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"Users of xHamster upload about 7,000 videos a day". "300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!" [1] I think that's the real reason. [1] http:

"Users of xHamster upload about 7,000 videos a day". "300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!" [1] I think that's the real reason. [1] http://videonitch.com/2017/12/13/36-mind-blowing-youtube-facts-figures-statistics-2017-re-post/ http://videonitch.com/2017/12/13/36-mind-blowing-youtube-fac...

megous 7y ago
It's stated in the article that YT/FB/whatever woudln't be able to grow as much as it did.
jseliger 7y ago
I was about to quote this exact passage. I flagged the article because its central argument is so specious. The writer gestures in the direction of scale: It is true that a site like Facebook wouldn’t be able to reach a billion users, or provide those users with the same experience, if it adopted the same content moderation model as a site like xHamster But the writer doesn't follow up on the scale of Facebook vs the scale of the comparison sites. To have an opinion on the Internet, all you need is a computer and an Internet connection.
IIAOPSW 7y ago
For the sake of putting things in consistent terms. 7,000 videos a day works out to just under 5 videos every minute. Assuming each video averages about 12 minutes in length, 1 hour of video is uploaded to xHamster every minute. Put another way, Youtube has to moderate 300x the amount of content. I suspect (but do not know) that Youtube also has 300x the userbase and can possibly afford 300x the moderation.
- Invictus0 7y ago
  It is not clear that Youtube is profitable at all, although no information has been forthcoming on the subject since 2015, from what I can gather.
  - grenoire 7y ago
    Perhaps also the reason why they have been coming up with subscription models and paid shows?
- natalyarostova 7y ago
  I feel like porn moderation is a more trivially binary choice: Legal vs. illegal, in a way that is crisp, clear, and clearly legislated. Whereas what about weird videos that try to sell products to kids under the age of 5? What about anti-semites? What about subtle racism (Is that even something we want to moderate?) What about bullying? The moderation space, and connectivity between peers, is orders of magnitude larger on youtube. Hours of content controlled for.
  - nickodell 7y ago
    >What about anti-semites? What about subtle racism (Is that even something we want to moderate?) It's not clear to me that xHamster actually tries to remove that from their site. I wonder if this is just a case where the media reports about racist content on YouTube or Facebook, but not on porn websites, so comparatively it looks like porn sites are doing a great job moderating.
    - Brian_K_White 7y ago
      I think that was their point. Xhampster only has a relatively few and relatively easily identified and relatively clearly defined things to look for, compared to youtube and faceebook and others, which have a universe of nebulous things to try to identify. xhampster (probably) doesn't even try to figure out if something is subtly antisemetic or anything like that. If it doesn't have kids or an actual not-faked death in it, then it's ok.
catalogia 7y ago
Isn't video moderation trivially parallelizable though? If one person can review one video a minute, then two people should be able to review two in a minute. And it's not like Facebook has such tight margins that there's simply no cash for this approach.. they just don't want to and nobody is making them.
bhntr3 7y ago
Not only that, the founder of xHamster doesn't claim they manually review everything: "We don’t allow just anything to be uploaded and immediately appear on the site. Our A.I. reviews the content for some violations or refers it to our team for additional review. We have had a legion of volunteers... who review uploads in exchange for in-site rewards, as well as the health of the community." Also, this line from the article is blatantly false and shows they know nothing about how content moderation actually works at Facebook or other social media sites: "Although some links and words do trigger a basic moderation algorithm that prevents the update from being posted, most moderation is done post hoc, often after problematic content is reported by users." Last I heard a lot of the haskell core team worked at facebook on Sigma (https://engineering.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with-haskell/ https://engineering.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with-haske...). Everything goes through Sigma and while Sigma is primarily a rules engine there are also many sophisticated ML algorithms in the background as well. It's ludicrous to suggest that xHamster's "AI" is better than the haskell team's rules and ML from the people who created PyTorch. Content can be sequestered for manual review. It doesn't even sound like xHamster pays anyone to do this. I guarantee Facebook pays hundreds if not thousands of people to review content already. Facebook is just as culpable for underage images or video as xHamster. It processes payments so it's responsible for anti-money laundering. I'm sure there's a list of things it does regulate. The issue is not with Facebook's technical ability or willingness to identify and sequester problematic content. It's all about what they consider problematic. Making them legally responsible for bullying or hate speech is probably going to happen and may be necessary. But it's silly to make believe they don't already deploy extremely sophisticated technology, sequester content, and perform human reviews for all the things they are held legally responsible for.
cornstalks 7y ago
YouTube is now up to 500 hours of uploads per minute[1]. Not that it makes much difference at this magnitude in this comparison. [1]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/03/14/with-over-1-billion-users-heres-how-youtube-is-keeping-pace-with-change.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/03/14/wit...

