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>In fact, it is a herd of ponies, some of which look rather more like full-grown Shires. Nine have more than a billion users globally. Every day people make an

>In fact, it is a herd of ponies, some of which look rather more like full-grown Shires. Nine have more than a billion users globally. Every day people make an estimated 6bn search queries on Google and upload more than 49 years’ worth of video to YouTube. More than 300bn emails are said to be sent every day. The absolute scale of Alphabet and its services sometimes boggles my mind. In particular - YouTube where one can't help but ponder about content moderation at this scale being impossible without highly sophisticated algorithms(which also face the heat every once in a while).

lalos 6y ago
This is scary to think about given that you need rare earth elements to build those chips powering all those machines. Makes sense why some countries are ensuring to have a supply on this in the long term, feels like the new oil.
- mc32 6y ago
  At least they are recoverable and recyclable, oil not so much.
  - CogitoCogito 6y ago
    Are they? If you have a pile of 1,000,000 chips, can you really get any of the elements out at reasonable (by almost any metric) cost?
    - SpaceRaccoon 6y ago
      Why would it be more difficult than to extract from ore? You can smelt them, that will burn away the plastic, and then you can separate the metals.
      - CogitoCogito 6y ago
        I'm honestly having a bit of trouble putting my misgiving into thoughts (which if anything demonstrates I haven't thought this all through), but if you throw together say 10 materials, how likely are you to be able to separate out those 10 materials again? Or will you only be able to separate a couple metals with certain convenient melting points? I do see what you're saying though. Maybe the easy question is, what actually happens when electronics are recycled today? How much of the original material is retrieved? Maybe I'm just entirely wrong even given the state of the art today?
        rurp 6y ago
        I only know a bit about this but from what I understand this is similar to how most modern mining works. Many minerals are mined in very low concentrations, which means they then need to be extracted out of the host material. Part of that process often involves multiple steps where the ore is soaked in various chemical solutions, which separate certain materials. It can be a very complicated process involving a lot of toxic chemicals.
        dodobirdlord 6y ago
        The rare earth metals are kinda irritating to separate because they have very similar physical properties, but it obviously can be done. They frequently co-occur in ore deposits for exactly that reason.
    - blacksmith_tb 6y ago
      Gold is recovered in significant quantities from e-waste[1] 1: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/electronic-devices-source-of-metals-for-recyclers-2877986 https://www.thebalancesmb.com/electronic-devices-source-of-m...
      - CogitoCogito 6y ago
        Once the gold has been recovered, are they still able to recover other metals? I don't mean this antagonistically, this is a serious question (in case you know).
        blacksmith_tb 6y ago
        Good question, but I don't know the answer - my sense is the bigger problem is the recycling tends to happen at low rates, and often involve nasty pollution/byproducts[1] 1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/02/10bn-precious-metals-dumped-each-year-electronic-waste-un-toxic-e-waste-polluting https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/02/10bn-pre...
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      Commercial chips still use gold bond wires (except flip chips), but that's fairly little. Apart from that it's just copper or aluminium for the metal layers, a bunch of silicon and a bunch of silica dust bound with some epoxy resin. Most of this isn't worth anything to reuse.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  It sounds like you may hold a common misconception about rare-earth minerals. IIUC, they're not (extremely) rare in the traditional sense; it's more that it's hard to economically extract them from ore. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element#:~:text=The%2017%20rare%2Dearth%20elements,%2C%20and%20yttrium%20(Y) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element#:~:text=The....
  - pydry 6y ago
    Even harder and even more expensive to extract if you give a damn about the environment.
    - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
      Good point! Your comment has made me curious about the total lifecycle of the waste products from these processes.
    - paulcole 6y ago
      This is an unpopular opinion here on HN but essentially everything the largest nations have done show that they don't give a damn about the environment at all. Like my dad said, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them."
