp doublespeak: demonetize them) AND at the same time offer them only canned responses or, worse, no contact at all, some of them WILL be driven to desperation. Hell, the inhumanity actually IS the word "demonetization": it sounds harmless but it is everything else than that.
And even worse: Youtube has recognized that there is a problem with the consequences their non-existence of a support has, but, typical for US culture, they head for fighting the symptoms (increasing "security") instead of fixing the problem (hire support staff with a decent bit of leeway).
I always wondered why tech companies had such an impenetrable inward communication until I came across the following insight:
"If you have a billion users, and 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you'd spend 19 person-years handling support issues every day.
If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you'd need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up. Amazing."[0]
It's not necessarily the exact same source that I discovered back then but the idea is the same. Even a tiny portion of customer service would still soak up a large amount of money, perhaps rightfully so, but at the scale some of these companies are, it quickly becomes unsustainable.
It's a misleading estimate because it doesn't define "user". In the case of YouTube, there are a billion users but only creators would require support.
Maybe there are 100,000 YouTube creators who get paid anything meaningful? (I have no idea, just guessing.) If 0.1% of them require support, that's 100 requests per day. Any moderately successful mom-and-pop SaaS gets that much.
There's no financial reason for Alphabet not to provide personal support to YouTube creators. They just don't want to.
What you're suggesting is how it already works. Partnered creators all have access to a creator support email (with a 1 business day SLO). Top partnered creators (aka the "creators who get paid anything meaningful") will also have a partner manager they can contact for 1-1 advice/support/etc.
Great. So maybe the bar for support is set too high? Someone making $50 / month on YouTube is meaningless to Google but may spend an enormous amount of time on that content in the hope of a breakout. Those are probably the people whose mental health is most at risk.
It’s Alphabet’s community, they own it. Extending more support to dedicated members may not make direct business sense but it could be the right thing for long-term community health.
I understand words like books and bricks and apples, because these words have physical referents. I have no idea what "long-term community health" means.
What does that mean?
And why would anyone invest more in it than in barricades and highly weaponized security guards? (I'm not actually promoting an armed response to whatever a 'community' is, I'm just using it as a rhetorical foil to try to understand the pros and cons of investing in whatever a 'community' is)
A community is a group of people you interact with (and who interact with each other) regularly. Community health means the people are kind to each other, help each other, communicate with each other. If a community is not healthy, they don't talk to each other and view each other as enemies.
If you have barricades and highly weaponized armed guards, you don't have a community. You have a war.
>What role does Youtube have in making a kumbaya kind of experience?
I'm assuming the question is "what reason does Youtube have", since their role is pretty clear: they control the platform. If they want people to keep using it, they have to keep those people happy. If they want to prevent a revolt, they have to keep people happy. Because unhappy, unstable people can turn violent. Keeping them happy won't necessarily stop all unstable people from turning violent, but you certainly do maximize that risk when you have some unstable people in your community and your community is already on the brink of a user revolt.
What's the percentage? If 80% o the peasants are revolting, and 80% of the content comes from the unrevolting peasants, do I care?
I'm not advocating that they should or should not care, but if one percent are revolting and 99% comes from the other, don't you think it is time to bring out the uzis?
> What role does Youtube have in making a kumbaya kind of experience?
Why would any corporation want its customers to be happy?
Some businesses certainly don't need to care. A restaurant in central Rome has an infinite supply of new tourists to feed, so they don't need to worry about whether anyone wants to come back. At the other end of the spectrum, a monopolist knows that customers have no choice and must come back regardless of how they're treated.
YouTube has elements of both: there's a near-infinite supply of hopeful Internet video stars, and they also have a near-monopoly on video viewership. They might still want to keep stakeholders happy because these issues tend to brew for a long time until they blow up into public consciousness. (Facebook's promiscuous spreading of user data was known ten years ago, but they only took action now. Damage control would have been easier earlier.)
Creators have these questions - "why is this seemingly harmless video demonetized?", "why are my videos not reaching the people who explicitly subscribed to me?" and support won't answer those. They blame the algos and point to you a vague list of guidelines.
>why are my videos not reaching the people who explicitly subscribed to me?
Ugh Facebook. I have a community page for my town with thousands of likes, and most posts only reach 10% of the people who explicitly followed my page. Even if I pay to boost a post, I'm lucky to hit 20%. I get a lot of complaints from people who missed an event because they never saw the (sometimes multiple) Facebook posts announcing it. I mean, they could have visited the website or subscribed to the newsletter, but still... they asked Facebook to kindly show them the posts from this page, and Facebook told them "no", because "algorithm".
> Even a tiny portion of customer service would still soak up a large amount of money, perhaps rightfully so, but at the scale some of these companies are, it quickly becomes unsustainable.
The problem is that now society has to shoulder the costs. For example, when a mentally not-so-stable person goes to YouTube HQ and starts shooting everyone in sight. Or, more common, people falling in depressions, losing their homes, ...
