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YouTube enlists volunteers to moderate site via “YouTube Heroes” program
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- radus 10y agoChicks dig YouTube Heroes
- sctb 10y agoPlease comment civilly and substantively on HN or not at all. We ban accounts that continue to post like this.
- yakult 10y agoMore and more big social is democratizing the black magic of boutique PR firms. Want reputation management? Rep-kill your competitors? Damage control your latest scandal? Just hire some mechturks for peanuts to flag the right videos and like the right pages and write the right reviews and submit the right DMCAs and retweet the right tweets and...
- generic_user 10y agoIt's also a sneaky back-door way of letting state sponsored censorship that stretches far beyond your legal rights. States can implement Orwellian censorship and Youtube has plausible deniability they have anything to do with it.
- Natsu 10y agoMy first thought on seeing this was this video, that was on HN some time ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
- 0xdada 10y agoMultiple people thought this is a good idea.
- tdkl 10y agoCensorship based on feelings of a "heroes" group. What could possibly go wrong?
- mc32 10y agoCuration Flickr style, for me, is an acceptable alternative to hamfisted policies on the one hand and 2ch-style free for all blather on the other. Groups get to run their group/forum as they wish with only occasional direct oversight by actual employees (threats, harassment, copyright, some succession disputes, etc.)
- neom 10y agoWorked incredibly well on deviantART for years. I found when a community cares about itself, it will usually take care of itself. This becomes especially true if the community exhibits and fosters a sense of pride.
- ekianjo 10y agoYouTube stands for nothing, unlike deviantArt who attracts a certain kind of public.
- pawadu 10y agothat is not correct, YouTube is a community for cat lovers.
- Someone 10y agoOn the other hand, my first thought was Wikipedia. Imagine a group of 'heroes' that goes on a crusade for something it deems desirable, such as gender-balance, right-to-carry or 'kid friendliness', and creates fairly strict rules as to how to present a video clip on YouTube ("yes, your video may be sarcastic, but some people may fail to see that, so we added the standard YouTube disclaimer; we also bleeped out your usage of the word 'ab*ion', as per rule 451)
- corobo 10y agoThen imagine anything they do still has to go through someone working at YouTube. Sure there's a chance that someone may agree with their fairly strict rules but on the other hand that someone also doesn't want to lose their job by abusing the powers it gives.
- MentatOnMelange 10y agoSo an extremely large for-profit entity is organizing a group of people, giving them things to do that help the company, but isn't actually paying them anything? This makes unpaid internships look like charity initiatives.
- ljk 10y agocrazy thing is there'll be enough people that want to do it to keep it going..
- NDizzle 10y agoReminds me of the Ultima Online Counselor's program. http://www.uoguide.com/Counselor#U.S._Counselor_Program_Demise http://www.uoguide.com/Counselor#U.S._Counselor_Program_Demi...
- vintermann 10y agoModerators will get paid, one way or another. Whatever you pay them with, you will get the kind of moderators who like that as payment. For some people, the power to filter for others is the best payment they could want. I'm heartened by how many of the nice, kid-friendly youtubers I follow who nonetheless have already spoken up about this terrible idea.
- aerovistae 10y agoBut I mean, isn't that how reddit moderation works? And all of stack exchange? Why is that okay and this isn't?
- ManlyBread 10y agoReddit moderation is very dysfunctional, especially since a large part of the job is automated and the criteria for getting banned are largely unknown to the masses.
- bipson 10y agoThat does not in any remote way answer his question though.
- flashman 10y agoFinally, a reliable way to contact YouTube support: add 400 sentences of subtitles
- strathmeyer 10y agoYou can report the video. Not that there would be a reason to do that.
- ljk 10y agohuh i was wondering why my comment didn't show up.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12551249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12551249
- pawadu 10y agobefore: THEY REMOVED MY COMMENT, THE GOVERNMENT DONT WANT YOU TO KNOW!! after: THEY REMOVED MY COMMENT, THE KID DOWN THE STREET DOESNT WANT YOU TO KNOW!!
- atheg33 10y agoI'd be interested to see a comparison of the contrasts between YouTube's new "Heroes" program and the disgraced AOL "Community Leader" program that was successfully sued for $15M USD in the past. [0] Participants in the AOL Community Leader Program claimed that AOL was using them as employees without paying them. Thus the lawsuit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program#Department_of_Labor_investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program#D...
- spacehome 10y agoI never quite understood that lawsuit. The volunteers understood that they weren't being paid when they signed up for the gig, right?
- veridies 10y agoTo enforce a minimum wage, you have to guarantee that people actually get paid at all. So in general, unless you're running a non-profit, you will have a really hard time legally with unpaid volunteers. If you don't mandate wages for employees, you have companies exploiting weaker people for their work, often under misleading pretenses.
