7 ms·

should be required by law If your videos don't pass the algorithm, post them somewhere else rather than reaching for the government hammer. Youtube/Google has

by crusso 9y ago

should be required by law If your videos don't pass the algorithm, post them somewhere else rather than reaching for the government hammer. Youtube/Google has every right to run their business of posting or denying video content the way they see fit without justifying it to you, free user of their service. If you think they're making a bad business decision and that there's a need for a video service that gives great explanations when they deny your videos, start such a service.

chc 9y ago
"Go start your own business if you disagree" seems like a middlebrow dismissal unless you're actually offering to fund the endeavor.
- crusso 9y ago
  It's a dismissal of the idea that we need to appeal to an authority to solve every problem we see without acknowledging that there are very real ways that the civil society can solve problems without the use of government force and the myriad of unintended consequences that go along with it. There are countless guides on the Internet for writing software that can create blogs, host pictures, videos, and other content. You could do it yourself or hire a few people for a relatively small amount of money. Start off with a hosting company and if you're successful, get your own colocation facility. Build from there. (yes, I was an engineering founder of an ISP in the Bay Area and built it up to past the point of being capable of the above - and we did it without outside funding, just our own savings from our jobs: engineers, accountant, support person)
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    But people have legitimate desires as consumers without necessarily wanting to be competitors, and without necessarily waiting for the market to evolve an alternative. You seem like a smart person, surely you know that while other platforms besides Youtube exist the network effects the obtain on a large platform have huge commercial value. I get that you don't like government force and the unintended consequences that often follow from the creation of laws, but you seem oblivious to the fact that markets have externalities and problems of their own, and are not by themselves sufficient for the operation of a society.
icebraining 9y ago
If you think they're making a bad business decision No, that's not what people arguing for a law think, and if you don't understand that, you can't make an effective argument rebutting their position. The implied position is that Google is doing something bad for society, even if it's good for business. You may disagree that this is bad for society, or that even if it is, it's still Google's prerogative, but you should at least understand the argument if you want to have a meaningful discussion.
- jMyles 9y ago
  I actually thought crusso did a good job of rebutting that argument given the context of a HN comment that presumably can't stretch on for volumes of political theory.
- crusso 9y ago
  You ignored the first part of my post where I said: post elsewhere rather than appealing to government authority. My last statement was suggesting a better idea in a free society than to try to bit-by-bit destroy that free society with yet more overpowering, overintrusive government. The implied position is that Google is doing something bad for society That completely doesn't compute. Google isn't in business to make things better for society. If they are, maybe they should give all their profits to charity, stop hosting cat videos and instead become some kind of hoster of national public content? Who said that was their business? I mean, why not argue that youporn.com isn't hosting these anti-ISIS videos either? They host videos. They could start hosting anti-ISIS videos to archive them.
  - jMyles 9y ago
    I wholeheartedly share your "don't run to government" sentiment. However, this sentiment bugs me: > That completely doesn't compute. Google isn't in business to make things better for society. If we're going to refrain from seeking the violence of state intervention when actors do things we don't like, don't we then have to count on business (and more generally, the market) to do things that we do like? Yes, I want Google to be in business to make things better for society. I'll go even further: I want Google to position itself so that its profit depends on it doing good for society. I was proud of Google when it aligned things this way re: VP8 / webm. If the violence inherent in the state is undesirable - and I agree that it is - then we need to build a society in which the free market selects for societal good.
AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
And, Government has right to break up monopolies. I now fully support breaking up Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft; may be Apple. Executives at publicly traded companies have no right to enforce their individual political views as company policies. They are not privately held companies, they are public companies who are held at higher standards of equal treatment to all. What if Bic and Mead said you can't write a opinion that we don't like using our pen and notebooks? What if US Postal Service said you can't send a snail mail if it contains references to UPS or FedEx?
- crusso 9y ago
  And, Government has right to break up monopolies Youtube is successful and even dominates the space, but is not a monopoly. There are other video hosting services that can be accessed by anyone. You can start your own if you think there's a need. The fact is that people like Youtube. Monopolies have a specific lock on their customers or their supply of a limited resource. That's why people are okay with breaking them up. Not just because they're really popular and successful. What if Bic and Mead said you can't write a opinion that we don't like using our pen and notebooks? Bic and Mead don't host your content. You buy their tools to create your own content and then publish it yourself, give it out yourself on media you paid for, etc. What if US Postal Service said you can't send a snail mail if it contains references to UPS or FedEx? The USPS is a government-supported entity. Special rules apply for entities that have government laws behind just them. If a delivery entity opened your packages to evaluate content, that would present an entirely different sent of problems for them and their customers - because the content is private. Youtube videos are public. That's the point. Youtube has determined for their own reasons that extremist content hurts their business model.
  - AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
    >Bic and Mead don't host your content. You buy their tools to create your own content and then publish it yourself, give it out yourself on media you paid for, etc. The people who bought into YouTube as a platform, the content creators and their followers, paid for by their time and watching ads into the platform. Remember, when you are not paying for the service, you are the product. The people who adopted into YouTube platform paid for it's success. YouTube was sanctuary when Facebook and Twitter were cracking down on Free Speech. Now, YouTube changing their position is clear bait and switch. You allowed people to use the platform till you are successful, taking their time and energy to drive your ad revenue, now you are cracking down on content you don't like. It is true that it will be relatively easy in this day and age, to secure funding outside of YouTube Ad revenue and host content yourself. Startups will start doing just that. YouTube will look at this moment in time where the executive's individual political preferences were turned into company policy, destroying shareholder value. >Monopolies have a specific lock on their customers or their supply of a limited resource. YouTube changes are bait and switch on content creators and consumers who made the platform successful. DeMonetizing someone overnight after years of efforts into the platform and acquiring followers is extreme power held by a corporation. >If a delivery entity opened your packages to evaluate content, that would present an entirely different sent of problems for them and their customers - because the content is private. My argument precisely for Net Neutrality. :-) Don't look at content, I bought data transfer, ISP should just forward it on using internet routing rules, just like Post Office does.
yeukhon 9y ago
Yes, absolutely! We solved the problem! No really, seriously, this idea is so flawed. * You don't like the government? Move or start your own government! * You don't like your house? Rebuild it or buy another house! * You don't like the way Earth is being run? Move or RIP! * You don't like the way the school is being run? Move to another town or build your own school! * You don't like the fact oil is so expensive? Drill your own oil! * You don't like this comment? Flag it or deal with it or build your own HN. * You don't like the way anything is done or served? DIY all the way. * You don't like your local Starbucks? Run one or go to Dunkin' Donut. * You don't like the way hospital runs? Run one or don't go. Something more extreme? * You don't like your parents? Disown your relationship with your parents or make new parents! * You don't like your child? Disown your child and make one again. Why don't we dedicate our own life building things every time we don't like? Because we have better things to do. We deserve to complain and we have every right to dislike a service and we don't need to discredit our expectations. Users want real time PvP and exchange/trade in PokemonGo, but after a year they are still not available. So why don't we build a new PokemonGo? Because we need to rent servers, build the code, maintain the code, make deal with Pokemon rights owners (which is impossible for a small company). So we bend and yield to Google, because we have no better alternative. This incident teaches us a few things; 1. Please do not think AI/algorithm is smart enough to replace an actual human. Even though human carries biases and are sloppy too, but algorithms are just as bias, if not, more bias and more sloppy (dealing with "abnormality" and edge cases) than a human being will ever be. The hype "AI" will take over... we are nowhere near that. 2. YT is too popular to listen. Losing a few thousand users means nothing to YT. We will soon forget about this in 5 hours and go back to do our own things.
- crusso 9y ago
  Appealing to government authority every time some business does something you don't like should make your list of "so flawed" solutions. 1. No one said it was, but it's their business. We live in a society that allows you to start up your own business in days if you don't like the offering of another private business. Giving up immediately and suggesting that the wielder of force in the society (government) jump in as a parent is usually a fail. 2. That still doesn't give you the right to dictate how they run their business? There's definitely something going on in our society these days where everyone wants authority to solve all their problems without acknowledging all of the potential problems that strengthening authority leads to. The article below talks about victimhood, but it mainly tries to help illuminate where this appeal to authority strain is coming from. http://reason.com/blog/2015/09/11/victimhood-culture-in-america-beyond-dig http://reason.com/blog/2015/09/11/victimhood-culture-in-amer...
cvsh 9y ago
That addresses one issue posed by AI bans, but not the other issue I mention in the second paragraph.
- crusso 9y ago
  That the ban was libelous? I'm not a lawyer, but being extreme according to their own standards doesn't sound like something you could successfully sue for libel. I think that libel involves written statements that have objective specificity that is provably wrong. Subjective statements, especially if only implied by the removal of some videos would seem to be entirely within the realm of protected opinion.
dang 9y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998738 and marked it off-topic.
- crusso 9y ago
  On second thought, nevermind. I realized that I'm just wasting my Saturday here. Have a nice day.
tanilama 9y ago
Agree. If Google just wants Youtube to be an entertainment funnel, it has every right to do so. If the service you describe exists, it won't survive long. People would begin to swarm such services with rejected videos from Youtube, which you can foresee will be problematic and messy, in the end it might just turned into a 4chan where you can upload video. Hardly an attractive business.

