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The real problem with these rules is subjectivity. Something you would consider offensive is probably not from my perspective. In the end it will be a moderator

The real problem with these rules is subjectivity. Something you would consider offensive is probably not from my perspective. In the end it will be a moderator bias galore. I can easily see a Christian mod demonetizing atheist videos, democrat <--> republican, prude <--> free, etc etc etc. I'd like to see a true free speech platform with violence/nudity sectioned off according to the local laws, and then let the advertisers decide where they want to spend the money, instead of treating them as children who don't know better.

PeachPlum 9y ago
With Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn on the team, what could go wrong?
- sctb 9y ago
  We've already asked you twice to stop trolling, so we've banned this account. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll start following the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
chiaro 9y ago
They have a pretty clear set of guidelines for what counts as controversial. I think they do a good job of circumscribing the worst of what they've been funding up to this point, without being too overreaching.
- viridian 9y ago
  I don't use youtube much, but I know that Joe Rogan's podcasts as well as a bunch of Jiu Jitsu stuff has been demonitized for no real reason. I can't imagine it's going well for other, more dramatic communities if even a combat sport with no striking is seeing a bunch of videos culled in the process.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  This is entirely untrue. Just search for "youtube" in HN's search and you'll see articles describing how inconsistent, inaccurate, and overreaching they've been.
rayalez 9y ago
That makes sense. The problem is that at the end of the day the decision will have to be made either by algorithms or by people. Algorithms are less nuanced, hard to write, and will often fail, people are expensive and biased. With the amount of videos youtube has to process, and without an almost human-level AI, I don't think there's a perfect solution. Algorithms flagging videos for review, and then humans making decisions based on some basic set of principles seems right. Also, to let advertisers decide where to spend their money there's targeting tools...
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Aren't algorithms also biased in theory since they are created by people?
  - lc5G 9y ago
    While algorithms can be biased intentionally or unintentionally, it is not true that ALL algorithms HAVE to be biased because they are created by people. In machine learning it might be easier to unintentionally create biased algorithms. On the other hand there are domains where I would trust algorithms to be less biased than people.
  - drchickensalad 9y ago
    The fact this is often glossed over causes many problems in society. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-age-of-the-algorithm/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-age-of-the-algori... makes some interesting and good arguments imo.
- bufferoverflow 9y ago
  The solution is obvious - tag/categorize the videos, according to very strict rules, let the advertisers decide which tags to serve. Allow the publishers to dispute the tags. For instance, "nudity" can be defined as "visible genitals, female nipples" in the US. "Controversial" tag should not even exist, it makes no sense, any non-trivial subject is controversial. And honestly, YouTube can benefit from a more precise tagging/category system, it's currently extremely crude.
icebraining 9y ago
But what advertiser wants to spend their time selecting videos to put their ads on? I don't see how your solution would be accepted. And automatic categorization doesn't work - otherwise Google wouldn't be spending money on humans.
- bufferoverflow 9y ago
  Automatic detection of curse words and nudity does work, as far as I know. The regular categorization should be left to the publishers, but it should be much wider and multilevel, not the current choice of, what, 10 categories? Yes, other things like hate speech are harder to detect, but, as I said, it's extremely subjective, and should not be dealt with in a general way, but rather broken down into subcategories, like "religion criticism", "radical feminism", "men's rights", etc, whatever ruffles people's feathers these days.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Yes, other things like hate speech are harder to detect Exactly. but, as I said, it's extremely subjective, and should not be dealt with in a general way, but rather broken down into subcategories, like "religion criticism", "radical feminism", "men's rights", etc, whatever ruffles people's feathers these days. Unless you have some reason to think that a non-insignificant number of advertisers would be OK with ads on a subset of those categories but not all, that's just pointless busywork.
    - bufferoverflow 9y ago
      These are huge groups. Consider religious criticism - we have Dawkins, Sam Harris, Dillahunty, Thunderf00t, PZ Myers, Aron Ra, Hitchens, etc. All with hundreds of videos. Tens to hundreds of millions of views for each of these names. If you demonetize them all because religious people consider criticism hate, you are throwing out tons of potential ad revenue. It's not much more work, just create more granular multilevel categories.
      - 9y ago
DoreenMichele 9y ago
