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We may be hitting the point where societal impact is great enough that people don't necessarily accept "We can't do that at scale" as an out.

• goatinaboat 7y ago
  Indeed. Given the vast wealth Google etc have accumulated its clear that actually, they could afford to do it, and still make good, but not astounding, profits. The rationale “we can’t make as much money as we’d like to if we followed the law” just won’t wash.
  • solveit 7y ago
    > Given the vast wealth Google etc have accumulated its clear that actually, they could afford to do it, and still make good, but not astounding, profits. Citation very much needed.
    • collyw 7y ago
      You need citation to prove that Google is rich?
      • icebraining 7y ago
        They need a citation to prove that Google is rich enough. According to stats, they were getting 400 hours of new video every minute - and that was back in 2015, it's probably at least 600 nowadays, as more people have been getting online. How much would it cost, with all overheads, to review all that?
        • ChickeNES 7y ago
          Also, content reviewers for Google and Facebook have straight up developed PTSD from the things they've seen, that has to be factored in as well.
  • sieabahlpark 7y ago
    That's a very naive approach to understand how company valuations work. They also need to not censor so much that it's a publisher and maintain themselves as a platform legally.
  • Mirioron 7y ago
    The platform economics change in that case. Right now, anybody can upload content for free and it'll appear very quickly on the channel. If you increase the cost per video by mandating human oversight on videos, then YouTube will probably remove the ability for (most) people to upload videos for free. I don't think that that's preferable for society.
    • goatinaboat 7y ago
      Is what we have now preferable? Imagine a YouTube that cost $10 to upload a video and $1 per comment. The quality of the content would be much higher and the hate speech would drop to zero. Wouldn’t that be preferable for society?
      • dsjoerg 7y ago
        Global median per-capita daily income is $8. So I have to spend my whole day's income to upload a video? You're effectively restricting speech to the rich, and the poor just have to sit there and listen. That would be sad and unnecessary.
        • crankylinuxuser 7y ago
          So it would be like old terrestrial over the air television. No?
        • goatinaboat 7y ago
          You can afford a camera, a laptop and a high speed connection, but not a token amount to cover moderating your upload? I don’t imagine this being a common scenario.
          • Mirioron 7y ago
            You can make videos on a computer that you can get for a few hundred dollars. That means you could make 20-30 videos for the same amount of money your equipment cost. That is a prohibitive scenario. I create content for YouTube and if I had to pay $10 per video then I would never make another YouTube video again. It doesn't matter that there are thousands of people (and tends of thousands+ sometimes), because I simply couldn't afford to spend time and effort to make a video and then spend extra money to share it. You could make the argument that perhaps society is better off if I don't create content, but there are at least some people that claim they enjoy it.
  • chii 7y ago
    it does, if the profit motive is the only motive. Google and company has no reason to not do the minimal acceptable amount. They aren't bound by morals, nor do they owe "society" anything. Shareholders also demand more and more profits, and so the result you see is the inevitable outcome, and it can't be any other way. Unless "society" wills it by voting in people who then make new laws to change the outcome.
• philpem 7y ago
  Maybe the solution to that is decentralised services. To use a historical example, it's easier to moderate an IRC channel of 100 people than an IRC network of 10,000.
  • crankylinuxuser 7y ago
    Or better yet, unmoderated. Usenet only fell apart because of the spam, and legal attacks by the RIAA and MPAA and BSA.
    • philpem 7y ago
      That would depend on your perspective and your own experiences, I expect. I found the moderated sci.* and comp.* groups more pleasant for asking questions and giving answers. The alt.* hierarchy had its moments, but mostly it was an exercise in tolerance. Some groups were largely self-moderating, others had such a poor SNR that there was no point putting the time in. The RIAA/MPAA/BSA raids were only really relevant if you were into pirating copyrighted material.
• manfredo 7y ago
  Evidenced by what? Violence continues to be at or near the lowest point since the mind 20th century. Not just in the US but globally. Economic growth is persisting despite governments uncooperative with the global economy in key countries (like the US). And the internet itself is doing a way better job of policing content today than it was in the 2000s. So why is the internet all of a sudden a problem today, despite key indicators showing that society isn't worse off?
• Nasrudith 7y ago
  Who decides societal impact then? Didn't we learn from Socrates that not even society can sanely decide that?