by crusso 9y ago

chc 9y ago

"Go start your own business if you disagree" seems like a middlebrow dismissal unless you're actually offering to fund the endeavor.

crusso 9y ago
It's a dismissal of the idea that we need to appeal to an authority to solve every problem we see without acknowledging that there are very real ways that the civil society can solve problems without the use of government force and the myriad of unintended consequences that go along with it. There are countless guides on the Internet for writing software that can create blogs, host pictures, videos, and other content. You could do it yourself or hire a few people for a relatively small amount of money. Start off with a hosting company and if you're successful, get your own colocation facility. Build from there. (yes, I was an engineering founder of an ISP in the Bay Area and built it up to past the point of being capable of the above - and we did it without outside funding, just our own savings from our jobs: engineers, accountant, support person)
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  But people have legitimate desires as consumers without necessarily wanting to be competitors, and without necessarily waiting for the market to evolve an alternative. You seem like a smart person, surely you know that while other platforms besides Youtube exist the network effects the obtain on a large platform have huge commercial value. I get that you don't like government force and the unintended consequences that often follow from the creation of laws, but you seem oblivious to the fact that markets have externalities and problems of their own, and are not by themselves sufficient for the operation of a society.

icebraining 9y ago

If you think they're making a bad business decision No, that's not what people arguing for a law think, and if you don't understand that, you can't make an effective argument rebutting their position. The implied position is that Google is doing something bad for society, even if it's good for business. You may disagree that this is bad for society, or that even if it is, it's still Google's prerogative, but you should at least understand the argument if you want to have a meaningful discussion.

jMyles 9y ago
I actually thought crusso did a good job of rebutting that argument given the context of a HN comment that presumably can't stretch on for volumes of political theory.
crusso 9y ago
You ignored the first part of my post where I said: post elsewhere rather than appealing to government authority. My last statement was suggesting a better idea in a free society than to try to bit-by-bit destroy that free society with yet more overpowering, overintrusive government. The implied position is that Google is doing something bad for society That completely doesn't compute. Google isn't in business to make things better for society. If they are, maybe they should give all their profits to charity, stop hosting cat videos and instead become some kind of hoster of national public content? Who said that was their business? I mean, why not argue that youporn.com isn't hosting these anti-ISIS videos either? They host videos. They could start hosting anti-ISIS videos to archive them.
- jMyles 9y ago
  I wholeheartedly share your "don't run to government" sentiment. However, this sentiment bugs me: > That completely doesn't compute. Google isn't in business to make things better for society. If we're going to refrain from seeking the violence of state intervention when actors do things we don't like, don't we then have to count on business (and more generally, the market) to do things that we do like? Yes, I want Google to be in business to make things better for society. I'll go even further: I want Google to position itself so that its profit depends on it doing good for society. I was proud of Google when it aligned things this way re: VP8 / webm. If the violence inherent in the state is undesirable - and I agree that it is - then we need to build a society in which the free market selects for societal good.

AmIFirstToThink 9y ago

And, Government has right to break up monopolies. I now fully support breaking up Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft; may be Apple. Executives at publicly traded companies have no right to enforce their individual political views as company policies. They are not privately held companies, they are public companies who are held at higher standards of equal treatment to all. What if Bic and Mead said you can't write a opinion that we don't like using our pen and notebooks? What if US Postal Service said you can't send a snail mail if it contains references to UPS or FedEx?