What's so outlandish about that support organization? Presumably you have the revenue to match when you have a billion users. Walmart has 2.3 million employees.
It’s fascinating how the tech community is so obsessed with scaling and automation that the idea of having a five-digit support staff for a billion users is seen as absurd. Companies like Google have taken this attitude to heart and seem to be absolutely determined to avoid anything that might require a linear relationship between userbase and staff numbers.
Google and Facebook have an employee:user ratio of roughly 1,000,000:1. This makes any hands-on intervention exceptionally expensive.
(Not impossibly, given high-enough levels of interest, but high.)
Google, and technology's, most powerful tool is its ability to amplify reach, capability, and efficiency. This works very well in a broadcast-style transmission.
Where that transmission is reversed, and the many nodes start trying to feed back to the single hub, there's a problem. It's interesting to note that much of the history of the formation of the modern corporate entity has been one of changing modes of communication (and the parallel development of management structures). Two authors who explore this in (well, for me) fascinating detail are JoAnne Yates and James R. Beniger
In particular, broadcast technologies give leverage, but work best, as with the agricultural model, where seed can be scattered at will, and harvesting is simple, bulk, and commodity. When your plants talk back to you and have concerns about their growing conditions and/or opportunities, you're going to need a more complex feedback system. And it will have to be effective.
This has long been an Achilles' heel of Google (and, to be fair, many other large corporations).
The fact that the modern corporation is, by its very intent and design, a risk-externalising machine, one that shifts danger to customers, users, vendors, and employees, rather than either the investor-principles or their manager-agents (and yes: principle-agent problem is another dynamic) is itself part of this very toxic mix.
And drive the other half of people to insanity. There is, in support terms, not much worse than an obvious chatbot or support personnel that only has canned responses available. You explain your problem, they come with a canned response that suggests doing what you already did AND WROTE THEM, you reply back "I already, as you advised, did XYZ and wrote you, this does not help" and get the SAME canned response bullshit back.
For what the fuck did I just invest half an hour in a detailed bug report when you're not even bothering to literally read it?!
It's not "screwing" them, you said it yourself. They can't provide adequate support to all of their customers (in this situation, customer is defined as a content creator), so they are reducing the number of customers that they take on (by making it so you need a specific number of views-per-month or subscribers before you are eligible for monetization), and are reducing the number of current customers they have (by demonetizing the videos and categories that advertisers like the least)
Great solution give or take the occasional shooting. The shootings don’t cost much and most shooters can’t scale their killing so I guess it’s all good.
I don't know why I'm even bothering to respond to this, but what is your proposed solution that keeps the company in-business and ensures no mentally-ill people decide to shoot up the company?
1. Doing this could basically cause the same result, as the cost of more support could easily make it so that they need to start charging or denying who can be a content creator. Neither of us have numbers, so it's all just guesses, but I'd be willing to wager that spending a TON of money and training on new CSRs wouldn't really change all that much, especially when telling someone explicitly "you were banned because X" is almost never a good idea, all this would do (in my opinion) is create a much more expensive, slower, and more annoying version of the same problem.
2. I think this would help, but it's not going to prevent mentally ill people from being mentally ill. They aren't going to say "oh well this removal was justified and was consistent with the others", they are going to find a perceived wrongdoing and will latch on to that, because they are mentally ill.
3. I've come to the conclusion that this is literally impossible. You can't be politically neutral. People aren't politically neutral, and therefore the things they create or moderate can't be politically neutral (whether they mean to do it or otherwise). Even algorithms that are created by people can show biases.
WRT #3, the problem seems to be moreso consciously executed covert and overt political censorship/demonetization of undesireable speech rather than the problem of unconscious biases of developers. It's as simple as refraining from censorship
But when "refraining from censorship" ends with advertisers (your main source of income) pulling out, your options become "censor videos" or "shutdown the service".
>But when "refraining from censorship" ends with advertisers (your main source of income) pulling out, your options become "censor videos" or "shutdown the service".
False dichotomy, there are other business models that don't require selling out to the whims of advertisers.
And YouTube is trying out those other business models, however the extreme vast majority of users don't want to pay, and the content creators already have the option to self-host, self-fund, or even use YouTube un-monetized and setup and run their own in-video ads.
YouTube is mainly an ad supported product, and just because other business models exist doesn't mean that you can call curation of the content "censorship".
This would be the exact same situation if say a website used a "subscription" model where you paid per month, then the credit-card processor decided that the content was "unethical" and dropped the video service as a customer. And that's not theoretical, it's happened to many porn hosting websites out there.
"Not playing the game" isn't an option, no matter what at the end of the day you need to "censor" some stuff (even if just to avoid getting in legal trouble), and that "censorship" will always be more strict than absolutely necessary, as the risk for a "not removed but bad video" far outweighs the downsides of a "removed but ultimately not bad video".
We are in the golden age of information in my opinion. It has never been easier to self-host and self-fund your own content in a way that is basically uncensorable. Use it! But don't go trying to change or destroy other platforms that explicitly don't want that content, or want to pursue another business model. This isn't a zero-sum game.