      - clairity 6y ago
        your two sentences led to some cognitive dissonance... yes, institutions like governments can be amoral/immoral on longer timescales (in fact, i'd posit institutions are employed specifically for this purpose), but people rarely exhibit such attributes statically, as your dad's quote alludes. it's at best "believe them in the moment". rare is the "bad" person; more common is the "bad" institution. expect the best of people (which is not the same as "be naïve").
        paulcole 6y ago
        It doesn't matter if the people are bad or the institution is bad. The end result is the same: > everything the largest nations have done show that they don't give a damn about the environment at all. I do expect the best of people. It's just been shown that the "best" a very large group of people can do re: climate change is pretty fucking pathetic.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  You need rare earth elements to make chips? Name one. And it had better be a rare earth, not something that is just rare and comes from the Earth. (slight amounts of REEs are used in amplifiers in optical fibers, and also in permanent magnets, but those aren't what you were talking about)
  - sabujp 6y ago
    https://semiengineering.com/more-rare-earth-rumblings/#:~:text=They%20include%20scandium%2C%20yttrium%2C%20lanthanum,%2C%20thulium%2C%20ytterbium%20and%20lutetium https://semiengineering.com/more-rare-earth-rumblings/#:~:te....
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Nowhere does that say that REEs are used in chips.
- boogies 6y ago
  Not as scary as the fact that Alphabet pressures local governments to let them drain aquifers to cool the machines¹, and powers them using vast swaths of bulldozed former habitats of endangered desert tortoises and focused beams of light that literally burn alive thousands of birds, including threatened predators². 1: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/google-s-controversial-groundwater-withdrawal-sparks-question-of-who-owns/article_bed9179c-1baa-11e7-983e-03d6b33a01e7.html https://www.postandcourier.com/news/google-s-controversial-g... 2: https://www.sbsun.com/2014/08/18/emerging-solar-plants-in-mojave-desert-scorch-birds-in-mid-air/ https://www.sbsun.com/2014/08/18/emerging-solar-plants-in-mo... "Once built, U.S. government biologists found the plant's superheated mirrors were killing birds. In April, biologists working for the state estimated that 3,500 birds died at Ivanpah in the span of a year, many of them burned alive while flying through a part of the solar installment where air temperatures can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit." — https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-to-deliver-1434138485 https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#Birds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#B...
  - robotnikman 6y ago
    Thats just one of their datacenters?! Thats huge!
    - boogies 6y ago
      The aquifer draining article linked is about one in South Carolina, the Ivanpah plant is in California's Mojave Desert, and IIUC is the largest bird incinerator in the world, burning a bird out of the sky every other minute. From the Sun article: Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair. Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version. They do seem to have reduced some of the more dramatic deaths by unfocusing the beams when the plant is idle and clearing even more land around it to keep birds away, although there were still thousands of deaths every year afterwards.
komali2 6y ago
One the one hand it's sad that it'll be impossible, practically and perhaps even physically, to archive all of Youtube should Google ever decide to axe it, on the other hand even though I'm fanatically a datahoarder, the thought of archiving youtube just seems... exhausting? Pointless? Haha I'm not sure. Then again just imagine how fantastically useful 40 years worth of video a day could be to a historian 200 years from now. I think the most important technology going forward will be analysis and indexing software, to make searching videos like this possible. Ted Chiang wrote a short story about that, where you could search like "that time I got in a fight with my wife about the toilet seat being up," and you'd get a video from the incident.
- Fiveplus 6y ago
  Given we are living in 2020, there have to have been efforts or thought-experiments dedicated to archiving YouTube (would love to read about them if they exist). It seems 'almost' impossible like you said, even if we disregard, say channels with less than 100 subscribers (just as an example).
  - 3pt14159 6y ago
    It's not impossible. It's merely a matter of resources and will. Google not only has to store all that video they also need to transmit it over and over again. An archivist would only have to write to store the video. If humanity makes it to the year 3000 we're going to be pretty disappointed that all that video was lost due to a lack of foresight.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      I bet the number of times the typical youtube upload is watched is zero. I think YouTube itself already fills the archival, non-transmitting role here.
      - formerly_proven 6y ago
        Average views per video is around 10k. I don't know what the mode (most frequent number of views) is, but I'm almost certain it's not zero, since the uploader checking if the video uploaded correctly already counts as a view. Anyway, for archival purposes you don't need to save the plethora of formats Youtube keeps at hand for each video, you just need one size in one codec, and it probably doesn't have to be 4K or 8K, which probably reduces the storage requirements by one order of magnitude or so.
foobiekr 6y ago
I think we give google too much credit by assuming sophisticated moderation _algorithms_.