There is no real solution for that. Even the legal system flip-flops periodically. We have a Supreme Court as final arbiter of these judgement calls, but there is no means to completely escape the issue of human subjectivity influencing human judgement calls.
- bufferoverflow 9y ago
  You can't seriously compare the legal system, where you're innocent till proven guilty, with evidence, hearings, lawyers and multiple levels of appeal with what YouTube has created: non-transparent judge, jury and the executioner in one, extremely biased moderators. Yeah, it's not as bad as Twitter, but it looks like it's getting there.
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    I worked in insurance. My job was making judgement calls that could stand up in court. I worked for a very large insurance company. I am pretty confident that other large companies, like Google, operate rather similarly with regards to making sure they can defend their decisions in court, if necessary.
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      Haha no. Google, Fb, Twitter, Youtube - they all do not have the incentive to do so, as there is no way to sue one of them for wrongful account termination. With my telco, I can sue - and unless I'm more than 3 months behind in payment they legally can't cut me off in Germany. Who says that the social media giants shouldn't be regulated in the same way, given their importance in today's world?
      - DoreenMichele 9y ago
        Insurance is very highly regulated. It falls under federal rules for both financial industries and health, so it is subject to both Gramm-Leach-Bliley and HIPAA. And when the actuarials decide some benefit is costing the company too much, they send the policy to legal who reinterprets the language and then the entire claims department gets retrained on how to pay the benefit correctly and informed we have been doing it wrong for the past 20 years. So, ha ha yourself. They have an in-house legal department to justify whatever the heck they plan to do anyway. They just want all their ducks in a row from the start. The lawyers basically get paid to get the company's story straight ahead of time. It's quite mind-boggling that insurance is even legal as an industry.
krapp 9y ago
>I'd like to see a true free speech platform with violence/nudity sectioned off according to the local laws, and then let the advertisers decide where they want to spend the money, instead of treating them as children who don't know better. A true free speech platform wouldn't have any concern at all for laws regarding content or any specific cultural mores - laws exist to limit the freedoms of the individual for the good of the community, not to define or enforce them, and the web doesn't belong to any culture but its own. I think you could still have tagging or filtering for such a platform, but it might need to be a service or market of systems in and of itself, either community driven or local to each user, and not something enforced by a central authority. Of course, that means first treating all content equally - including objectionable and illegal content, because that's the real and for many uncomfortable consequence of free speech.
ckastner 9y ago
> The real problem with these rules is subjectivity. Something you would consider offensive is probably not from my perspective. I'd be surprised if YouTube didn't account for this, or in other words, if they made the demonetization decision indeed dependent on a single person. I'd actually expect them to look for this bias, and filter out the reviewer, for example: reviewer X has consistently flagged videos that a number of other reviewers have cleared, etc. Edit: perhaps a better example: For any sample of 100 videos, ensure that 5 videos (5%) are from a pool of videos pre-approved by some gremium. If a reviewer flags more than X (X being 1 to 5, however strict you want to be) of these pre-approved videos, there is a high probability that this reviewer exhibits a strong bias, so you discard that reviewer's selection.
- visarga 9y ago
  What about slight biases, say, 1.1x more probable to favor whites to blacks? Everyone is biased in many ways, and it adds up.
  - ckastner 9y ago
    The selection of test videos (the 5%) could address that -- just pick videos that a fair reviewer would ignore, and an at least slightly biased reviewer would reject. If a reviewer flags more than X of these videos, one might assume that the reviewer is biased. (X should probably be large enough to account for false positives from fair reviewers).
visarga 9y ago
> In the end it will be a moderator bias galore. Same problem as with AI bias. A great video about this problem: The Trouble with Bias - NIPS 2017 Keynote - Kate Crawford - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMym_BKWQzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMym_BKWQzk
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ucaetano 9y ago
> The real problem with these rules is subjectivity. The real problem with humans is subjectivity. > I'd like to see a true free speech platform with violence/nudity sectioned off according to the local laws, and then let the advertisers decide where they want to spend the money, instead of treating them as children who don't know better. Build one. Good luck preventing it from going bankrupt when advertisers decide they won't spend any money on your platform. It has been tried, this isn't any different than all the "alt-right internet" services popping up. Or 4chan. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/technology/alt-right-internet.html?_r=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/technology/alt-right-inte...