2 is the key. It’s not just “demonetization” it’s seemingly arbitrary demonetization. It seems like political censorship to some people, to others it seems random and capricious. Nobody seems to have any clue as to how it all works and the natural result is that people take it personally. Transparency costs nothing and scales infinitely.
Well, I fall on the side of calling a situation involving a company promoting a service that is monetized and then suddenly (sometimes quietly) removing said monetization from people with little or no attempt at justification with strange/vague rules that no one understands nor will the company bother to explain as screwing your clients or customers or creators or whatever we wish to call them.
But Google is explaining their actions here, at least on a macro level.
The blog post at [0] as well as an email summarizing the situation was sent to every channel under the new threshold for monetization.
And any time a video is demonetized, they are given links to various help articles like [1] that go over what isn't allowed. You are also sent a link on how to appeal the decision at [2] They don't speak to an individual reason or reasons, and likely never will, because it's too easy to game that. You end up with people following the "letter of the law" but not the spirit, then if you decide to ban them anyway, you get called out for applying rules inconsistently.
There's a reason why our legal system has judges, lawyers, juries, and takes many years in some cases to come to a conclusion. This shit is extremely difficult to manage at any scale.
Also 1 billion users may be true for viewers, but the real support is only needed for content creators. That number is _significantly_ lower than 1 billion.
Even if those statistics are accurate, my response to such companies would still be “boo hoo”. If your company wants to rake in the billions of dollars in benefits, you need to spend some money too. If your company can’t handle the time/effort then you shouldn’t aim for a billion users.
Am I being crass to also suggest that YouTube, perhaps more than any other platform, is a magnet for unstable people?
I'm not trying to make a blanket claim regarding mentally unhealthy people (who I have heard are less violent as a group than the general population) and not trying to absolve YouTube of their role in this with their "marketing decisions" but it seems that YouTube specifically should maybe tread more carefully than other platforms.
Besides the monetary angle there is the dangling chance at fame, an audience, acceptance that draws, in some cases, maybe more fragile people.
It's funny to think that some people think they can be called "creator" just because they're making and uploading video to the Internet.
Yes, some of those videos are fun to watch, maybe informative, but to be honest, I don't think they "created" anything more than other media did, so why give them that title?
It differentiates them from "consumers" who watch the videos. When you have two different groups of users you need two words.
Also, I think you underestimate how much work goes in to some popular channels. People with millions of subscribers often have production teams that would rival a well funded TV show. It's something I find a little saddening when kids say they want to be a YouTuber as a career choice; they think it's a guy in his bedroom with a camera and a laptop. It really isn't.
It's a two-sided coin actually. You cannot blame Youtube for people's choices to go fully dependent on viewer count revenues, it's irresponsible to say the least. But, you can blame Youtube for changing the rules whenever and however they sit fit without considering such grave consequences. This thing with Youtube demonetization is pretty messed up. In any case, would you rather invest in a Ponzi scheme? No, who would be that stupid, right? Right?
I am fully dependent on my employer’s ability to find repeat business. I have personally suffered when one of the principals of a business that employed me upset one of their main suppliers/licensors and our ability to run the business was withdrawn overnight.
The same holds true for retailers in malls, or property managers. There are many lines of work where you are entirely reliant on things that you can’t reasonably have second sources for.
Blaming people for deriving significant income from YouTube is putting the cart well and truly before the horse.
You cannot compare "content creation" on Youtube with entrepreneurship. There are different sets of rules.
Youtube does not employ "creators". Creators suffering from anxiety because of endangered income should first get help and then get a real job. Youtube is just another "get rich quick" scheme if done irresponsibly.
What!? How the heck do you think YouTube even makes money? It's exclusively through the content their users create, so they should treat them with some fucking decency. Not communicating with your users, or sending some canned responses at best is not. Just because they don't sign a formal work contract doesn't mean they can treat the users like complete shit.
Youtube is just another "get rich quick" scheme if done irresponsibly.
Most non-professional YouTube channels start as a side project. Someone thinks of something they'd like to make videos about, starts in their spare time, and grows a following. Then the money starts to come in, and eventually it's enough for them to quit their day job and work on their YouTube channel full time. Sometimes they start a business and employ people to help along the way.
If that was a SaaS app instead of a video channel there'd be no question about whether or not it's entrepreneurial. The fact they're making videos instead of code doesn't change anything.
I agree that if your hobby starts making more money than your actual job it's really attractive to think of a media startup then. It doesn't mean though that you just switch. You have to know how volatile it might be. You have to consider possibilities of outcomes. You have to calculate risks. If you want to let your hobby make money for you then you have to do it professionally. And for that you need major investments and a business model. Completely relying on views count is a bad business model. Being paid for writing actual code is different to talking about writing code in videos and being paid eventually.
I don't think you understand the amount of money we're talking about here. There are YouTube channels that started as side projects that have grown in to multi-million dollar profit businesses. Keeping that as a side project because "views count is a bad business model" would be completely crazy.
