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> Be sure to remind youtube of their power and responsibility after tragedy strikes. To be clear - they aren't actually responsible for an active shooter showi

> Be sure to remind youtube of their power and responsibility after tragedy strikes. To be clear - they aren't actually responsible for an active shooter showing up on campus. It sounds like you're saying they could have some responsibility in someone coming to their office with a gun.

ivl 9y ago
I'm fairly certain they were including that in the media's reaction and participation in this.
sqdbps 9y ago
Of course not. I'm referring to hints of victim blaming in the media: https://www.recode.net/2018/4/4/17196704/youtube-susan-wojcicki-controversial-monetization-changes-shooter https://www.recode.net/2018/4/4/17196704/youtube-susan-wojci...
deftnerd 9y ago
While they're not directly responsible, the problem was entirely of their making. They created a whole new profession (even my 8-year-old son wants to grow up to be a "professional youtubber") and then arbitrarily destroy careers. The created an environment where people could work hard to create their own destiny while giving themselves the ability to destroy those destinies without cause or recourse. It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge.
- tclancy 9y ago
  >It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge. [citation needed, God help us all]
- danso 9y ago
  So basically every company who has ever laid off or fired an employee should expect at some point to fall victim to a mass shooting?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - rpiguy 9y ago
    Homicide has long been the number 2 cause of death in the workplace in the U.S. You can find statistics going back as far as 1992. Layoffs are indeed often a motivation. Hence the term, "going postal."
    - refurb 9y ago
      Homicide has long been the number 2 cause of death in the workplace in the U.S. That stat doesn't pass the sniff test, so I looked up some numbers[1]. In 2016, there were 500 workplace homicides in the US. No where near the 2nd most common cause of death. [1]https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf
      - rectang 9y ago
        It looks like it depends how you group the causes around it. A more easily defensible way to put it is that around one in ten US workplace deaths are caused by homicide.
      - rpiguy 9y ago
        It depends on if you group together accidental deaths. Homicide is not number 2 if you break all the accidents out, for example, "vehicle accidents," "falls," etc. are both more frequent than homicides. If you group together accident-types, then homicide is number 2 and you will often see it referred to as such. https://www.osha.gov/dte/grant_materials/fy03/46j3-ht47/preventing_violence.ppt https://www.osha.gov/dte/grant_materials/fy03/46j3-ht47/prev... I should have clarified that I can see how it would seem improbable.
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    Statistically, yes, i.e. every company that has ever laid off or fired an employee should expect the possibility at whatever the relevant probability is.
- strken 9y ago
  GP's contention is that the media was the ultimate cause of the destroyed careers, because it began the moral panic against ads on inappropriate content.
- thefounder 9y ago
  People ahould not put too much trust in youtube-like companies. If you have a youtube career you don't really have a real career/job. You just found a way to make easy bucks. Youtube is not the "internet" of videos. You can have your own website
  - ryanbrunner 9y ago
    To some degree, it is though. YouTube has a quasi-monopoly on the promotion and discovery of video content, which is far more important than the distribution (which you're correct, is relatively cheap and straightforward) If a business capriciously de-indexed from Google search, I think there'd be plenty of room for criticism of Google. I don't think there's a terribly large difference here. It might not rise to the level of illegality, and it certainly doesn't justify shooting employees, but I do think it's a predictable result.
  - netzone 9y ago
    That's not exactly right. First you would need to know how to use an ad system, probably DFP and maybe DFP Premium if you're expecting a high audience, and probably an organisation to book and handle all those ads to maximise your income. Your website also needs the infrastructure to be able to deliver your content to your audience. That can be hard for a non-technical person, hard and expensive. So, you have a website with your videos, you have proper advertising on your videos, maybe a subscription system setup. What next? Where do you get your audience? Today the universal truth is that you get your audience on Youtube, and to some extent Vimeo. You just lost practically 100% of potential customers.
  - makecheck 9y ago
    It’s absurdly expensive to live in many parts of the US, and incomes in those same places can be insultingly low. You can depend desperately on extra income even if you have a job (or two). “Real career/job” is just not something many people can count on in the US, and hasn’t been for a long time. I strongly recommend that you learn more about this. People are really, really hurting right now, no matter how many millionnaires there are.
  - Applejinx 9y ago
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge. A victim of a free service? The degree of entitlement on display here is ridiculous. You have no right to the service to begin with, no right to the audience and no right to the income. All you have is the potential, and if you don't like the terms of service you can instead of bringing a weapon to the company you disagree with fuck off and host your own content. If all business disputes were sorted out by people taking up arms then it would be a pretty wild world.
- mistersquid 9y ago