PeachPlum 9y ago

With Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn on the team, what could go wrong?

sctb 9y ago
We've already asked you twice to stop trolling, so we've banned this account. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll start following the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

chiaro 9y ago

They have a pretty clear set of guidelines for what counts as controversial. I think they do a good job of circumscribing the worst of what they've been funding up to this point, without being too overreaching.

viridian 9y ago
I don't use youtube much, but I know that Joe Rogan's podcasts as well as a bunch of Jiu Jitsu stuff has been demonitized for no real reason. I can't imagine it's going well for other, more dramatic communities if even a combat sport with no striking is seeing a bunch of videos culled in the process.
CaptSpify 9y ago
This is entirely untrue. Just search for "youtube" in HN's search and you'll see articles describing how inconsistent, inaccurate, and overreaching they've been.

rayalez 9y ago

That makes sense. The problem is that at the end of the day the decision will have to be made either by algorithms or by people. Algorithms are less nuanced, hard to write, and will often fail, people are expensive and biased. With the amount of videos youtube has to process, and without an almost human-level AI, I don't think there's a perfect solution. Algorithms flagging videos for review, and then humans making decisions based on some basic set of principles seems right. Also, to let advertisers decide where to spend their money there's targeting tools...

hkmurakami 9y ago
Aren't algorithms also biased in theory since they are created by people?
- lc5G 9y ago
  While algorithms can be biased intentionally or unintentionally, it is not true that ALL algorithms HAVE to be biased because they are created by people. In machine learning it might be easier to unintentionally create biased algorithms. On the other hand there are domains where I would trust algorithms to be less biased than people.
- drchickensalad 9y ago
  The fact this is often glossed over causes many problems in society. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-age-of-the-algorithm/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-age-of-the-algori... makes some interesting and good arguments imo.
bufferoverflow 9y ago
The solution is obvious - tag/categorize the videos, according to very strict rules, let the advertisers decide which tags to serve. Allow the publishers to dispute the tags. For instance, "nudity" can be defined as "visible genitals, female nipples" in the US. "Controversial" tag should not even exist, it makes no sense, any non-trivial subject is controversial. And honestly, YouTube can benefit from a more precise tagging/category system, it's currently extremely crude.

icebraining 9y ago

But what advertiser wants to spend their time selecting videos to put their ads on? I don't see how your solution would be accepted. And automatic categorization doesn't work - otherwise Google wouldn't be spending money on humans.

bufferoverflow 9y ago
Automatic detection of curse words and nudity does work, as far as I know. The regular categorization should be left to the publishers, but it should be much wider and multilevel, not the current choice of, what, 10 categories? Yes, other things like hate speech are harder to detect, but, as I said, it's extremely subjective, and should not be dealt with in a general way, but rather broken down into subcategories, like "religion criticism", "radical feminism", "men's rights", etc, whatever ruffles people's feathers these days.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Yes, other things like hate speech are harder to detect Exactly. but, as I said, it's extremely subjective, and should not be dealt with in a general way, but rather broken down into subcategories, like "religion criticism", "radical feminism", "men's rights", etc, whatever ruffles people's feathers these days. Unless you have some reason to think that a non-insignificant number of advertisers would be OK with ads on a subset of those categories but not all, that's just pointless busywork.
  - bufferoverflow 9y ago
    These are huge groups. Consider religious criticism - we have Dawkins, Sam Harris, Dillahunty, Thunderf00t, PZ Myers, Aron Ra, Hitchens, etc. All with hundreds of videos. Tens to hundreds of millions of views for each of these names. If you demonetize them all because religious people consider criticism hate, you are throwing out tons of potential ad revenue. It's not much more work, just create more granular multilevel categories.
    - 9y ago

DoreenMichele 9y ago

There is no real solution for that. Even the legal system flip-flops periodically. We have a Supreme Court as final arbiter of these judgement calls, but there is no means to completely escape the issue of human subjectivity influencing human judgement calls.

