15 ms·

I don't think they are really doing their best. If other Google's support forums are any indicator of their effort, they are mostly trying to automate the whole

by tekkk 6y ago

I don't think they are really doing their best. If other Google's support forums are any indicator of their effort, they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this. Which makes sense from the SV software engineer perspective, but really is unfathomable to the normal user who then has to live in fear if some malicious teenager decides to ruin their channel. Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service, to me it feels that they treat it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust. Yeah I know it's terribly expensive to keep a horde of content reviewers, but then it would be nice for Youtube to be upfront about it that there is maybe a human in the process, but most likely not. I guess honesty is not anymore a valuable commodity in this world, yet it would feel nice sometimes to hear the truth, not some lawyer jargon to avoid all responsibility.

movedx 6y ago
> Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service I've worked in high volume customer services. It's not easy for the agents doing the work or the companies operating them. I've worked in multiple call centers dealing with calls and tickets. I've worked in companies in which I dealt with mobile phone bill queries and hardware issues right up to Cisco networking problems and then eventually enterprise grade Linux clusters at Rackspace (UK). I've spanned a pretty large spectrum of industries from a customer services perspective. I've even done customer services in the food industry. It's HARD. Not just for you as an operator, but as a company trying to offer the service to begin with. of all of the companies I worked for, O2 (a mobile phone provider and network operator) had tens of millions of customers. We had several call centers that spanned close to ten thousand agents doing everything from calls to tickets, emails to Tweets. The call queue for that company never dropped below a constant 200-300 on hold and emails took days to even get to. Google has approx' one BILLION customers. What is your suggestion here? > they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this Damn straight automation, to a larger degree, is the answer. People don't scale at all. They can do one job at a time, for a limited amount of time, and are subject to all kinds of problems. > Yeah I know it's terribly expensive to keep a horde of content reviewers It cost O2 about $5/6 to answer a single call. That's the cost of the agent's time and JUST answering the call, not the cost of listening, understanding, resolving and ending the call. Humans are expensive. I'm not saying don't use people. I'm saying automation at Google's scale is one of the few solutions available to them when it comes to dealing with the simply insane amounts of complaints they'll receive just via their YouTube platform alone. EDIT: Apologies for being so crude in my original wording. I'm updating the comment to reflect a more professional, civil tone.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dagnabbit 6y ago
  I can say with absolute certainty that you've never given a shit about a customer. Ever. I have. I've worked with many customers, and I've helped them solve problems. I've cared about them. I've worried about if I was doing harm to them. I've let them be more than just a KPI on my dashboard. It's HARD. There is a lot of pressure from sociopathic, no talent, MBA-holding sociopaths who will argue that the best thing to do is to fuck the customer. These people think they're smart, but they're dumb af. They view the world as zero sum. IN order for us to win, the customer must lose. To win over the long term, we must ignore all of these dumb, lazy, zero-sum thinking mouth-breathers, and embrace the customer, care about their problems, and solve them. Google had thirty billion of _profit_ last year. They can pick up the phone even if it costs $5 a call. They need to ignore the people like you, the cowards who have never had the courage to care about a customer more than the immediate bottom line. They need to borrow some fucking balls and grow some fucking leadership. I'm not saying don't use ML. I'm saying that ML at Google's scale is not a full and complete solution, and it's simply insane to argue otherwise. They need to deal with the exceptions and make their ML better. To do otherwise is to embrace permanent failure and eventual irrelevance.
- droopyEyelids 6y ago
  I don't think your point passes a back of the envelope math test. Right now Google makes the second most profit per employee of any large enterprise on earth: $269,000 in profit, annually, per employee. I know of other- successful!- companies that make less money per employee, because they hire people to do customer support. To start your argument, I think you have to explain why Google can not hire more CSRs, even though they are the #2 most profitable enterprise on Earth.
  - stopping 6y ago
    IMO, Google's profit per employee isn't an indicator of Google's obligation to increase its customer service headcount. Taken to it's logical conclusion, we should let poorly-performing companies off the hook for having awful customer service. The rest of this comment is going to be somewhat critical of Google criticism and seemingly apologistic. Please assume positive intent. I agree that Google certainly could do more to help people on its platform. But this will always be the case until every single customer service issue is solved to the user's satisfaction. The important question that I never see anybody asking or answering is "How much is reasonably enough, and how do we know (subject X) has done enough?" It all boils down to what we believe the moral obligation of people (and companies, by extension) ought to be. Any extra service that Google provides beyond those required for profit maximization (e.g. customer retention, maintaining reputation, being only slightly better than the second-best option) is purely charity. Then, how do we evaluate when a certain amount of charity is sufficient, let alone necessary? Public sentiment is fickle, and therefore not a great measure. I bet even if Google increased its