Relying on YouTube is no different to relying on Google, or Amazon, or any service that people build successful businesses on. Yes, there's a risk having a single critical factor, but that doesn't automatically mean the risk is too great to still be worthwhile.
The real problem here is that YouTube has an effective monopoly as the only working platform for monetized online video. If that's the business you're in then you have to use YouTube.
Vimeo and Youtube are two very different things, like a sniper rifle and a machine-gun is. Vimeo is primarily a video hosting service, whereas Youtube is a publishing hub.
YouTube creators have built those multi-million dollar businesses on top of a free service, you can't expect many rights when you don't pay to use the product, regardless of whether or not you're making money for the host.
I can see both sides of the argument, but developing an application and paying to host it on AWS or GCP is different to creating A video and uploading it somewhere for free.
So you are somehow claiming that YouTube offered these services purely out of the kindness of their hearts and didn't receive any form of revenue whatsoever?
You absolutely can blame YouTube for encouraging content creators to go "all in".
They are absolutely aware of this and the design of YouTube highly emphasises these metrics (which in turn translate to financial success). They allowed the formation of networks (few successful channels are "independent", finding a network is usually one of the first steps creators take when seeking to become "professional"). Their promos (e.g. Rewind) routinely feature content with high production values that are only possible with financial investment and they actively promote the idea of having YouTube "celebrities" (although lately there has been a shift towards "importing" TV personalities).
What YouTube did was create a culture around their platform that encourages people to go full time and earn money by producing content for YouTube for free and get a cut of the ad revenue in return.
In order to fight creators who gamed the system they then went and created an air of mystery around what content they actively promote (just listen to YouTubers talk about "the algorithm"), leading to various superstitions and conspiracy theories while intentionally driving creators to change the kind of content they create in order to adapt.
Then they pulled the rug underneath creators by secretly demonetising videos, resulting in revenue to drop for seemingly no reason until they made the monetisation status more visible (which sparked the "adpocalypse" drama). At that point many creators diversified their income via patreon but this relied on viewers to actually part with their money, which only worked for channels with very dedicated fans or a consistent level of quality (further adding to the pressure to churn out new content and reach a wider audience).
Meanwhile YouTube has been abandoning the independent creators that drove the site's initial success in favor of big name production studios moving content from TV over to YouTube or creating tie-ins. The independent creators that still do well are mostly the ones heavily relying on clickbait to drive fews and churning out short and shallow content that allows them to feed the algorithm and stay relevant (although even these now often rely on product placement and sponsorship deals).
On the one hand this is a classical story of a startup pivoting as it adapts to market changes and hits problems of scale. On the other hand there is a massive social cost YouTube is all but neglecting to take responsibility for.
YouTube doesn't care how their changes affect the livelihoods of creators. Free market libertarians will say they shouldn't have to care about this and they are absolutely right legally speaking. But let's not pretend the effects those decisions have on real people's lives weren't predictable.
There's the old Web 2.0 joke that "there's nothing social about social media" but YouTube certainly lives up to that. Note that all of this wouldn't be half as bad if YouTube were at all approachable to its creators. Instead, by using an unpredictable "algorithm" to hand out punishments (demonetisation, content claims, strikes) and rewards ("trending", "watch next", etc), YouTube creates a victim mindset which naturally breeds resentment.
EDIT: If anything, YouTube is a high-risk high-reward precursor to other "sharing economy" companies like Uber, except Uber's playing field is much more level.
I agree that it's unclear why Youtube just changes the rules, disregaring their actual audience magnets and causal effects.
As for "blame Youtube for encouraging", well, yes, sure you can blame Youtube for encouraging other people. Ponzi schemeres also "encourage" you to invenst. Snake oil vendor also "encourage" you to buy this insanely expensive wonder tincture which is supposed to heal just about everything there is. Ironically, in the US, the tactics of the so-called confidence men are not illegal. In free trade a sales pitch is everything. If anyone can convince you to fall for a scheme then it's your own damn fault. If you know that, you avoid that.
What do you think how many Ponzi schemers were murdered and quartered just because somebody fell for their shady ways of "encouraging" the money out of naive people's pockets?
I'm sorry, but let's face reality here. If you fall for that kind of "encouragement" you probably should review your own naive world view. The reality is hostile. If there is a way to take advantage of you it will be taken if your aren't careful.
I'm fairly sure that Ponzi schemes are, unlike YouTube, illegal in most countries though.
> If you fall for that kind of "encouragement" you probably should review your own naive world view.
I guess that's what makes you a anarcho-capitalist and me a socialist. I'm not sure where you're from, but I'm German. The general attitude in the US for example seems to be that "your problem is your problem". Like many other European countries, in Germany the view tends to be closer to "your problem is everyone's problem" (though I think some of the Nordic countries take this to a greater extreme than us).