bufferoverflow 9y ago
You can't seriously compare the legal system, where you're innocent till proven guilty, with evidence, hearings, lawyers and multiple levels of appeal with what YouTube has created: non-transparent judge, jury and the executioner in one, extremely biased moderators. Yeah, it's not as bad as Twitter, but it looks like it's getting there.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  I worked in insurance. My job was making judgement calls that could stand up in court. I worked for a very large insurance company. I am pretty confident that other large companies, like Google, operate rather similarly with regards to making sure they can defend their decisions in court, if necessary.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    Haha no. Google, Fb, Twitter, Youtube - they all do not have the incentive to do so, as there is no way to sue one of them for wrongful account termination. With my telco, I can sue - and unless I'm more than 3 months behind in payment they legally can't cut me off in Germany. Who says that the social media giants shouldn't be regulated in the same way, given their importance in today's world?
    - DoreenMichele 9y ago
      Insurance is very highly regulated. It falls under federal rules for both financial industries and health, so it is subject to both Gramm-Leach-Bliley and HIPAA. And when the actuarials decide some benefit is costing the company too much, they send the policy to legal who reinterprets the language and then the entire claims department gets retrained on how to pay the benefit correctly and informed we have been doing it wrong for the past 20 years. So, ha ha yourself. They have an in-house legal department to justify whatever the heck they plan to do anyway. They just want all their ducks in a row from the start. The lawyers basically get paid to get the company's story straight ahead of time. It's quite mind-boggling that insurance is even legal as an industry.

krapp 9y ago

>I'd like to see a true free speech platform with violence/nudity sectioned off according to the local laws, and then let the advertisers decide where they want to spend the money, instead of treating them as children who don't know better. A true free speech platform wouldn't have any concern at all for laws regarding content or any specific cultural mores - laws exist to limit the freedoms of the individual for the good of the community, not to define or enforce them, and the web doesn't belong to any culture but its own. I think you could still have tagging or filtering for such a platform, but it might need to be a service or market of systems in and of itself, either community driven or local to each user, and not something enforced by a central authority. Of course, that means first treating all content equally - including objectionable and illegal content, because that's the real and for many uncomfortable consequence of free speech.

ckastner 9y ago

> The real problem with these rules is subjectivity. Something you would consider offensive is probably not from my perspective. I'd be surprised if YouTube didn't account for this, or in other words, if they made the demonetization decision indeed dependent on a single person. I'd actually expect them to look for this bias, and filter out the reviewer, for example: reviewer X has consistently flagged videos that a number of other reviewers have cleared, etc. Edit: perhaps a better example: For any sample of 100 videos, ensure that 5 videos (5%) are from a pool of videos pre-approved by some gremium. If a reviewer flags more than X (X being 1 to 5, however strict you want to be) of these pre-approved videos, there is a high probability that this reviewer exhibits a strong bias, so you discard that reviewer's selection.

visarga 9y ago
What about slight biases, say, 1.1x more probable to favor whites to blacks? Everyone is biased in many ways, and it adds up.
- ckastner 9y ago
  The selection of test videos (the 5%) could address that -- just pick videos that a fair reviewer would ignore, and an at least slightly biased reviewer would reject. If a reviewer flags more than X of these videos, one might assume that the reviewer is biased. (X should probably be large enough to account for false positives from fair reviewers).

visarga 9y ago

> In the end it will be a moderator bias galore. Same problem as with AI bias. A great video about this problem: The Trouble with Bias - NIPS 2017 Keynote - Kate Crawford - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMym_BKWQzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMym_BKWQzk

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ucaetano 9y ago

> The real problem with these rules is subjectivity. The real problem with humans is subjectivity. > I'd like to see a true free speech platform with violence/nudity sectioned off according to the local laws, and then let the advertisers decide where they want to spend the money, instead of treating them as children who don't know better. Build one. Good luck preventing it from going bankrupt when advertisers decide they won't spend any money on your platform. It has been tried, this isn't any different than all the "alt-right internet" services popping up. Or 4chan. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/technology/alt-right-internet.html?_r=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/technology/alt-right-inte...