CSR by 10x, we'd still see communities eagerly latch onto any criticism of the tech giant and shout "you have to do more!" without quantifying what the final demand actually is! I take the moral position that we as a society certainly can and should do much more to take care of each other. Telling each other to be better is absolutely valuable and I will never argue against that. But I believe we ought to do a much better job of suggesting desirable and realistic end states, instead of perpetuating insubstantial discourse amounting to one of either "They need to do better!" or "Come on, they're doing the best they can." Admittedly this places me in a non-committal position. I don't have any great suggestions for what the end states of YouTube, Twitter, et al should look like from a content moderation perspective. But I would love to hear input from actual experts in who can offer some reasonable ideas about the most cost-beneficial solutions for society as a whole.
colechristensen 6y ago
If you're living in fear go find a paid platform where you are the customer instead of the product. If you aren't making enough money on YouTube to be able to afford paying someone to host your content and provide better, paid customer service, then you have to consider that the risk of being on a mostly automated, poorly supported platform is the only thing keeping you from losing money, or in other words, is the sole source of your income. When you are as big as Google, very improbable failures happen all the time, pointing them out doesn't tell the story of how well they're doing unless your expectation is constant perfection. Go find rates, not anecdotes, then you might have something. Also, if you're being blackmailed and harassed, it would seem to be a matter for the police and the courts, not Google, to fix.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Youtube has locked viewers in. If a content creator leaves youtube no one consumes their content, so this isn't really an option.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    Then complain about Google's monopoly, not its moderation inadequacies, and consider that creators unwilling to leave are the source of the monopoly, not necessarily its victims, especially if they're not even trying other platforms. I guess I don't like the entitlement/blame cycle where people who help create a problem complain about the consequences.
    - colinmhayes 6y ago
      The monopoly is due to threshold of creators being on youtube. A single channel leaving would make no difference. I'd love to see a movement away from youtube, but that would require a movement with serous organization, which creators mostly aren't capable of doing.
      - colechristensen 6y ago
        Cue the Simpsons clip "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas". If one is not willing, capable, or even interested in trying to solve problems they help create, as an individual or a group, I have very little interest in sympathy for their difficulty.
rezonant 6y ago
I completely agree with your sentiment here, and having read the other sibling comments to mine, I'd like to note that I have dealt with high volume customer support, I work closely with YouTube so I know their reps/support/processes pretty well and I'm also a software engineer who thinks about these challenges quite a lot. None of that changes the fact that Google is indeed "treating it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust". That's basically their MO, and they put wayyyy too much stock in the results. Saying that Google doesn't do this is crazy. This is why the Podcast Addict thing happened; they were trying to crack down on the misinformation from "plandemic" weirdos and Podcast Addict and many other apps were hit with the spray of the shotgun blast. Is their original intention worthwhile? Yes. Do I think a human "reviewed" Podcast Addict before they took it out for linking to content about literally the world's most talked about story while at the same time Google Podcasts did the exact same thing? Absolutely not. If a human reviewed that case and decided that Podcast Addict (the #1 podcast app on Android) needed to be suspended, then something is broken. Maybe someone needs to be fired, but there's no someone in the chair. You can't fire the AIs at this point- You can only tweak and rework them and hope they take out less innocent bystanders. All this said, is it hard? Yes. Is there too much content to really do this right? Yes I believe there is. Could Google do a better, more efficient and transparent job of cleaning up the mess when their scripts misfire? Oh absolutely yes.
marcyb5st 6y ago
(Disclaimer: I work on YouTube, but all the opinions are strictly my own). We tried to convey the message [1] that due to corona virus fewer and fewer human reviewers will be available. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-coronavirus-content-moderation-video-review-machine-learning-community-guidelines-2020-3?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-coronavirus-content-...
- esperent 6y ago
  Why? Surely reviewing content is a perfect candidate for remote work?
  - marcyb5st 6y ago
    Sorry for the late reply. I am speculating as I don't know the reason for the decision, but I believe it has to do with the fact that we don't want to expose families to some really gruesome content or that for some parts of the world internet connections are not available (e.g. rural India).
jpalomaki 6y ago
If you have large amount of people for these tasks, you need to give clear guidelines for them to get consistent results. Also you can’t expect people to put their heart and soul to this kind if grunt work - reviewing content and complaints all day long. In the end it might be that humans just become robots on task like this.
7leafer 6y ago
Here is how YouTube is dong their best about this: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spiderman+elsa https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spiderman+elsa And this, by far, is not the worst case of what's proliferating there.
Mirioron 6y ago
What baffles me is that the Games From Scratch YouTube channel has likely generated over $15,000 in revenue for YouTube. Is it really so difficult for them to have a human that the youtuber could turn to?