  > The created an environment where people could work hard to create their own destiny while giving themselves the ability to destroy those destinies without cause or recourse. > It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge. I strongly disagree that given YouTube's arbitrary policies murderous retaliation was inevitable. However, your pointing to the economic context of Ms. Nasim's grievance with YouTube is very helpful. Before continuing, I want to clarify that whatever may have motivated Ms. Nasim to take the actions she took, I believe her actions are ultimately unjustified and unbearably tragic and that no one is responsible for what Ms. Nasim did except Ms. Nasim herself. Concerning the economic context, the arbitrary foreclosure of a career path where the contractor (YouTuber?) has little to no recourse over her livelihood highlights problems with the unequal power between platform and content generator. I believe platform owners (like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) have the ability to make matters more equitable. Attempting to make platforms that rely on user-generated content more equitable undoubtedly will present new challenges, but such consideration for the people whose labor a platform depends for its existence is the moral and ethical thing to do. Giving content generators more power over the monetization of their content is the right thing to do. EDIT: add a "the"
  - andromeduck 9y ago
    > I strongly disagree that given YouTube's arbitrary policies murderous retaliation was inevitable. It's the law of large numbers at work. With how many youtubers there are, and how severely some have been impacted, and how two faced/hypocritical they've been, and the current state of mental health in america I don't think it's rational to believe the risk is zero.
- Applejinx 9y ago
  Yes. I'd also like to add this: I believe there's a direct correlation with how unreachable the decisions of the corporation are. Youtube and Google in general are notoriously unreachable by users and regular humans: it's not ONLY wielding the ability to obliterate other peoples' plans, it's also the choice to do so behind a faceless corporate mask. People really like protesting, people like yelling at those who've wronged them, people like finding the boss and giving 'em a piece of their mind. If you can yell at the person responsible for ruining your big plans, you've probably vented that feeling safely. If you can identify some middle manager or CEO as responsible for actions that have harmed you, then you can go yell at that person. Creating a situation where 'go murder random employee people, as many as possible' seems like an appropriate choice, is actually quite difficult. If you can identify ANY more relevant target for your anger then you focus on that target, and if you can identify other humans then there are a wide range of options for hurting those humans non-lethally (including shame, simple verbal abuse and so on) YouTube gives itself the ability to destroy individual humans' plans/destinies FACELESSLY. This is in fact the problem with setting up massive unanswerable corporate power as a faceless system. It enables you to abuse people far more than you could get away with face to face, or as a corporate manager publically known and subject to social pressures. Unfortunately, when you abuse people on a vast scale while giving them no legitimate outlet for their anger, you expose your own people to personal danger to the extent they can be identified as you… since you aren't allowing anyone important to be identified as you. (the scale is important because it means that, statistically, you'll sometimes be extremely unjust to somebody that can be dangerous)
- simias 9y ago
  They didn't create anything, streamers and "Youtubers" would have existed with or without Youtube. They'd exist on twitch and other services if Youtube went down. Youtube was just at the right place at the right time and there's a lot more to youtube than e-celebs. >It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge. Damn, that's a pretty fatalist viewpoint and an odd way to state that. "We updated the ToS, somebody went and shot a few of our employees, oh well, what can we do?". It's very tempting to let the discussion stray into "Americans and gun violence" at this point but I guess I'll stop there.
- heedlessly3 9y ago
  sounds like this is your way of saying "they were asking for it"
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Actually I disagree. Obviously responsibility is shared and primarily owned by Nasim but some is also owned by youtube. Think of it like this - does youtube bear some responsibility when creators leave the platform because of demonetization? Of course. Does youtube bear some responsibility when creators make lots of angry videos because of demonetization? Of course. Does youtube bear some responsibility when demonetization is implemented in a way that feels arbitrary to it's creators? Of course. Does youtube bear some responsibility for failing to stand up and protect it's creators from some of the advertisers demands? Of course. The company makes decisions that affect some peoples lives in a profound way thus they also have some responsibility in the direct and indirect effects of those decisions.
- golergka 9y ago
  I think you're confusing being part of the reason behind something and being responsible for it. When a fit minded adult makes a decision out of his own free will, there's a lot of factors and reasons involved. However, since it's his decision, he's the only one responsible for it.
  - nmca 9y ago
    This seems... curious. It might be an appealing simplification of a terrifyingly complex world to operate on the basis of the binary attribution of responsibility; but I really think it's a bias that we should fight to overcome.
- cal5k 9y ago
  Respectfully, that's bullshit. There is nothing that YouTube could have done that makes an active shooter their fault. "Maybe if they hadn't been so mean...". News flash: normal people don't go on a shooting spree when bad things happen in life. This is squarely the fault of a psychologically troubled woman. Discussions about YouTube's monetization policies shouldn't even be part of the story.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
psyc 9y ago
Of course they are not responsible for the actions of the shooter, or anyone who decides to use violence to make their point. They are partly responsible for the mounting rage at their increasingly arbitrary treatment of users, and near-total lack of transparency about it, which has been festering for years, and is getting worse. They are quite responsible for those arbitrary decisions themselves. What's that bit about freedom not implying freedom from consequences? These things are related. 'Victim blaming' and other thought-stopping catch-phrases aside.
txsh 9y ago
They absolutely are responsible. Imagine if Uber started randomly denying drivers payment, taking away their source of income for arbitrary reasons with no chance of appeal. It would only be a matter of time before someone showed up at their door with a gun. Only the shooter is guilty of the crime. But YouTube is responsible. And the courts will agree when the victims sue.

