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The worst part of the information age is arbitration by unreasonable and impenetrable algorithms rather than humans with the capacity to make a judgement call w

• viridian 9y ago
  I think the bigger issue is that certain companies have near monopolies in their spaces to start with. For plebs like myself, youtube is really the only viable option I have to distribute video media if I hope to build an audience. The fact that you effectively can't mount an alternative to facebook, youtube, etc due to network effects is the larger disease, and this is one of many symptoms.
  • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Agreed. If competition exists, customer service is one of the angles competitors can improve on to try to gain customers. For instance, one of the top reasons I prefer FastMail over Gmail is that real customer service I get.
  • the8472 9y ago
    I think the only solution is a distributed and decentralized web. Distributed hosting of static content is a sorta-solved problem. But curating, linking and discoverability (which require mutating content) is a lot harder due to the trust anchor problem.
    • stephen82 9y ago
      Your suggestion exists and has a name: bitchute. I will paste here what they have for "About" at the end of their main page: BitChute is a peer to peer content sharing platform. Our mission is to put people and free speech first. It is free to join, create and upload your own content to share with others. Feel free to read more about it in their FAQ. I really want to stop using YouTube and use this instead. I hope they make it. https://www.bitchute.com/ https://www.bitchute.com/
      • the8472 9y ago
        Webtorrent does not meet the distributed requirement since webrtc needs signalling servers. Plus the discovery component is still hosted on websites subject to the networking effect.
      • vidarh 9y ago
        The big challenge with this is to solve the problem that almost everyone has a "one step too far" when it comes to what type of content we are willing to tolerate and/or what type of content we may get in trouble for hosting even if it is not intentional. That makes it tricky to for solutions that "put people and free speech first" to succeed, because they've basically painted a giant target on themselves, and it easily makes even a lot of people that sympathise in principle worried about the bits and pieces that steps over their personal line. Figuring out a reasonable solution to this, I think, will be essential to get more widespread adoptions of platforms like these.
        • the8472 9y ago
          I think the problem is the expectation of people that someone else do the filtering for them. I.e. "I don't want to see this kind of content" leads to "someone else should remove it from all the sites I visit". Which obviously leads to conflicting requirements once you have more than one person and those people disagree on what they want to see and don't want to see. The only reasonable solution is to host everything, modulo requirements by law, and give users the tools to locally filter out content en masse. In a decentralized system you also skip the law requirements since you cannot enforce multiple incompatible jurisdictions at the platform level, individual users will be responsible for enforcing it on their own nodes, similar how all you can do when accidentally encountering child porn is to clear your cache.
          • djrogers 9y ago
            > I.e. "I don't want to see this kind of content" leads to "someone else should remove it from all the sites I visit". I don’t think that’s always the mindset. Isn’t it reasonable for people to have the mindset of “I want to go to sites that don’t have content that I find objectionable”? This way websites can decide which group of people they want to cater to.
    • flamedoge 9y ago
      Webtorrent is another torrent based media sharing
    • chongli 9y ago
      I think the only solution is a distributed and decentralized web. I love the idea but one problem: who pays for it? It's a special case of the co-operative vs corporation problem. Without an individual's starting capital, how do you get off the ground?
• ingenuous2 9y ago
  This has always existed. We call it bureaucracy.
  • cvsh 9y ago
    Bureaucracies are staffed with humans who have the capacity to make a judgement call on how to interpret the rules, and bend their letter to serve their spirit, or the interests of pubic relations, or just common sense.
    • detaro 9y ago
      Do we know how much YouTube involves humans in the process? I wouldn't be surprised if appeals go to a human which clicks the "yeah, nope" button.
    • ingenuous2 9y ago
      I disagree. Have you ever been to the CA DMV with a photo of your license (that you lost/had stolen)? I have. They told me I needed a copy of my lost license to get a new one, or else the man couldn't validate my identity. Bureaucratic hell, as defined by Harry Harrison in the Stainless Steel Rat series, is the definition of humans as automata.
• Retra 9y ago
  That's not the worst part at all! Anyone could file a complaint about a mistaken algorithm; the companies are run by people, and they'll have to address their customers' concerns. The worst part is that humans use these algorithms to justify and enforce their own shitty decisions; to say it is "out of their hands" due to some inane, manufactured inconvenience. >There's irreparable reputational damage associated with an algorithm libelously labeling something "extremist content" that isn't. The damage is definitely repairable. You admit the algorithm is flawed and you tolerate exceptions to it.
  • ScottBurson 9y ago
    I think they were talking about the content producer's reputation.
• pmoriarty 9y ago
  To be fair, the process needs to be much more than merely transparent. It needs to be independent. That means that it needs to be done by an entity outside of Google itself, and not in any way associated with or influenced by Google.
  • hossbeast 9y ago
    Google is a company. You want video hosting to be run by the government?
    • the8472 9y ago
      How about by a non-profit?
    • pmoriarty 9y ago
      It doesn't have to be the hosting itself that's independent, but it would be an improvement if there was an independent body to which you could appeal.
    • geocar 9y ago
      Yes. An alternative is to classify Google as a common carrier, exempting them from the DMCA, but preventing them from censoring or even throttling traffic, however given their business model is around sponsorship, it is unclear how to also protect the advertisers' interests. Trying to get government shackles onto Google simply seems too tricky; It seems much easier to simply run Google with tax dollars and no advertising.