by tekkk 6y ago

movedx 6y ago

> Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service I've worked in high volume customer services. It's not easy for the agents doing the work or the companies operating them. I've worked in multiple call centers dealing with calls and tickets. I've worked in companies in which I dealt with mobile phone bill queries and hardware issues right up to Cisco networking problems and then eventually enterprise grade Linux clusters at Rackspace (UK). I've spanned a pretty large spectrum of industries from a customer services perspective. I've even done customer services in the food industry. It's HARD. Not just for you as an operator, but as a company trying to offer the service to begin with. of all of the companies I worked for, O2 (a mobile phone provider and network operator) had tens of millions of customers. We had several call centers that spanned close to ten thousand agents doing everything from calls to tickets, emails to Tweets. The call queue for that company never dropped below a constant 200-300 on hold and emails took days to even get to. Google has approx' one BILLION customers. What is your suggestion here? > they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this Damn straight automation, to a larger degree, is the answer. People don't scale at all. They can do one job at a time, for a limited amount of time, and are subject to all kinds of problems. > Yeah I know it's terribly expensive to keep a horde of content reviewers It cost O2 about $5/6 to answer a single call. That's the cost of the agent's time and JUST answering the call, not the cost of listening, understanding, resolving and ending the call. Humans are expensive. I'm not saying don't use people. I'm saying automation at Google's scale is one of the few solutions available to them when it comes to dealing with the simply insane amounts of complaints they'll receive just via their YouTube platform alone. EDIT: Apologies for being so crude in my original wording. I'm updating the comment to reflect a more professional, civil tone.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dagnabbit 6y ago
I can say with absolute certainty that you've never given a shit about a customer. Ever. I have. I've worked with many customers, and I've helped them solve problems. I've cared about them. I've worried about if I was doing harm to them. I've let them be more than just a KPI on my dashboard. It's HARD. There is a lot of pressure from sociopathic, no talent, MBA-holding sociopaths who will argue that the best thing to do is to fuck the customer. These people think they're smart, but they're dumb af. They view the world as zero sum. IN order for us to win, the customer must lose. To win over the long term, we must ignore all of these dumb, lazy, zero-sum thinking mouth-breathers, and embrace the customer, care about their problems, and solve them. Google had thirty billion of _profit_ last year. They can pick up the phone even if it costs $5 a call. They need to ignore the people like you, the cowards who have never had the courage to care about a customer more than the immediate bottom line. They need to borrow some fucking balls and grow some fucking leadership. I'm not saying don't use ML. I'm saying that ML at Google's scale is not a full and complete solution, and it's simply insane to argue otherwise. They need to deal with the exceptions and make their ML better. To do otherwise is to embrace permanent failure and eventual irrelevance.
droopyEyelids 6y ago
I don't think your point passes a back of the envelope math test. Right now Google makes the second most profit per employee of any large enterprise on earth: $269,000 in profit, annually, per employee. I know of other- successful!- companies that make less money per employee, because they hire people to do customer support. To start your argument, I think you have to explain why Google can not hire more CSRs, even though they are the #2 most profitable enterprise on Earth.
- stopping 6y ago
  IMO, Google's profit per employee isn't an indicator of Google's obligation to increase its customer service headcount. Taken to it's logical conclusion, we should let poorly-performing companies off the hook for having awful customer service. The rest of this comment is going to be somewhat critical of Google criticism and seemingly apologistic. Please assume positive intent. I agree that Google certainly could do more to help people on its platform. But this will always be the case until every single customer service issue is solved to the user's satisfaction. The important question that I never see anybody asking or answering is "How much is reasonably enough, and how do we know (subject X) has done enough?" It all boils down to what we believe the moral obligation of people (and companies, by extension) ought to be. Any extra service that Google provides beyond those required for profit maximization (e.g. customer retention, maintaining reputation, being only slightly better than the second-best option) is purely charity. Then, how do we evaluate when a certain amount of charity is sufficient, let alone necessary? Public sentiment is fickle, and therefore not a great measure. I bet even if Google increased its CSR by 10x, we'd still see communities eagerly latch onto any criticism of the tech giant and shout "you have to do more!" without quantifying what the final demand actually is! I take the moral position that we as a society certainly can and should do much more to take care of each other. Telling each other to be better is absolutely valuable and I will never argue against that. But I believe we ought to do a much better job of suggesting desirable and realistic end states, instead of perpetuating insubstantial discourse amounting to one of either "They need to do better!" or "Come on, they're doing the best they can." Admittedly this places me in a non-committal position. I don't have any great suggestions for what the end states of YouTube, Twitter, et al should look like from a content moderation perspective. But I would love to hear input from actual experts in who can offer some reasonable ideas about the most cost-beneficial solutions for society as a whole.