megous 7y ago

It's stated in the article that YT/FB/whatever woudln't be able to grow as much as it did.

jseliger 7y ago

I was about to quote this exact passage. I flagged the article because its central argument is so specious. The writer gestures in the direction of scale: It is true that a site like Facebook wouldn’t be able to reach a billion users, or provide those users with the same experience, if it adopted the same content moderation model as a site like xHamster But the writer doesn't follow up on the scale of Facebook vs the scale of the comparison sites. To have an opinion on the Internet, all you need is a computer and an Internet connection.

IIAOPSW 7y ago

For the sake of putting things in consistent terms. 7,000 videos a day works out to just under 5 videos every minute. Assuming each video averages about 12 minutes in length, 1 hour of video is uploaded to xHamster every minute. Put another way, Youtube has to moderate 300x the amount of content. I suspect (but do not know) that Youtube also has 300x the userbase and can possibly afford 300x the moderation.

Invictus0 7y ago
It is not clear that Youtube is profitable at all, although no information has been forthcoming on the subject since 2015, from what I can gather.
- grenoire 7y ago
  Perhaps also the reason why they have been coming up with subscription models and paid shows?
natalyarostova 7y ago
I feel like porn moderation is a more trivially binary choice: Legal vs. illegal, in a way that is crisp, clear, and clearly legislated. Whereas what about weird videos that try to sell products to kids under the age of 5? What about anti-semites? What about subtle racism (Is that even something we want to moderate?) What about bullying? The moderation space, and connectivity between peers, is orders of magnitude larger on youtube. Hours of content controlled for.
- nickodell 7y ago
  >What about anti-semites? What about subtle racism (Is that even something we want to moderate?) It's not clear to me that xHamster actually tries to remove that from their site. I wonder if this is just a case where the media reports about racist content on YouTube or Facebook, but not on porn websites, so comparatively it looks like porn sites are doing a great job moderating.
  - Brian_K_White 7y ago
    I think that was their point. Xhampster only has a relatively few and relatively easily identified and relatively clearly defined things to look for, compared to youtube and faceebook and others, which have a universe of nebulous things to try to identify. xhampster (probably) doesn't even try to figure out if something is subtly antisemetic or anything like that. If it doesn't have kids or an actual not-faked death in it, then it's ok.

catalogia 7y ago

Isn't video moderation trivially parallelizable though? If one person can review one video a minute, then two people should be able to review two in a minute. And it's not like Facebook has such tight margins that there's simply no cash for this approach.. they just don't want to and nobody is making them.

bhntr3 7y ago

Not only that, the founder of xHamster doesn't claim they manually review everything: "We don’t allow just anything to be uploaded and immediately appear on the site. Our A.I. reviews the content for some violations or refers it to our team for additional review. We have had a legion of volunteers... who review uploads in exchange for in-site rewards, as well as the health of the community." Also, this line from the article is blatantly false and shows they know nothing about how content moderation actually works at Facebook or other social media sites: "Although some links and words do trigger a basic moderation algorithm that prevents the update from being posted, most moderation is done post hoc, often after problematic content is reported by users." Last I heard a lot of the haskell core team worked at facebook on Sigma (https://engineering.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with-haskell/ https://engineering.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with-haske...). Everything goes through Sigma and while Sigma is primarily a rules engine there are also many sophisticated ML algorithms in the background as well. It's ludicrous to suggest that xHamster's "AI" is better than the haskell team's rules and ML from the people who created PyTorch. Content can be sequestered for manual review. It doesn't even sound like xHamster pays anyone to do this. I guarantee Facebook pays hundreds if not thousands of people to review content already. Facebook is just as culpable for underage images or video as xHamster. It processes payments so it's responsible for anti-money laundering. I'm sure there's a list of things it does regulate. The issue is not with Facebook's technical ability or willingness to identify and sequester problematic content. It's all about what they consider problematic. Making them legally responsible for bullying or hate speech is probably going to happen and may be necessary. But it's silly to make believe they don't already deploy extremely sophisticated technology, sequester content, and perform human reviews for all the things they are held legally responsible for.

cornstalks 7y ago

YouTube is now up to 500 hours of uploads per minute[1]. Not that it makes much difference at this magnitude in this comparison. [1]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/03/14/with-over-1-billion-users-heres-how-youtube-is-keeping-pace-with-change.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/03/14/wit...