crusso 9y ago
And, Government has right to break up monopolies Youtube is successful and even dominates the space, but is not a monopoly. There are other video hosting services that can be accessed by anyone. You can start your own if you think there's a need. The fact is that people like Youtube. Monopolies have a specific lock on their customers or their supply of a limited resource. That's why people are okay with breaking them up. Not just because they're really popular and successful. What if Bic and Mead said you can't write a opinion that we don't like using our pen and notebooks? Bic and Mead don't host your content. You buy their tools to create your own content and then publish it yourself, give it out yourself on media you paid for, etc. What if US Postal Service said you can't send a snail mail if it contains references to UPS or FedEx? The USPS is a government-supported entity. Special rules apply for entities that have government laws behind just them. If a delivery entity opened your packages to evaluate content, that would present an entirely different sent of problems for them and their customers - because the content is private. Youtube videos are public. That's the point. Youtube has determined for their own reasons that extremist content hurts their business model.
- AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
  >Bic and Mead don't host your content. You buy their tools to create your own content and then publish it yourself, give it out yourself on media you paid for, etc. The people who bought into YouTube as a platform, the content creators and their followers, paid for by their time and watching ads into the platform. Remember, when you are not paying for the service, you are the product. The people who adopted into YouTube platform paid for it's success. YouTube was sanctuary when Facebook and Twitter were cracking down on Free Speech. Now, YouTube changing their position is clear bait and switch. You allowed people to use the platform till you are successful, taking their time and energy to drive your ad revenue, now you are cracking down on content you don't like. It is true that it will be relatively easy in this day and age, to secure funding outside of YouTube Ad revenue and host content yourself. Startups will start doing just that. YouTube will look at this moment in time where the executive's individual political preferences were turned into company policy, destroying shareholder value. >Monopolies have a specific lock on their customers or their supply of a limited resource. YouTube changes are bait and switch on content creators and consumers who made the platform successful. DeMonetizing someone overnight after years of efforts into the platform and acquiring followers is extreme power held by a corporation. >If a delivery entity opened your packages to evaluate content, that would present an entirely different sent of problems for them and their customers - because the content is private. My argument precisely for Net Neutrality. :-) Don't look at content, I bought data transfer, ISP should just forward it on using internet routing rules, just like Post Office does.

yeukhon 9y ago

Yes, absolutely! We solved the problem! No really, seriously, this idea is so flawed. * You don't like the government? Move or start your own government! * You don't like your house? Rebuild it or buy another house! * You don't like the way Earth is being run? Move or RIP! * You don't like the way the school is being run? Move to another town or build your own school! * You don't like the fact oil is so expensive? Drill your own oil! * You don't like this comment? Flag it or deal with it or build your own HN. * You don't like the way anything is done or served? DIY all the way. * You don't like your local Starbucks? Run one or go to Dunkin' Donut. * You don't like the way hospital runs? Run one or don't go. Something more extreme? * You don't like your parents? Disown your relationship with your parents or make new parents! * You don't like your child? Disown your child and make one again. Why don't we dedicate our own life building things every time we don't like? Because we have better things to do. We deserve to complain and we have every right to dislike a service and we don't need to discredit our expectations. Users want real time PvP and exchange/trade in PokemonGo, but after a year they are still not available. So why don't we build a new PokemonGo? Because we need to rent servers, build the code, maintain the code, make deal with Pokemon rights owners (which is impossible for a small company). So we bend and yield to Google, because we have no better alternative. This incident teaches us a few things; 1. Please do not think AI/algorithm is smart enough to replace an actual human. Even though human carries biases and are sloppy too, but algorithms are just as bias, if not, more bias and more sloppy (dealing with "abnormality" and edge cases) than a human being will ever be. The hype "AI" will take over... we are nowhere near that. 2. YT is too popular to listen. Losing a few thousand users means nothing to YT. We will soon forget about this in 5 hours and go back to do our own things.

crusso 9y ago
Appealing to government authority every time some business does something you don't like should make your list of "so flawed" solutions. 1. No one said it was, but it's their business. We live in a society that allows you to start up your own business in days if you don't like the offering of another private business. Giving up immediately and suggesting that the wielder of force in the society (government) jump in as a parent is usually a fail. 2. That still doesn't give you the right to dictate how they run their business? There's definitely something going on in our society these days where everyone wants authority to solve all their problems without acknowledging all of the potential problems that strengthening authority leads to. The article below talks about victimhood, but it mainly tries to help illuminate where this appeal to authority strain is coming from. http://reason.com/blog/2015/09/11/victimhood-culture-in-america-beyond-dig http://reason.com/blog/2015/09/11/victimhood-culture-in-amer...

cvsh 9y ago

That addresses one issue posed by AI bans, but not the other issue I mention in the second paragraph.

crusso 9y ago
That the ban was libelous? I'm not a lawyer, but being extreme according to their own standards doesn't sound like something you could successfully sue for libel. I think that libel involves written statements that have objective specificity that is provably wrong. Subjective statements, especially if only implied by the removal of some videos would seem to be entirely within the realm of protected opinion.

dang 9y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998738 and marked it off-topic.

crusso 9y ago
On second thought, nevermind. I realized that I'm just wasting my Saturday here. Have a nice day.

tanilama 9y ago

Agree. If Google just wants Youtube to be an entertainment funnel, it has every right to do so. If the service you describe exists, it won't survive long. People would begin to swarm such services with rejected videos from Youtube, which you can foresee will be problematic and messy, in the end it might just turned into a 4chan where you can upload video. Hardly an attractive business.