ivl 9y ago

I'm fairly certain they were including that in the media's reaction and participation in this.

sqdbps 9y ago

Of course not. I'm referring to hints of victim blaming in the media: https://www.recode.net/2018/4/4/17196704/youtube-susan-wojcicki-controversial-monetization-changes-shooter https://www.recode.net/2018/4/4/17196704/youtube-susan-wojci...

deftnerd 9y ago

While they're not directly responsible, the problem was entirely of their making. They created a whole new profession (even my 8-year-old son wants to grow up to be a "professional youtubber") and then arbitrarily destroy careers. The created an environment where people could work hard to create their own destiny while giving themselves the ability to destroy those destinies without cause or recourse. It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge.

tclancy 9y ago
>It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge. [citation needed, God help us all]
danso 9y ago
So basically every company who has ever laid off or fired an employee should expect at some point to fall victim to a mass shooting?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rpiguy 9y ago
  Homicide has long been the number 2 cause of death in the workplace in the U.S. You can find statistics going back as far as 1992. Layoffs are indeed often a motivation. Hence the term, "going postal."
  - refurb 9y ago
    Homicide has long been the number 2 cause of death in the workplace in the U.S. That stat doesn't pass the sniff test, so I looked up some numbers[1]. In 2016, there were 500 workplace homicides in the US. No where near the 2nd most common cause of death. [1]https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf
    - rectang 9y ago
      It looks like it depends how you group the causes around it. A more easily defensible way to put it is that around one in ten US workplace deaths are caused by homicide.
    - rpiguy 9y ago
      It depends on if you group together accidental deaths. Homicide is not number 2 if you break all the accidents out, for example, "vehicle accidents," "falls," etc. are both more frequent than homicides. If you group together accident-types, then homicide is number 2 and you will often see it referred to as such. https://www.osha.gov/dte/grant_materials/fy03/46j3-ht47/preventing_violence.ppt https://www.osha.gov/dte/grant_materials/fy03/46j3-ht47/prev... I should have clarified that I can see how it would seem improbable.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  Statistically, yes, i.e. every company that has ever laid off or fired an employee should expect the possibility at whatever the relevant probability is.
strken 9y ago
GP's contention is that the media was the ultimate cause of the destroyed careers, because it began the moral panic against ads on inappropriate content.
thefounder 9y ago
People ahould not put too much trust in youtube-like companies. If you have a youtube career you don't really have a real career/job. You just found a way to make easy bucks. Youtube is not the "internet" of videos. You can have your own website
- ryanbrunner 9y ago
  To some degree, it is though. YouTube has a quasi-monopoly on the promotion and discovery of video content, which is far more important than the distribution (which you're correct, is relatively cheap and straightforward) If a business capriciously de-indexed from Google search, I think there'd be plenty of room for criticism of Google. I don't think there's a terribly large difference here. It might not rise to the level of illegality, and it certainly doesn't justify shooting employees, but I do think it's a predictable result.
- netzone 9y ago
  That's not exactly right. First you would need to know how to use an ad system, probably DFP and maybe DFP Premium if you're expecting a high audience, and probably an organisation to book and handle all those ads to maximise your income. Your website also needs the infrastructure to be able to deliver your content to your audience. That can be hard for a non-technical person, hard and expensive. So, you have a website with your videos, you have proper advertising on your videos, maybe a subscription system setup. What next? Where do you get your audience? Today the universal truth is that you get your audience on Youtube, and to some extent Vimeo. You just lost practically 100% of potential customers.
- makecheck 9y ago
  It’s absurdly expensive to live in many parts of the US, and incomes in those same places can be insultingly low. You can depend desperately on extra income even if you have a job (or two). “Real career/job” is just not something many people can count on in the US, and hasn’t been for a long time. I strongly recommend that you learn more about this. People are really, really hurting right now, no matter how many millionnaires there are.
- Applejinx 9y ago
jacquesm 9y ago