This is why we have a real social welfare system, real public health care, real workers rights and real consumer protection laws. You're still not excused from being a naive idiot, but it's not only considered unethical to exploit naive idiots, it's also almost always a crime. Not because we want to encourage people to be naive idiots but because we think it's society's moral duty to protect even the naive idiots (and because everyone eventually has their moment of being a naive idiot about something).
I fail to understand how any of this justifies violence and threats against YouTube employees. Tying your income to an "algorithm" will always be a high risk proposition. The whole field of entertainment video itself has always been a very tough business to break into that carried with it lots of risks. People thought YouTube was easy money, and perhaps for a while it was, but it would be naive to assume that gravy train had any long-term potential.
The world of television is full of stories of pilot episodes that get picked up, are a smash hit for a few seasons, but get cancelled. The producers of those shows didn't have right to shoot up ABC, NBC, or Fox and many just licked their wounds and tried again.
People tie their income to Youtube because they think Youtube is fair. They certainly give the impression that it is (we only demonitize terrorist videos, etc.). But because Youtube is completely controlled by a messy algorithm, they don't live up to that impression at all. People find out when it's too late.
YouTube disavow their responsibility by deferring their decisions to "the algorithm" and surely you can't blame a machine. But the obvious truth is that they're in control of it and could change it -- even if it is too complicated to predict, nothing is forcing them to use it and they could still replace it with something more predictable but less "error-prone". Instead they chose not to, which means they are entirely responsible for the outcome.
This isn't unique to YouTube either. Plenty of tech companies try to hide behind a wall of maths to justify unethical behavior.
I'm not sure why you think I'm trying to justify violence against anyone. Even if you could argue that some YouTube employees are morally complicit, that's no reason to take a gun to a YouTube office and shoot people.
She didn't shoot people because YouTube uses unethical business practices. She shot people because she was an unhinged individual with extremist views about lots of things. She saw YouTube's apathy as a personal conspiracy against her content.
Whether YouTube's business practices are ethical and whether it's okay to shoot YouTube employees because of it are two separate questions. You don't need to be an ISIS sympathiser to take issue with what the US military is doing overseas.
FWIW whether YouTube's business practices are "okay" strongly depends on your political ideology and cultural background. It seems Americans, especially on HN, tend to hold the opinion that conning people into making bad decisions is (to some degree) okay because it's the victim's fault for being naive and careless. I'm German and thus have grown up in a country with strong consumer protection laws -- YouTube's behavior strikes me as obviously nefarious, but I'm well aware this perception is not universal.
This is what happens when you promise ad revenue, and then slowly, without any information, begin shadow banning channels and videos, meanwhile YouTube still runs ads and gets the cut. You will get crazy people who depend on YouTube for income, and then without any warning your income is slashed. Did you break the terms? No. Did you get banned? No. You just get 1/8th the views because who knows why?
Well you say to yourself, just go somewhere else. Where? There is no video platform that offers the ability to advertise like YouTube that has even close the amount of eye balls. Well then just use Patreon! Yeah good luck getting people to sign up unless you're wildly popular and do this as your day job. You're basically squeezed into this hole where you were making money, enjoying what you were doing, and trying to build something with YouTube, and now you're trying to read between the lines of what is advertiser friendly and won't get your shadow banned. It's an abusive relationship that people who have money think you should just do something else.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadWhen you have a service where people's livings depend on, and you take away their income source (in corp doublespeak: demonetize them) AND at the same time offer them only canned responses or, worse, no contact at all, some of them WILL be driven to desperation. Hell, the inhumanity actually IS the word "demonetization": it sounds harmless but it is everything else than that.
And even worse: Youtube has recognized that there is a problem with the consequences their non-existence of a support has, but, typical for US culture, they head for fighting the symptoms (increasing "security") instead of fixing the problem (hire support staff with a decent bit of leeway).
All those big (tech) whales with no way to normally contact them, it is insane.
"If you have a billion users, and 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you'd spend 19 person-years handling support issues every day.
If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you'd need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up. Amazing."[0]
It's not necessarily the exact same source that I discovered back then but the idea is the same. Even a tiny portion of customer service would still soak up a large amount of money, perhaps rightfully so, but at the scale some of these companies are, it quickly becomes unsustainable.
[0]: https://plus.google.com/+DeWittClinton/posts/1hRWj489oEz
Maybe there are 100,000 YouTube creators who get paid anything meaningful? (I have no idea, just guessing.) If 0.1% of them require support, that's 100 requests per day. Any moderately successful mom-and-pop SaaS gets that much.
There's no financial reason for Alphabet not to provide personal support to YouTube creators. They just don't want to.
It’s Alphabet’s community, they own it. Extending more support to dedicated members may not make direct business sense but it could be the right thing for long-term community health.
I understand words like books and bricks and apples, because these words have physical referents. I have no idea what "long-term community health" means.
What does that mean?
And why would anyone invest more in it than in barricades and highly weaponized security guards? (I'm not actually promoting an armed response to whatever a 'community' is, I'm just using it as a rhetorical foil to try to understand the pros and cons of investing in whatever a 'community' is)
If you have barricades and highly weaponized armed guards, you don't have a community. You have a war.
