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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 t

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 8y 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.
- deftnerd 9y ago
  I'm not saying that they would deserve it. If a company algorithmically fired portions of their workforce every day without even talking to those employees or giving them a chance to appeal, then I would expect something terrible to eventually happen. I would expect that eventually an employee would snap under the injustice of the situation and commit a mass shooting, just like eventually an employee would commit suicide. Firings/layoffs are stressful and those edge cases happen already. When you add in a feeling of "injustice", then I postulate that those edge cases become a little bit more common.
  - kamaal 9y ago
    This is just getting confused between an incentive and a right. Making money on YouTube isn't exactly protected under labor laws in the same way a job is. Ad money provides an incentive to make money, encouraging you to post some video. It isn't exactly a salary paying thing like a job. Sure every once in a while some kid could become a millionaire posting reviews on toys. That rarely means everybody can or must. Its also in a way the plight of so many street performers and musicians. When you go to Pier 39 in San Francisco, many performers are on the verge of begging for tips. People don't understand the concept of paying for content, and most of it works like 'Bystander effect'- If I'm not paying may be somebody else is.
  - benmmurphy 9y ago
    I think the problem with youtube is they have the choice of either using algorithms to filter/monetize content or extremely limiting the amount of content they host/monetize. I don't think employing people is an option for them. I don't think youtube generates enough revenue for this to be a possibility. I think this is a case of its just not possible to run the youtube business without heavy use of algorithmic filtering. Which I guess kind of sucks if you are making your livelihood from youtube. But I don't think this is a problem that is going to be solved in the near future.
- Applejinx 9y ago
  Those who make a huge point of abstracting all their decisions so that no specific point of human accountability can be defined, yes. If you get your plans and (faltering) livelihood ruined by some Big Boss Man, you absolutely could be filled with rage, but the chances that you will direct that rage at some random secretary in a wholly other division is nil. You can identify the boss that fired you, you are enraged, maybe you try to revenge yourself and maybe not, and maybe you feel that just telling the world how rotten that guy is, will suffice. If you're not allowed any focus for your rage because the organization is completely abstracted, those are the conditions under which 'just any employee' might seem like just as valid a target: there is literally nobody available who would seem more to blame. So, lay off people in person if you want to minimize (a) the chances of an attacker mass murdering just employees, and (b) the chances of that person being completely deprived of any other outlet for their rage. I mean, if they knew who you were they could make a doll of you and stick pins in it. How are you going to make a voodoo doll of 'Youtube'? How are you going to let people go 'My monetization got taken away, and I'm down $30 a month I was using to feed my kid, and it's THAT GUY's fault!' If you expose only the blameless as a target, you take away the chance for people to vent more productively, just for your own personal comfort. You're a cog in the Google machine, but you've got human shields.
- root_axis 9y ago
  Yes? This is not something new in the age of mass shootings, e.g. "going postal" has long been used as a crude shorthand to describe homicidal violence perpetrated by disgruntled employees. In cases such of those we never have a problem condemning the violence while simultaneously recognizing qualities of the work environment that led the employee to the disgruntled state.
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"

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 8y 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.
deftnerd 9y ago
I'm not saying that they would deserve it. If a company algorithmically fired portions of their workforce every day without even talking to those employees or giving them a chance to appeal, then I would expect something terrible to eventually happen. I would expect that eventually an employee would snap under the injustice of the situation and commit a mass shooting, just like eventually an employee would commit suicide. Firings/layoffs are stressful and those edge cases happen already. When you add in a feeling of "injustice", then I postulate that those edge cases become a little bit more common.
- kamaal 9y ago
  This is just getting confused between an incentive and a right. Making money on YouTube isn't exactly protected under labor laws in the same way a job is. Ad money provides an incentive to make money, encouraging you to post some video. It isn't exactly a salary paying thing like a job. Sure every once in a while some kid could become a millionaire posting reviews on toys. That rarely means everybody can or must. Its also in a way the plight of so many street performers and musicians. When you go to Pier 39 in San Francisco, many performers are on the verge of begging for tips. People don't understand the concept of paying for content, and most of it works like 'Bystander effect'- If I'm not paying may be somebody else is.
- benmmurphy 9y ago
  I think the problem with youtube is they have the choice of either using algorithms to filter/monetize content or extremely limiting the amount of content they host/monetize. I don't think employing people is an option for them. I don't think youtube generates enough revenue for this to be a possibility. I think this is a case of its just not possible to run the youtube business without heavy use of algorithmic filtering. Which I guess kind of sucks if you are making your livelihood from youtube. But I don't think this is a problem that is going to be solved in the near future.
Applejinx 9y ago
Those who make a huge point of abstracting all their decisions so that no specific point of human accountability can be defined, yes. If you get your plans and (faltering) livelihood ruined by some Big Boss Man, you absolutely could be filled with rage, but the chances that you will direct that rage at some random secretary in a wholly other division is nil. You can identify the boss that fired you, you are enraged, maybe you try to revenge yourself and maybe not, and maybe you feel that just telling the world how rotten that guy is, will suffice. If you're not allowed any focus for your rage because the organization is completely abstracted, those are the conditions under which 'just any employee' might seem like just as valid a target: there is literally nobody available who would seem more to blame. So, lay off people in person if you want to minimize (a) the chances of an attacker mass murdering just employees, and (b) the chances of that person being completely deprived of any other outlet for their rage. I mean, if they knew who you were they could make a doll of you and stick pins in it. How are you going to make a voodoo doll of 'Youtube'? How are you going to let people go 'My monetization got taken away, and I'm down $30 a month I was using to feed my kid, and it's THAT GUY's fault!' If you expose only the blameless as a target, you take away the chance for people to vent more productively, just for your own personal comfort. You're a cog in the Google machine, but you've got human shields.
root_axis 9y ago
Yes? This is not something new in the age of mass shootings, e.g. "going postal" has long been used as a crude shorthand to describe homicidal violence perpetrated by disgruntled employees. In cases such of those we never have a problem condemning the violence while simultaneously recognizing qualities of the work environment that led the employee to the disgruntled state.

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"