> It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge. A victim of a free service? The degree of entitlement on display here is ridiculous. You have no right to the service to begin with, no right to the audience and no right to the income. All you have is the potential, and if you don't like the terms of service you can instead of bringing a weapon to the company you disagree with fuck off and host your own content. If all business disputes were sorted out by people taking up arms then it would be a pretty wild world.
mistersquid 9y ago
> The created an environment where people could work hard to create their own destiny while giving themselves the ability to destroy those destinies without cause or recourse. > It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge. I strongly disagree that given YouTube's arbitrary policies murderous retaliation was inevitable. However, your pointing to the economic context of Ms. Nasim's grievance with YouTube is very helpful. Before continuing, I want to clarify that whatever may have motivated Ms. Nasim to take the actions she took, I believe her actions are ultimately unjustified and unbearably tragic and that no one is responsible for what Ms. Nasim did except Ms. Nasim herself. Concerning the economic context, the arbitrary foreclosure of a career path where the contractor (YouTuber?) has little to no recourse over her livelihood highlights problems with the unequal power between platform and content generator. I believe platform owners (like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) have the ability to make matters more equitable. Attempting to make platforms that rely on user-generated content more equitable undoubtedly will present new challenges, but such consideration for the people whose labor a platform depends for its existence is the moral and ethical thing to do. Giving content generators more power over the monetization of their content is the right thing to do. EDIT: add a "the"
- andromeduck 9y ago
  > I strongly disagree that given YouTube's arbitrary policies murderous retaliation was inevitable. It's the law of large numbers at work. With how many youtubers there are, and how severely some have been impacted, and how two faced/hypocritical they've been, and the current state of mental health in america I don't think it's rational to believe the risk is zero.
Applejinx 9y ago
Yes. I'd also like to add this: I believe there's a direct correlation with how unreachable the decisions of the corporation are. Youtube and Google in general are notoriously unreachable by users and regular humans: it's not ONLY wielding the ability to obliterate other peoples' plans, it's also the choice to do so behind a faceless corporate mask. People really like protesting, people like yelling at those who've wronged them, people like finding the boss and giving 'em a piece of their mind. If you can yell at the person responsible for ruining your big plans, you've probably vented that feeling safely. If you can identify some middle manager or CEO as responsible for actions that have harmed you, then you can go yell at that person. Creating a situation where 'go murder random employee people, as many as possible' seems like an appropriate choice, is actually quite difficult. If you can identify ANY more relevant target for your anger then you focus on that target, and if you can identify other humans then there are a wide range of options for hurting those humans non-lethally (including shame, simple verbal abuse and so on) YouTube gives itself the ability to destroy individual humans' plans/destinies FACELESSLY. This is in fact the problem with setting up massive unanswerable corporate power as a faceless system. It enables you to abuse people far more than you could get away with face to face, or as a corporate manager publically known and subject to social pressures. Unfortunately, when you abuse people on a vast scale while giving them no legitimate outlet for their anger, you expose your own people to personal danger to the extent they can be identified as you… since you aren't allowing anyone important to be identified as you. (the scale is important because it means that, statistically, you'll sometimes be extremely unjust to somebody that can be dangerous)
simias 9y ago
They didn't create anything, streamers and "Youtubers" would have existed with or without Youtube. They'd exist on twitch and other services if Youtube went down. Youtube was just at the right place at the right time and there's a lot more to youtube than e-celebs. >It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge. Damn, that's a pretty fatalist viewpoint and an odd way to state that. "We updated the ToS, somebody went and shot a few of our employees, oh well, what can we do?". It's very tempting to let the discussion stray into "Americans and gun violence" at this point but I guess I'll stop there.
heedlessly3 9y ago
sounds like this is your way of saying "they were asking for it"