- fenomas 10y agoDid you read the link? They were compensated (with free internet access) in return for which they had to undergo training, work for a set number of hours, fill in timecards, etc. It sounds like it was a part-time job in all but name.
- GirlsCanCode 10y agoI'd rather have some corporate overlords moderating than some self-appointed social justice warriors who obviously have too much free time.
- generic_user 10y agoI think all these resent attempts to censor speech and engage in narrative peddling are going to backfire on the companies. There is nothing more frustrating then taking the time to comment on something or participate in a conversation and have those comments removed by someone who has an agenda or simply disagrees with you. There has already been a fair amount of attempts to start alternatives to popular sites that start to censor. Voat has been fairly successful in pealing off Reddit users. GNUsocial, Wikipedia clones etc. It would be nice to see some of these services like Facebook and Youtube have a sizeable chunk of there users taken away by companies that make an public commitment to limited data retention and freedom of speech.
- sillysaurus3 10y agoThere's currently a backlash against this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh_1966vaIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh_1966vaIA 1,500 likes vs 75,500 dislikes. Most people on the Reddit thread dislike it too: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/53wffb/youtube_introduces_a_new_program_that_rewards/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/53wffb/youtube_intr...
- infinitesoup 10y agoThere's a lot of misinformation going on in the Reddit thread. These "Heroes" get better tools for flagging videos faster (among other things), but it's still just flagging. Every flag still gets reviewed by a human at YouTube, according to their documentation: > YouTube staff review flagged videos 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and videos that violate our Community Guidelines are removed from YouTube. Videos that may not be appropriate for all younger audiences are age-restricted. > Flagged videos are not automatically taken down by the flagging system. If a video doesn't violate our guidelines, no amount of flagging will change that, and the video will stay on the site. [0] And that documentation is still true for the Hero program: > As always, the policy team at YouTube makes the final determination of whether content should be removed. [1] [0]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802027 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802027 [1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2803402 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2803402
- pdkl95 10y ago> YouTube says that those who participate will be eligible to receive perks, including access to exclusive workshops and sneak preview product launches, for example. Gamifying content flagging with mass-flagging tools combined with their stupidly vague content rules[1] is a gift to the people that abuse moderation tools for hateful or trolling purposes. Maliciously flagged videos are already a problem (regardless of any human review), and YT is now going to reward (some of) these assholes? [1] Remember the recent mess regarding the de-monitisation of videos arbitrarily deemed "not advertiser friendly"? The problem isn't that some videos were de-monotized; the guidelines - as written - could apply to anything.
- smackay 10y agoPotential volunteers might want to read the following before signing up: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/
- reduxive 10y agoOh, spectacular. This will go swimmingly! You know, when I was in high school, we had an all volunteer group of hall monitors, and it was this pointless excursion in self-policing that resulted in frustration on all sides, because both the monitors and the deviants were equally incompetent, and unprofessional. Only the dumbest volunteered, and only the dumbest got caught. Meanwhile, parking lot shenanigans surged, even though people were still exchanging blowjobs in the elevators in the two-floor wings (yes, even on camera). So, hallway fights declined, but fights were the only metric that saw progress, and people fought behind the school, in the parking lots, and in the sports fields instead, but at least they weren't fighting in the hallways anymore. Youtube, meanwhile, doesn't have a single critical metric. Their goal is quality of community. You can't let everybody into your community indiscriminately, and expect to have a high quality community. Selective partitioning and curration of membership creates quality of company; choose your friends wisely. This is why gifted-and-talented programs are so controversial. Youtube can't simultaneously appeal to the lowest common denominator AND enjoy openly elitist patronage, which is by definition exclusive. P.S. In the end, my school district accepted defeat, and paid for professional security guards. The school was unruly enough to warrant the extra line item in the budget, and initially people complained that the students were being alienated, as if they were criminals, to which the stark reply was: Some of them ARE criminals, and here're the arrest records and police blotter to prove it!
- EdiX 10y agoThis should be called YouTube Large Scale Stanford Experiment.
- lake99 10y agoNah, this will go the way of Microsoft Tay and Facebook's automated curation. 4chan will run the system to generate jokes for themselves, until Google finally kills it.
- aikah 10y agoAKA "Trust and safety council" /s
- ethana 10y agoFlagging abuse aside, I think the text transcript is actually a really good idea to refine their STT system. The automatic transcript that YouTube uses has improved to about 80% whenever I try to use it. This will no doubt help their effort in improving their accuracy. Too bad the PR team bundled it into this "Heroes" nonsense.