colechristensen 6y ago

If you're living in fear go find a paid platform where you are the customer instead of the product. If you aren't making enough money on YouTube to be able to afford paying someone to host your content and provide better, paid customer service, then you have to consider that the risk of being on a mostly automated, poorly supported platform is the only thing keeping you from losing money, or in other words, is the sole source of your income. When you are as big as Google, very improbable failures happen all the time, pointing them out doesn't tell the story of how well they're doing unless your expectation is constant perfection. Go find rates, not anecdotes, then you might have something. Also, if you're being blackmailed and harassed, it would seem to be a matter for the police and the courts, not Google, to fix.

colinmhayes 6y ago
Youtube has locked viewers in. If a content creator leaves youtube no one consumes their content, so this isn't really an option.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Then complain about Google's monopoly, not its moderation inadequacies, and consider that creators unwilling to leave are the source of the monopoly, not necessarily its victims, especially if they're not even trying other platforms. I guess I don't like the entitlement/blame cycle where people who help create a problem complain about the consequences.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    The monopoly is due to threshold of creators being on youtube. A single channel leaving would make no difference. I'd love to see a movement away from youtube, but that would require a movement with serous organization, which creators mostly aren't capable of doing.
    - colechristensen 6y ago
      Cue the Simpsons clip "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas". If one is not willing, capable, or even interested in trying to solve problems they help create, as an individual or a group, I have very little interest in sympathy for their difficulty.

rezonant 6y ago

I completely agree with your sentiment here, and having read the other sibling comments to mine, I'd like to note that I have dealt with high volume customer support, I work closely with YouTube so I know their reps/support/processes pretty well and I'm also a software engineer who thinks about these challenges quite a lot. None of that changes the fact that Google is indeed "treating it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust". That's basically their MO, and they put wayyyy too much stock in the results. Saying that Google doesn't do this is crazy. This is why the Podcast Addict thing happened; they were trying to crack down on the misinformation from "plandemic" weirdos and Podcast Addict and many other apps were hit with the spray of the shotgun blast. Is their original intention worthwhile? Yes. Do I think a human "reviewed" Podcast Addict before they took it out for linking to content about literally the world's most talked about story while at the same time Google Podcasts did the exact same thing? Absolutely not. If a human reviewed that case and decided that Podcast Addict (the #1 podcast app on Android) needed to be suspended, then something is broken. Maybe someone needs to be fired, but there's no someone in the chair. You can't fire the AIs at this point- You can only tweak and rework them and hope they take out less innocent bystanders. All this said, is it hard? Yes. Is there too much content to really do this right? Yes I believe there is. Could Google do a better, more efficient and transparent job of cleaning up the mess when their scripts misfire? Oh absolutely yes.

marcyb5st 6y ago

(Disclaimer: I work on YouTube, but all the opinions are strictly my own). We tried to convey the message [1] that due to corona virus fewer and fewer human reviewers will be available. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-coronavirus-content-moderation-video-review-machine-learning-community-guidelines-2020-3?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-coronavirus-content-...

esperent 6y ago
Why? Surely reviewing content is a perfect candidate for remote work?
- marcyb5st 6y ago
  Sorry for the late reply. I am speculating as I don't know the reason for the decision, but I believe it has to do with the fact that we don't want to expose families to some really gruesome content or that for some parts of the world internet connections are not available (e.g. rural India).

jpalomaki 6y ago

If you have large amount of people for these tasks, you need to give clear guidelines for them to get consistent results. Also you can’t expect people to put their heart and soul to this kind if grunt work - reviewing content and complaints all day long. In the end it might be that humans just become robots on task like this.

7leafer 6y ago

Here is how YouTube is dong their best about this: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spiderman+elsa https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spiderman+elsa And this, by far, is not the worst case of what's proliferating there.

Mirioron 6y ago

What baffles me is that the Games From Scratch YouTube channel has likely generated over $15,000 in revenue for YouTube. Is it really so difficult for them to have a human that the youtuber could turn to?