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YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

• krisrm 8y ago
  I like the intention, and I hope to see more of this... but it's kind of hard to imagine that the end goal here is "Responsibility", when the business goal is "how many ads can we sell?"
  • joaomacp 8y ago
    The purpose of ads is not just eyeballs. It's to get people to buy a product. If a lot of kids that watch YouTube all day see a Nike ad, it doesn't mean they'll buy sneakers. There are more and more people that do nothing but be on the internet all day. Advertisers don't want those people, they want social people that watch YouTube on the side, and are likely to buy products too.
  • Liquix 8y ago
    Valid concerns. What does Google gain from putting genuine effort into stopping the spread of these kinds of video? Perhaps more "responsible" content and an eventual turn-around of the platform... But that's a big gamble - may take years, may never happen. In the meantime, they're bleeding man hours, money, ad impressions, perhaps advertisers targeting the audiences which are being culled. Now examine the question: What does Google have to gain by appearing to put a genuine effort into this while not actually addressing the problem? They gain a whole lot more than in the first scenario - new users hopeful of an increase in quality, support from privacy and attention-span advocates, insight into how they can influence, suppress, or promote certain themes going forward, more metrics to become more entrenched in the data harvesting machine learning game...
  • duxup 8y ago
    Valid concern, at the same time as users.... most aren't willing to pay. So I guess we get what we pay for.
• rc_kas 8y ago
  In theory this sounds a little better. Obviously there is some distance to cover in implementing it in reality.
• jatsign 8y ago
  I wonder if they could look at groups of users who up vote "bad" videos (as marked by their own internal reviewers), see what else they up vote, cluster those videos, and down promote them in their algorithm. IOW use the users who like "bad" videos to help find other "bad" videos via an algorithm.
  • twanvl 8y ago
    That sounds easy to abuse. Just create some users, have them like obvious bad videos, then have them like videos of <insert competitor>.
    • ses1984 8y ago
      Literally any algorithm that simple is easy to abuse, you need to integrate any algorithm with fraud detection and user trustworthiness assessment.
      • luckylion 8y ago
        Either Twitter figured that they don't care enough, or it's not that easy. Mass-flagging is still a thing they haven't solved, and what are you going to do? Kick out your users because they're trying to manipulate your powerful algorithm to do their bidding? There's easier ways to make your audience find a new platform.
        • ses1984 8y ago
          It's not that easy, the cost of doing it right is astronomical and most users don't care.
  • gmiller123456 8y ago
    This really only works in a low volume situation. There's about 500,000 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every day, so employees would only be able to actually watch an insignificant fraction of that per day. Additionally, they're unlikely qualified to judge whether a video is actually good or bad. They can judge the sound quality, or videography, but unless you're well versed in the field the video is about, it's pretty much impossible to determine if a video is actually offering novel or good information. Additionally, the bots upvoting content are going to have several thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of bots. So detecting the circle is going to be very difficult. Even more so if you consider a lot of legitimate users will have the same taste and watch a lot of the same videos.
• coldtea 8y ago
  >Creating the right metric for success could help marginalize videos that are inappropriate, or popular among small but active communities with extreme views. So, deplatform what's not mainstream, accepted by the establishment, favorable to Google...
  • rwj 8y ago
    I don't think that deplatform is the right idea here. Presumably, the videos will still be present and watchable. However, the algorithms used to sort and present videos must be seen as playing an editorial role, and that brings a different set of questions.
    • maceurt 8y ago
      That is the equivalent of deplatforming in a lot of ways, especially on youtube where millions of videos are uploaded daily. If your videos are not suggested, and do not show up high in trending or search results, then they practically don't exist except from word of mouth and outside promotion.
      • krapp 8y ago
        Then by definition most videos on Youtube are already "deplatformed," since the space for recommendations and the front page is limited. Why is this suddenly a problem?
        • maceurt 8y ago
          False. The trending pages and suggested pages are filled based on google's algorithm that determines which video the user will like/ watch the most. That is the only fair way to determine trending and suggested videos.
          • krapp 8y ago
            How is that fair? Google's algorithm is biased towards what brings revenue for google. Content that isn't easily monetizable is suppressed, and content creators are punished for not conforming their content to what the algorithm wants.
• a012 8y ago
  How about metrics that NOT automatically takes down videos on requests, no questions asked?