Or a highly pacified citizenry? ("Move on citizen. It's after dark. go home.")
What role does Youtube have in making a kumbaya kind of experience?
That's still a war, just a very one-sided war.
>What role does Youtube have in making a kumbaya kind of experience?
I'm assuming the question is "what reason does Youtube have", since their role is pretty clear: they control the platform. If they want people to keep using it, they have to keep those people happy. If they want to prevent a revolt, they have to keep people happy. Because unhappy, unstable people can turn violent. Keeping them happy won't necessarily stop all unstable people from turning violent, but you certainly do maximize that risk when you have some unstable people in your community and your community is already on the brink of a user revolt.
I'm not advocating that they should or should not care, but if one percent are revolting and 99% comes from the other, don't you think it is time to bring out the uzis?
Why would any corporation want its customers to be happy?
Some businesses certainly don't need to care. A restaurant in central Rome has an infinite supply of new tourists to feed, so they don't need to worry about whether anyone wants to come back. At the other end of the spectrum, a monopolist knows that customers have no choice and must come back regardless of how they're treated.
YouTube has elements of both: there's a near-infinite supply of hopeful Internet video stars, and they also have a near-monopoly on video viewership. They might still want to keep stakeholders happy because these issues tend to brew for a long time until they blow up into public consciousness. (Facebook's promiscuous spreading of user data was known ten years ago, but they only took action now. Damage control would have been easier earlier.)
Ugh Facebook. I have a community page for my town with thousands of likes, and most posts only reach 10% of the people who explicitly followed my page. Even if I pay to boost a post, I'm lucky to hit 20%. I get a lot of complaints from people who missed an event because they never saw the (sometimes multiple) Facebook posts announcing it. I mean, they could have visited the website or subscribed to the newsletter, but still... they asked Facebook to kindly show them the posts from this page, and Facebook told them "no", because "algorithm".
Does that still apply if they get summarily "de-partnered"?
The problem is that now society has to shoulder the costs. For example, when a mentally not-so-stable person goes to YouTube HQ and starts shooting everyone in sight. Or, more common, people falling in depressions, losing their homes, ...
(Not impossibly, given high-enough levels of interest, but high.)
Google, and technology's, most powerful tool is its ability to amplify reach, capability, and efficiency. This works very well in a broadcast-style transmission.
Where that transmission is reversed, and the many nodes start trying to feed back to the single hub, there's a problem. It's interesting to note that much of the history of the formation of the modern corporate entity has been one of changing modes of communication (and the parallel development of management structures). Two authors who explore this in (well, for me) fascinating detail are JoAnne Yates and James R. Beniger
Yates: "The Memorandum as a Management Genre" http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/dcom/Ch6_YatesMemoMgtCommQtly1989....
Yates: Control Through Communication: The rise of system in American management https://www.worldcat.org/title/control-through-communication...
Beniger, The Control Revolution http://www.worldcat.org/title/control-revolution-technologic...
In particular, broadcast technologies give leverage, but work best, as with the agricultural model, where seed can be scattered at will, and harvesting is simple, bulk, and commodity. When your plants talk back to you and have concerns about their growing conditions and/or opportunities, you're going to need a more complex feedback system. And it will have to be effective.
This has long been an Achilles' heel of Google (and, to be fair, many other large corporations).
On which, see A.O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. https://www.worldcat.org/title/exit-voice-and-loyalty-respon...
The fact that the modern corporation is, by its very intent and design, a risk-externalising machine, one that shifts danger to customers, users, vendors, and employees, rather than either the investor-principles or their manager-agents (and yes: principle-agent problem is another dynamic) is itself part of this very toxic mix.
For what the fuck did I just invest half an hour in a detailed bug report when you're not even bothering to literally read it?!
2. Provide clearly defined guidelines as they relate to the algo and be equitable with enforcement
3. Be politically neutral
This will not guarantee safety from violence, but it could increase it.
2. I think this would help, but it's not going to prevent mentally ill people from being mentally ill. They aren't going to say "oh well this removal was justified and was consistent with the others", they are going to find a perceived wrongdoing and will latch on to that, because they are mentally ill.
3. I've come to the conclusion that this is literally impossible. You can't be politically neutral. People aren't politically neutral, and therefore the things they create or moderate can't be politically neutral (whether they mean to do it or otherwise). Even algorithms that are created by people can show biases.
No, but it's pretty easy not to be censorship happy, far left SJW activists.
"Not playing the game" isn't ever an option here.
False dichotomy, there are other business models that don't require selling out to the whims of advertisers.
YouTube is mainly an ad supported product, and just because other business models exist doesn't mean that you can call curation of the content "censorship".
This would be the exact same situation if say a website used a "subscription" model where you paid per month, then the credit-card processor decided that the content was "unethical" and dropped the video service as a customer. And that's not theoretical, it's happened to many porn hosting websites out there.