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

Actually I disagree. Obviously responsibility is shared and primarily owned by Nasim but some is also owned by youtube. Think of it like this - does youtube bear some responsibility when creators leave the platform because of demonetization? Of course. Does youtube bear some responsibility when creators make lots of angry videos because of demonetization? Of course. Does youtube bear some responsibility when demonetization is implemented in a way that feels arbitrary to it's creators? Of course. Does youtube bear some responsibility for failing to stand up and protect it's creators from some of the advertisers demands? Of course. The company makes decisions that affect some peoples lives in a profound way thus they also have some responsibility in the direct and indirect effects of those decisions.

golergka 9y ago
I think you're confusing being part of the reason behind something and being responsible for it. When a fit minded adult makes a decision out of his own free will, there's a lot of factors and reasons involved. However, since it's his decision, he's the only one responsible for it.
- nmca 9y ago
  This seems... curious. It might be an appealing simplification of a terrifyingly complex world to operate on the basis of the binary attribution of responsibility; but I really think it's a bias that we should fight to overcome.
cal5k 9y ago
Respectfully, that's bullshit. There is nothing that YouTube could have done that makes an active shooter their fault. "Maybe if they hadn't been so mean...". News flash: normal people don't go on a shooting spree when bad things happen in life. This is squarely the fault of a psychologically troubled woman. Discussions about YouTube's monetization policies shouldn't even be part of the story.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

psyc 9y ago

Of course they are not responsible for the actions of the shooter, or anyone who decides to use violence to make their point. They are partly responsible for the mounting rage at their increasingly arbitrary treatment of users, and near-total lack of transparency about it, which has been festering for years, and is getting worse. They are quite responsible for those arbitrary decisions themselves. What's that bit about freedom not implying freedom from consequences? These things are related. 'Victim blaming' and other thought-stopping catch-phrases aside.

txsh 9y ago

They absolutely are responsible. Imagine if Uber started randomly denying drivers payment, taking away their source of income for arbitrary reasons with no chance of appeal. It would only be a matter of time before someone showed up at their door with a gun. Only the shooter is guilty of the crime. But YouTube is responsible. And the courts will agree when the victims sue.