• prolepunk 8y ago
  > The video service generates most of its revenue through advertising and the business works best when as many people as possible are spending as much time as possible on YouTube. Hence executives’ obsession with engagement stats. Adding murkier metrics to the mix could crimp ad revenue growth. This is the core point of it. I've been critical of youtube for some time, but if they are willing to forgo some revenue growth in to deal with the current problems, I applaud them. > The YouTube channel Red Ice TV broadcasts political videos with a “pro-European perspective,” which critics label as promoting white supremacy. Bloomberg, you can call them Nazis. This is not a racist uncle that everyone needs to deal with, who can sometimes be reasoned with. These people are literally Nazis. > YouTube declined to share details on how it uses metrics to rank and recommend videos. In a January blog post, the company said it was hiring human reviewers who would train its software based on guidelines that Google’s search business has used for years. It's going to be tricky to get this to work, and I'm sure google will make many mistakes by automating decision making to a degree where it will prove to be meaningless, but finally there's going to be some human moderation. Thank you.
  • freeone3000 8y ago
    I think a key thing overlooked is "human reviewers who would train its software..." which usually means throwing out it as a human interface task to mechanical turk and retrieving the result, then throwing the data into the input of the machine learning algorithm. This is not the same as having a human look at videos.
• exabrial 8y ago
  On a side note, the creators of YouTube ought to [at least informally] unionize. There's no reason Adam Neely should be getting copyright "strikes" for explaining music to the masses, or Cody's Lab should be forced to take down videos on mining with explosives [on his family's ranch]. YouTube needs to have a hotline for problem solving for their most profitable content providers, and until the creators collectively hit the pocket book, they'll face these disruptive yet easily solvable problems.
  • prolepunk 8y ago
    This is an interesting idea. The nature of the work of youtubers parallels with the work of Hollywood actors, someone might want to organize Screen Actors Guild for youtube creators.
  • criley2 8y ago
    MCN's are basically the private version of this. Content creators join MCN's "Multi-Channel Networks" with the idea that the MCN will handle some of the more administrative and legal tasks while the content creators focus on content. MCN's try to help with the copyright striking and often do have a direct line to youtube due to their size and importance.
    • eropple 8y ago
      I haven't paid attention to this in a few years, but haven't MCNs gone through a pretty bad stretch? I seem to recall a lot of people leaving theirs (sometimes acrimoniously) because they weren't handling those administrative/copyright issues.
    • busterarm 8y ago
      Except MCNs sit as a middleman to you getting paid. The Defy Media debacle taught everyone a hard lesson. For those unaware, Defy Media went bust and had taken out substantial loans to operate. A large number of big creators are still unpaid while Defy Media's creditors carve up the company's assets. All those creators are going to get left unpaid.
• monkeybrainsrus 8y ago
  It this point, they should just be regulated by the various world governments. Though I don't like a world where google can override a given countries law, or googles tries to solve the issue for union of all the worlds government laws. I also don't like the possibilites of hidden metrics driving things that have such huge social implications.
  • Liquix 8y ago
    Exactly. If things keep going at this rate Google and Facebook will be shaping and distorting reality for a large portion of the population. If 95% of your internet traffic goes through a search box or algorithm... And you spend 6 hours a day on the internet... And you're not savvy to these issues (as our readers are)... That's almost 50% of waking life spent consuming manufactured data which your brain (on some level) interprets as "real" without question. Terrifying.
  • chillacy 8y ago
    I think 2019 is when this attitude started to get more mainstream within tech. I’m not opposed to it but I hope people understand that following local laws means that companies may end up enforcing laws from other cultures.
• sebastianconcpt 8y ago
  How designed responsibility isn't censorship?
• keiferski 8y ago
  Frankly, I hope YouTube (and Google in general) dramatically overdo it with the censorship, "curation", and deplatforming of "irresponsible" content, purely so that it forces an independent, non-corporate model to be developed. Having one company be the sole gatekeeper for the overwhelming majority of the web's video content is not a solution.
  • beaconstudios 8y ago
    the accelerationist model of web centralisation. It depends on how much of the populace actually cares, or if YouTube draws most of its revenue from casual viewers watching trending videos that are not likely to fall foul of these practices.
  • sametmax 8y ago
    Because it worked so well for radio, tv and newspapers.
    • foota 8y ago
      ... Yes?