      • dom0 9y ago
        Google and Facebook are bigger than a single country now.
        • geocar 9y ago
          This is a strange way to define "bigger". Google and Facebook combined have a total market cap (sum of all shares) is around 1.2 trillion dollars, which would represent only a 5% increase in tax revenue for America to simply buy all the shares. However, the Government doesn't need to turn a profit: Google and Facebook combined spend only around $200 million dollars per year on R&D and operating expenses, which would be a rounding error on the tax budget.
• anigbrowl 9y ago
  The opacity is by design. It's notable that such behavior by an individual would typically be considered psychologically abusive. It's one reason I talk about power relations frequently; we are in the throes of automating them, and given the impact of technology on other spheres of human activity we should be wary of what sort of social relations were are baking in. Perhaps the Graph should be public domain. Perhaps too we are heading towards a world where reputation and legal identity are subject to casual destruction but there's no real barrier to starting over, much like when you die in a videogame.
• nnfy 9y ago
  This isn't just some AI gone wrong. YouTube has had an agenda for years. At the very least, people with power to undo these bans are complacent, there is simply no way that YouTube staff are unaware of the gradual crackdowns. Even content producers will mention demonitization occasionally. Nothing major online happens by accident.
• likelynew 9y ago
  I am on communities where I am fine with content being removed or fined without delivering a rationale(HN included). I definitely don't want government intervention everywhere.
• tankenmate 9y ago
  I think the biggest problem is that unlike a judicial decision the thought process (including any highlighted pros and cons) that accompanies a decision is entirely missing.
• ubernostrum 9y ago
  The worst part of the information age is arbitration by unreasonable and impenetrable algorithms rather than humans The thing is, people only tend to notice it when it affects them personally (either they are the victim of the algorithm, or someone they know/like/support is). The world has long worked on irrational biases, which now are being used as the training data for decision-making systems which are subsequently declared to be "objective" because people believe an algorithm can't be biased. And increasingly, the mark of privilege is having access to a system -- applications, interviews, customer service, even courts -- which will use human judgment instead of an unreviewable algorithm. For more on the topic I suggest the book Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil.
• erikpukinskis 9y ago
  This seems like a false dichotomy. There is nothing preventing a human staff from declining to provide an explanation, nor is there any reason a machine learning algorithm couldn't summarize its reasons. The issue isn't AI vs human, it's transparent vs opaque.
• Buge 9y ago
  These takedowns were done by humans. The videos were flagged by AI for human review.
  • gaius 9y ago
    The videos were flagged by AI for human review The training parameters of that "AI" were set by a human too. Someone said to it "here are a bunch of videos that I PERSONALLY THINK are to be banned, learn from that".
• AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
  I mean, why not wait till it is deemed illegal by the authorities and due process? How can you take away someone's freedom of speech? It's not like the AI has absolute idea of what is 'extremist' content, it's just enforcing someone idea of what it is. AI is trained on data, and whoever labeled that data is the person/s who are winning here.
  • ucaetano 9y ago
    > How can you take away someone's freedom of speech? Nobody is taking away your freedom of speech by deleting your video. Nobody is mandated to provide you with a vehicle or medium for your speech.
    • AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
      Anyone can deny any service to anyone for any reason? Are you sure you are sold on right outcome of the baker/LGBT wedding-cake case? How about a pharmacist not telling correct/all options based on their theology? How about a publicly traded corporation? Do they have a mandate to treat people equally? If they are picking a political viewpoint and removing customers because of it, what makes you think that their hiring practices are fair? Google has a religion now, it has been baptized in the religion of intolerant left. Google is now theocratic, it will not allow blasphemous talk that challenges its religion. Google claimed to champion Net-Neutrality, don't open the packet, they said to the ISPs. They want to resist opening of TCP/IP packet but when it comes to content of the videos, they want to play God. TCP/IP packet or Video, let the legal system take its course, let authorities tell you to ban something, don't play God on the platform that is valuable because of the sum number of people on it. YouTube is a social network, its value comes from people participating in it, treat the people equally and be an neutral steward of the platform technology, don't push ideology. Anyway, Google has damaged its image too much now. It will never be seen with same affection again, at least not by me.
• dunkelheit 9y ago
  I think the notion that machine learning algorithms are "unreasonable and impenetrable" is seen as a huge PR boon by these companies as it shifts the responsibility away from actual humans. So they try hard to promote it. The fact is that there is always a human in the loop. Without human supervision these algorithms deliver a small but significant portion of incredibly stupid results. So an actual human has to sit down, analyze these results one by one and decide what to do (in some cases just hardcoding the "correct" answer). The general public must be educated about this stuff so that responsibility is not muddled.
  • jjoonathan 9y ago
    Yep. The usual incarnation of the scapegoat is "policy." It sounds much better to blame a byzantine rulebook (which is the perfect tool for diffusion-of-responsibility) than to reveal that the strategists have decided to throw a subset of customers under the bus. In the case of monopoly, sometimes it's not even a subset. Incidentally, this also explains why there is zero interest in making rulebooks available, conscise, searchable, etc. All of these would improve fairness, but rulebooks are actually an instrument of power, not of fairness, so existing power structures will typically oppose any such changes.