"Not playing the game" isn't an option, no matter what at the end of the day you need to "censor" some stuff (even if just to avoid getting in legal trouble), and that "censorship" will always be more strict than absolutely necessary, as the risk for a "not removed but bad video" far outweighs the downsides of a "removed but ultimately not bad video".
We are in the golden age of information in my opinion. It has never been easier to self-host and self-fund your own content in a way that is basically uncensorable. Use it! But don't go trying to change or destroy other platforms that explicitly don't want that content, or want to pursue another business model. This isn't a zero-sum game.
But I admit that could just be me.
The blog post at [0] as well as an email summarizing the situation was sent to every channel under the new threshold for monetization.
And any time a video is demonetized, they are given links to various help articles like [1] that go over what isn't allowed. You are also sent a link on how to appeal the decision at [2] They don't speak to an individual reason or reasons, and likely never will, because it's too easy to game that. You end up with people following the "letter of the law" but not the spirit, then if you decide to ban them anyway, you get called out for applying rules inconsistently.
There's a reason why our legal system has judges, lawyers, juries, and takes many years in some cases to come to a conclusion. This shit is extremely difficult to manage at any scale.
[0] https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2018/01/additional-c...
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278
[2] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7083671#appeal
However, 0.1% per day and 10 minutes per call is a very high estimate.
I'm not trying to make a blanket claim regarding mentally unhealthy people (who I have heard are less violent as a group than the general population) and not trying to absolve YouTube of their role in this with their "marketing decisions" but it seems that YouTube specifically should maybe tread more carefully than other platforms.
Besides the monetary angle there is the dangling chance at fame, an audience, acceptance that draws, in some cases, maybe more fragile people.
It's funny to think that some people think they can be called "creator" just because they're making and uploading video to the Internet.
Yes, some of those videos are fun to watch, maybe informative, but to be honest, I don't think they "created" anything more than other media did, so why give them that title?
"Producers" maybe better?
Also, I think you underestimate how much work goes in to some popular channels. People with millions of subscribers often have production teams that would rival a well funded TV show. It's something I find a little saddening when kids say they want to be a YouTuber as a career choice; they think it's a guy in his bedroom with a camera and a laptop. It really isn't.
So the "consumer" is the viewer, and "creator" is the video maker/uploader.
Well, that make more sense when you put those two words inside the YouTube circle.
Thank you and corobo for explaining.
I think you may be underestimating the content on YouTube, some of these channels bring in more views and cash than the smaller legacy TV companies do
https://www.etymonline.com/word/produce
The same holds true for retailers in malls, or property managers. There are many lines of work where you are entirely reliant on things that you can’t reasonably have second sources for.
Blaming people for deriving significant income from YouTube is putting the cart well and truly before the horse.
Youtube does not employ "creators". Creators suffering from anxiety because of endangered income should first get help and then get a real job. Youtube is just another "get rich quick" scheme if done irresponsibly.
Most non-professional YouTube channels start as a side project. Someone thinks of something they'd like to make videos about, starts in their spare time, and grows a following. Then the money starts to come in, and eventually it's enough for them to quit their day job and work on their YouTube channel full time. Sometimes they start a business and employ people to help along the way.
If that was a SaaS app instead of a video channel there'd be no question about whether or not it's entrepreneurial. The fact they're making videos instead of code doesn't change anything.
Relying on YouTube is no different to relying on Google, or Amazon, or any service that people build successful businesses on. Yes, there's a risk having a single critical factor, but that doesn't automatically mean the risk is too great to still be worthwhile.
The real problem here is that YouTube has an effective monopoly as the only working platform for monetized online video. If that's the business you're in then you have to use YouTube.
Vimeo has their VOD service. It works very differently, but still...
That is actually a great simile. :)
I can see both sides of the argument, but developing an application and paying to host it on AWS or GCP is different to creating A video and uploading it somewhere for free.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/highest-paid-youtube-stars-201...
Who employs entrepreneurs?
They are absolutely aware of this and the design of YouTube highly emphasises these metrics (which in turn translate to financial success). They allowed the formation of networks (few successful channels are "independent", finding a network is usually one of the first steps creators take when seeking to become "professional"). Their promos (e.g. Rewind) routinely feature content with high production values that are only possible with financial investment and they actively promote the idea of having YouTube "celebrities" (although lately there has been a shift towards "importing" TV personalities).
What YouTube did was create a culture around their platform that encourages people to go full time and earn money by producing content for YouTube for free and get a cut of the ad revenue in return.
In order to fight creators who gamed the system they then went and created an air of mystery around what content they actively promote (just listen to YouTubers talk about "the algorithm"), leading to various superstitions and conspiracy theories while intentionally driving creators to change the kind of content they create in order to adapt.
Then they pulled the rug underneath creators by secretly demonetising videos, resulting in revenue to drop for seemingly no reason until they made the monetisation status more visible (which sparked the "adpocalypse" drama). At that point many creators diversified their income via patreon but this relied on viewers to actually part with their money, which only worked for channels with very dedicated fans or a consistent level of quality (further adding to the pressure to churn out new content and reach a wider audience).