  • kzcqt 8y ago
    A site like youtube requires so much CPU/GPU power, storage capacity and bandwidth that it's highly unlikely that a new competitor[] will appear, and completely impossible to decentralise. []If we don't count the likes of Facebook, Microsoft, etc as competitors, since they would manage the site in the same way Google does.
    • krapp 8y ago
      Plenty of other video streaming sites exist. Competition certainly isn't impossible, and competitors don't have to operate at Youtube's scale to be viable, assuming they target a niche demographic.
      • kzcqt 8y ago
• AlexB138 8y ago
  What a dystopian nightmare the internet is turning into. Anything that isn't in line with "right thought" isn't Responsible and is therefore hidden away? How did we end up here? How did Silicon Valley go from a place focused on ideas and building the future to generating systematic censorship and endless puritanical moral panic? We badly need some new blood guiding tech development.
  • krapp 8y ago
    Why is it a dystopian nightmare for Youtube to curate its content according to "quality", but it wasn't a dystopian nightmare for Youtube to curate its content to maximize engagement for ad revenue?
    • lsniddy 8y ago
      the latter is demand driven
      • krapp 8y ago
        One could argue that the former is as well, given the platform's low reputation for quality, and the bad press its recieved for allowing extremist and algorithm generated content. Let's not pretend Youtube is pushing this entirely down the public's throat against their will.
    • fatjokes 8y ago
      People can agree on the definition of 'ad revenue'.
      • close04 8y ago
        And perhaps more importantly revenue can come from anybody regardless of views - money has no smell. “Quality” will easily turn into “whatever the site maintainers or majority consider good”. This being said I pretty much agree that so far no big tech company found the recipe for properly and “fairly” curating content.
    • 8y ago
• noego 8y ago
  Honestly, it's pretty ridiculous that YouTube is being pressured to police the content on its platform. What worries me far more than extremist videos on YouTube, is the idea of a mega-corporation exerting outsized influence over the opinions we are exposed to. Is our democracy really so fragile that it cannot survive an open marketplace of ideas?
  • minikites 8y ago
    It's not an open marketplace and each side is is fighting a different fight: >Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
    • noego 8y ago
      What makes it not an open marketplace? The very bias introduced by platform like YouTube which you seem to be defending? Is the average person so dumb that they cannot distinguish between "sound argument" vs "intimidate and disconcert"? If that's how you feel about the average person, why do you still favor democracy?
      • minikites 8y ago
        People aren't dumb, but I think people have poor information literacy skills, which is linked to the decline in liberal arts education in favor of the emphasis on STEM education. The lack of these skills leads to people being unable to distinguish between "sound argument" vs "intimidate and disconcert" (again, not related to their intelligence, this is a developed skill). https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10858.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10858.html >We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable, productive, and empathetic individuals. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world.
• bitxbit 8y ago
  Please just give us the ability to blacklist channels. That’d increase usability by 10x for me.
  • duxup 8y ago
    I wish, but I doubt it will ever come / be useful. Google and YouTube want their AI or algorithms pointed AT you, not working for you.
  • eropple 8y ago
    AFAIK you can do that? Hit the menu on a video recommendation, "Not Interested" -> "Tell Us Why" -> "I'm not interested in this channel". IMO, though, blacklisting has been mostly proven to be insufficient. If you block, say, noted chud Sargon of Akkad, that doesn't mean that another half-dozen "Rationalist" "Thinkers" Who Just Happen To Be Chuds won't be recommended to you as well.
    • beaconstudios 8y ago
      allow channels to categorise themselves (which I believe already exists but is underutilised?) and allow users to express positive or negative interest towards categories. There is little incentive to self-categorise incorrectly as it would lower your visibility to those who want to find you.
    • zwkrt 8y ago
      If you are getting suggested these things it's because people with similar viewing habits as you watched them. I get suggested riposte videos to such content without ever seeing the original "bad" video. I'm assuming this is based on my own habits on the site. I would prefer getting neither, but here we are. To claim that blacklisting would be ineffective because there is always more trash is disingenuous. If everyone blocked (e.g.) PewDiePie, surely they would get less YouTube talking-head content. It's like saying that we shouldn't/can't avoid candy because people are always making new candies.
      • eropple 8y ago
• legohead 8y ago
  These companies focusing so much on algorithms, when the best solution is to simply use actual humans. I've done a fair amount of work on trying to detect and deal with spammers, fraudulent activity and such. Nothing beats a human eye. My most successful approach has been to filter out the super obvious stuff, then send the rest to a queue that is kept an eye on by humans. A small staff can easily fight back against bullshit. Yes, YouTube is orders of magnitude above what I've dealt with, but I'm sure their smart engineers can filter out the majority of stuff. It's painfully obvious that YouTube lacks human eyes on things. That, or they lack direction and empowerment of their employees.
  • golemotron 8y ago
    This is why it's great to have an ecosystem of many small players.
  • luckylion 8y ago
    > Nothing beats a human eye. Well, thousands of videos sure beat a human eye. Then you'll need lots and lots of people that watch those videos and make judgement calls, and there will be edge cases, and you will have to give people a chance to challenge those decisions, etc. For a forum with a few hundred posts a day, that's certainly an option. At Youtube's scale with hundreds of hours of video uploaded every minute of every day, I have my doubts.
    • stronglikedan 8y ago
      Not to mention the cost of necessary therapy.
  • jdietrich 8y ago
    YouTube already have a huge staff of human moderators, probably in the tens of thousands. Moderating content in a consistent and fair manner is essentially impossible, largely because nobody agrees on what should be kept off the platform. Is the image of a female nipple pornographic or empowering? Is the image of a murder victim terrorist propaganda or reportage? Is a political rant hate speech or free speech? There is no universal answer to any of these questions, least of all when we consider the huge difference in cultural attitudes across an international user base. I can highly recommend the documentary The Internet’s Dirtiest Secrets: The Cleaners, which illustrates these paradoxes with brilliant clarity by intercutting between the moderators and the moderated.
• bitL 8y ago
  Quality content takes time to create; many of the past changes in YouTube algorithms explicitly pushed for churning out low-quality content frequently and rewarded it, while seriously disadvantaging irregular quality content (that moved elsewhere in the meantime). You get what you reward.
  • degenerate 8y ago
    This can be seen easily if you go to Youtube and search "fortnite", with every single top video being just over 6 minutes long, full of vapid nothingness related to the title, and perhaps 20-30 seconds of content related to the title it originally baited you into watching. The majority of what can be found through searching/filtering on YouTube is also hot steamy garbage, or large corporate channels. The recommendation engine sometimes throws in some gems, but rarely. The only video length filters are "short <4mins" and "long >20mins". Why on earth? It's like they randomly tried those values in 2008 and never looked at it again.
    • rchaud 8y ago
      Kids watch that stuff and don't yet know how to sift through the trash to get to the good videos. They're like us in 2007 when we'd all get Rick Roll'd by blindly clicking on YT links placed on forums. By setting their KPIs arund "view time", YT created a product which caters almost exclusively to kids and conspiracy nuts, aka the only 2 demographics that have seemingly unlimited time to watch cartoons or people talking into a camera.
  • CM30 8y ago
    Not just YouTube algorithms either. Almost all social media site algorithms and search engine ones (like say, Google's) seem to put a heavy emphasis on regular content rather than quality content. And it's the main cause behind both journalism going through a massive decline in quality and so much low effort content showing up everywhere online.
  • tmm84 8y ago
    I noticed this a long time ago. Content creators were being rewarded for "daily" videos. So many of the channels I loved had videos where they came out and said "I'm going daily and, yes, the videos are going to suck until I daily upload good stuff." A few channels I watched just disappeared because of the daily upload reward/promote requirement. Algos don't work with creative works and human tastes.
• skilled 8y ago
  The Trending page has been listing the same people over and over and over again for the last 3 years. It's shameful, pathetic, and makes the platform feel extremely biased. Seriously though. This is unacceptable and overly controlled. Not to mention that those people over the last 3 years post borderline brainwash content without any connection to a real audience. It's pretty sad to see YouTube turn into something like this.
  • jvagner 8y ago
    The Trending page makes me feel really old, and pretty "get off my lawn" w/r/t what's popular, or being promoted, right now. A lot of the channels I've followed have gone fallow. No new content. That said, I think the arguments around this topic are pretty disingenuous. 1) There's nasty content being uploaded to Youtube -- YouTube isn't making the nasty content. 2) YouTube promotes some content, people are pissed - it's all about the moneti$ation. 3) YouTube creates a system to stop promoting some kinds of content, people are pissed - censorship, slippery slope to de-platforming, etc. There's no real alternative to YouTube (Vimeo isn't it, and the blockchain YouTube isn't it) for: a) creators, b) creators who want to make money. And looking at what Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have to deal with in the social sphere, who'd want to inherit those problems? This is why we're still going to end up with aggregated media empires, because they'll accept the overhead of running the network, and it will simply get even more shallow in terms of who supplies "content".