Meanwhile YouTube has been abandoning the independent creators that drove the site's initial success in favor of big name production studios moving content from TV over to YouTube or creating tie-ins. The independent creators that still do well are mostly the ones heavily relying on clickbait to drive fews and churning out short and shallow content that allows them to feed the algorithm and stay relevant (although even these now often rely on product placement and sponsorship deals).
On the one hand this is a classical story of a startup pivoting as it adapts to market changes and hits problems of scale. On the other hand there is a massive social cost YouTube is all but neglecting to take responsibility for.
YouTube doesn't care how their changes affect the livelihoods of creators. Free market libertarians will say they shouldn't have to care about this and they are absolutely right legally speaking. But let's not pretend the effects those decisions have on real people's lives weren't predictable.
There's the old Web 2.0 joke that "there's nothing social about social media" but YouTube certainly lives up to that. Note that all of this wouldn't be half as bad if YouTube were at all approachable to its creators. Instead, by using an unpredictable "algorithm" to hand out punishments (demonetisation, content claims, strikes) and rewards ("trending", "watch next", etc), YouTube creates a victim mindset which naturally breeds resentment.
EDIT: If anything, YouTube is a high-risk high-reward precursor to other "sharing economy" companies like Uber, except Uber's playing field is much more level.
As for "blame Youtube for encouraging", well, yes, sure you can blame Youtube for encouraging other people. Ponzi schemeres also "encourage" you to invenst. Snake oil vendor also "encourage" you to buy this insanely expensive wonder tincture which is supposed to heal just about everything there is. Ironically, in the US, the tactics of the so-called confidence men are not illegal. In free trade a sales pitch is everything. If anyone can convince you to fall for a scheme then it's your own damn fault. If you know that, you avoid that.
What do you think how many Ponzi schemers were murdered and quartered just because somebody fell for their shady ways of "encouraging" the money out of naive people's pockets?
I'm sorry, but let's face reality here. If you fall for that kind of "encouragement" you probably should review your own naive world view. The reality is hostile. If there is a way to take advantage of you it will be taken if your aren't careful.
> If you fall for that kind of "encouragement" you probably should review your own naive world view.
I guess that's what makes you a anarcho-capitalist and me a socialist. I'm not sure where you're from, but I'm German. The general attitude in the US for example seems to be that "your problem is your problem". Like many other European countries, in Germany the view tends to be closer to "your problem is everyone's problem" (though I think some of the Nordic countries take this to a greater extreme than us).
This is why we have a real social welfare system, real public health care, real workers rights and real consumer protection laws. You're still not excused from being a naive idiot, but it's not only considered unethical to exploit naive idiots, it's also almost always a crime. Not because we want to encourage people to be naive idiots but because we think it's society's moral duty to protect even the naive idiots (and because everyone eventually has their moment of being a naive idiot about something).
The world of television is full of stories of pilot episodes that get picked up, are a smash hit for a few seasons, but get cancelled. The producers of those shows didn't have right to shoot up ABC, NBC, or Fox and many just licked their wounds and tried again.
YouTube disavow their responsibility by deferring their decisions to "the algorithm" and surely you can't blame a machine. But the obvious truth is that they're in control of it and could change it -- even if it is too complicated to predict, nothing is forcing them to use it and they could still replace it with something more predictable but less "error-prone". Instead they chose not to, which means they are entirely responsible for the outcome.
This isn't unique to YouTube either. Plenty of tech companies try to hide behind a wall of maths to justify unethical behavior.
She didn't shoot people because YouTube uses unethical business practices. She shot people because she was an unhinged individual with extremist views about lots of things. She saw YouTube's apathy as a personal conspiracy against her content.
Whether YouTube's business practices are ethical and whether it's okay to shoot YouTube employees because of it are two separate questions. You don't need to be an ISIS sympathiser to take issue with what the US military is doing overseas.
FWIW whether YouTube's business practices are "okay" strongly depends on your political ideology and cultural background. It seems Americans, especially on HN, tend to hold the opinion that conning people into making bad decisions is (to some degree) okay because it's the victim's fault for being naive and careless. I'm German and thus have grown up in a country with strong consumer protection laws -- YouTube's behavior strikes me as obviously nefarious, but I'm well aware this perception is not universal.
The existence of threats does not mean what you are doing is evil.
Well you say to yourself, just go somewhere else. Where? There is no video platform that offers the ability to advertise like YouTube that has even close the amount of eye balls. Well then just use Patreon! Yeah good luck getting people to sign up unless you're wildly popular and do this as your day job. You're basically squeezed into this hole where you were making money, enjoying what you were doing, and trying to build something with YouTube, and now you're trying to read between the lines of what is advertiser friendly and won't get your shadow banned. It's an abusive relationship that people who have money think you should just do something else.
Somebody's gonna get injured.