    • mdorazio 8y ago
      > b) creators who want to make money. The only platform I've seen so far for this one to compete with YT outside of porn is Patreon, and the videos that get monetized there without also being posted and/or monetized on YT tend to be... less than wholesome in a lot of cases.
      • kkarakk 8y ago
        Patreon only really works for people with an audience so enchanted with the creator that they would follow them anywhere.
• bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  So wait, they're trying to be Vimeo now?
• malloreon 8y ago
  whatever gets them to stop recommending me BEN SHAPIRO [EVISCERATES / DEMOLISHES / LEAVES SPEECHLESS] LIBERAL [PROFESSOR / SMART PERSON / SPEAKER] OVER [SOMETHING BEN IS CLEARLY WRONG / TROLLING ABOUT] videos.
  • rchaud 8y ago
    Majority of my YT view history is music. 90% of my recommended videos are similar genres of music, but there is nearly always some political/culture war/conspiracy video sitting there as well. The other day it was "The REAL truth about the Vietnam War". Super relevant in 2019. Fortunately, I can block channels from my Recommended, but there are hundreds of similar channels out there, so killing one just means it'll be replaced by the next nutjob channel in the queue.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • smegger001 8y ago
    that is pretty much why I have quit facebook, I was sick of ultraconservative relatives tagging me in these political shitpost linking to Shapiro style videos and conservative political memes. The only reason I still have a account is so my grandmother and sister can see baby pictures of my kid.
• rhizome 8y ago
  This seems like a re-implementation of television ratings and survey (Nielsen) methods. In this way, it's interesting how strategies on the commercial internet gravitate toward business models with a century of momentum (and student loans) behind them. Business chips away at the revolution.
• JohnFen 8y ago
  Yeah, we'll see how well that goes. I can't help but suspect that YouTube's definition of "quality" and mine are not quite the same.
  • commandlinefan 8y ago
    YouTube's (and Google's) management has been very openly left-leaning, so it's not a stretch to imagine that "quality" as defined by their editors will also be left-leaning or at least not right-leaning... so, yeah.
    • JohnFen 8y ago
      From my perspective "quality" is unrelated to political bent.
• driverdan 8y ago
  There are so many simple rules that would improve their recommended content. Examples: 1. Lower rank for clickbait titles 2. Lower rank for listicle / compilation / clip videos 3. Delist listicle / compilation videos with stolen content (most of them) 4. Lower rank for clickbait thumbnails 5. Lower rank for YT drama videos 6. Increased rank for 100% original videos
  • eyeareque 8y ago
    But then how would virtually every YouTuber make a living? You’ve described all of their tricks :)
  • dredmorbius 8y ago
    Channel blocking, with recommendation weighting. If I get recommendations from a channel producing shit, I should be able to block the entire channel. Sufficient good-faith blocks dock that channel's recommendation weighting. The fact this isn't available even when logged inremoves all incentive I have to log in to YT. (Which is already near nil.)
• kadendogthing 8y ago
  Well the reality is that you don't get quality content generally when you allow people to publish whatever they want. Everyone has an opinion and viewpoint. That doesn't make them qualified opinions or viewpoints, and definitely doesn't make them worth considering. People have significantly mistaken and waaay over estimated the benefits of mass media in the hands of your everyday person. It's becoming pretty clear the cost is not worth any perceived benefits (because I don't think you can really point to any benefits such models have given us). And no, moderating and editorializing content is not dystopian. Whenever someone has that talking point it's really a case of someone read 1984 (and sometimes didn't actually read it) and decided to apply it to everything with absolutely no discretion and absolutely no respect for what the book actually said.
• bobbygoodlatte 8y ago
  I think when critics accuse YouTube of "stepping on the scale" here, they under-consider how warped that scale is already. The existing YouTube algorithm isn't neutral or fair, and is laughably easy to game. It's already biased—it's just biased towards extremes. YouTube waded into this moral quagmire a long time ago. Being biased towards "engagement" is just as troubling as having a more human-relatable bias. Now they're starting to take responsibility for the recommendations this algorithm spits out. I think that's a good thing.