- pvarangot 6y ago
  There's algorithms for sure, but the sophisticated part is the scale at which they run. And by sophisticated I mean it was sophisticated five years ago.
  - actuator 6y ago
    Way before than that. It sounds easy in theory but it was amazing how their platform auto moderated content. People used to go around finding new ways like clipping the video frame and adding unrelated content. Slowing down video, audio etc.
    - barbecue_sauce 6y ago
      They still do that.
      - Avicebron 6y ago
        And it still actually works, the algorithms are sophisticated, but the heavy reliance on them leads to some serious blind spots.
      - jjoonathan 6y ago
        The obfuscation techniques are getting more and more intrusive. Google hasn't won, but they seem to be gaining ground against an enormous number of clever and lively human adversaries. That's impressive.
        pvarangot 6y ago
        More than not won I think Google already lost. They wanted to empower individual creators but their automatic moderation algorithms are already at a level where they flag fair use and legal use of user generated content in a way that usually backfires on them with small PR fires within internet communities. But I guess that's the price to pay to be able to be "friends" with big media.
krick 6y ago
I don't know how these estimates are made or if they are even close to being true, but it always surprises me that there is claimed to be 50x daily emails than daily google searches. I've seen these numbers several times before (never sourced, ironically), and this one always seems weird. People don't even open any websites other way than googling the name, and most people don't send dozens of emails daily. I think the only way you can get 300B daily emails is if you multiply every automatically sent email by the number of recipients.
- huac 6y ago
  probably includes spam emails too
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  > and most people don't send dozens of emails daily. What you're missing is that the vast majority of emails aren't sent individually from one person to another; they're sent by programs. In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing lists, etc. Looking through my emails now I have an incredible volume of GitHub notifications and various other auto-generated emails. In total I definitely receive hundreds of emails per day. And I don't actually do that many Google searches per day (maybe only a couple dozen) mainly because I tend to go back to the same websites over and over again, and the browser URL bar autocompletes the name rather than performing a Google search on the name of the site. You really have to go out of your way these days to perform a Google search on the name of a site rather than just go to the site directly.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    > In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing lists, etc. Much of that flow could be replaced by RSS-based notifications and the like. E-mail might be justified when you want your stuff to be auto-archived, but perhaps any message you would delete immediately after skimming it should just not be sent in the first place.
    - 6y ago
ericmcer 6y ago
That was one big takeaway from watching the antitrust case. They definitely view these tech giants as having infinite power over technology with little regard for the complexity and scale of what is going on. I am in favor of breaking up some of these giants, but at the same time how can people with no concept of technology legislate it. They could very easily make a policy that is difficult for google to enforce, and completely impossible for a smaller player to even contemplate. I’m always reminded of the Louis CK bit where a person is introduced to WiFi in an airplane and then is complaining about it not working 15 minutes later.
- class4behavior 6y ago
  They legislate all walks of life. It is their job to comprehend the abstraction of each issue and seek advice in the right places, not to be knowledgeable in all professions and subjects of interest.
  - dantheman 6y ago
    I'd argue that job is impossible - the most heavily legislated areas are the most dysfunctional -- because they don't understand.
    - pedrosbmartins 6y ago
      I don't believe that's true. For instance, banking and electricity are highly regulated markets, and rightly so. In this cases, I think it is obviously critical for the government to draw expertise from the right sources
      - thephyber 6y ago
        Your examples are probably pretty good for explaining the depth of 2 regulated industries (except PG&E is a black eye for regulatory success), but perhaps they were talking about the breadth of all of the industries that Congress chooses to regulate, which is quite extensive. I'd argue that Congress critters and their staff aren't great at finding those "right sources" with enough consistency.
AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
> YouTube where one can't help but ponder about content moderation at this scale being impossible That's precisely why YouTube cares so much about content moderation. They need to figure out some way to not hemorrhage money with all the hosting, transcode, and CDN costs for low-effort, spammy, and controversial content that cannot be monetized. Their actions taken to address content moderation sent the world into a tailspin as a result, proving Google both understands their scale and cares very little about the way their policies disrupt societies. In 2018 YouTube went on a deletion/censorship spree in the name of racism, deleting 50mil videos in the process. But it was clear that they only scapegoated racism as the reason, because only 1% of the video they deleted was racist. [0] The reason for this scapegoating was to avoid culpability in the mistaken business model of being the world's largest beer bong for internet video. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/13/youtube-removed-nearly-2-million-channels-more-than-7-million-videos.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/13/youtube-removed-nearly-2-mil...
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  YouTube was amazing back in the day but with censorship it has become a mediocre content dumpster fire. I haven’t been interested in anything on trending in a long time.
  - AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
    Like every other startup, they pursued "growth at all costs," got acquired by a business that could eat all the red ink, but now over a decade later, that business is sick of it and looking for the mouth wash. It's just too bad they got pretty much the entire first world addicted to it before they decided to ban anti-war content as "racist" and alternative approaches to medicine as "dangerous." Why is YouTube so insistent that we not use our own minds to decide for ourselves? Perhaps because they really would find it more preferable if you didn't do any of that thinking for yourself. That's not how advertising works. [0] [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/781798-universal-literacy-was-supposed-to-educate-the-common-man-to https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/781798-universal-literacy-w...
    - 6y ago
fsociety 6y ago
With content moderation at scale.. having leeway can allow you to prioritize on trending videos, which removes a large subset of things required to moderate
SkyBelow 6y ago
For YouTube moderation, I wonder if they can track bad users for discovering new user created content. Effectively categorize the different sort of content that isn't allowed. When ever content is flagged as being in one of these categories, track the users that viewed it. Keep repeating this until you have users that seem to prefer this sort of rule breaking content. Then, begin tracking what new content those "bad viewers" view while also identifying new users who follow a similar viewing pattern and categorizing them as bad viewers. Once you get a large enough data set, you can begin to things based on what percentage of bad users view new content. If some new account uploads a few videos and 75%+ of views are from bad users all in the same category of not allowed material, what is the chance the material belongs in that category? And what I'm describing is the version 0.0.0.1 variant. You would also track things like length of view, timing of views, sentiment analysis of any comments made on the video (and potentially of any speech in the video), etc.

lalos 6y ago

This is scary to think about given that you need rare earth elements to build those chips powering all those machines. Makes sense why some countries are ensuring to have a supply on this in the long term, feels like the new oil.

mc32 6y ago
At least they are recoverable and recyclable, oil not so much.
- CogitoCogito 6y ago
  Are they? If you have a pile of 1,000,000 chips, can you really get any of the elements out at reasonable (by almost any metric) cost?
  - SpaceRaccoon 6y ago
    Why would it be more difficult than to extract from ore? You can smelt them, that will burn away the plastic, and then you can separate the metals.
    - CogitoCogito 6y ago
      I'm honestly having a bit of trouble putting my misgiving into thoughts (which if anything demonstrates I haven't thought this all through), but if you throw together say 10 materials, how likely are you to be able to separate out those 10 materials again? Or will you only be able to separate a couple metals with certain convenient melting points? I do see what you're saying though. Maybe the easy question is, what actually happens when electronics are recycled today? How much of the original material is retrieved? Maybe I'm just entirely wrong even given the state of the art today?
      - rurp 6y ago
        I only know a bit about this but from what I understand this is similar to how most modern mining works. Many minerals are mined in very low concentrations, which means they then need to be extracted out of the host material. Part of that process often involves multiple steps where the ore is soaked in various chemical solutions, which separate certain materials. It can be a very complicated process involving a lot of toxic chemicals.
      - dodobirdlord 6y ago
        The rare earth metals are kinda irritating to separate because they have very similar physical properties, but it obviously can be done. They frequently co-occur in ore deposits for exactly that reason.
  - blacksmith_tb 6y ago
    Gold is recovered in significant quantities from e-waste[1] 1: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/electronic-devices-source-of-metals-for-recyclers-2877986 https://www.thebalancesmb.com/electronic-devices-source-of-m...
    - CogitoCogito 6y ago
      Once the gold has been recovered, are they still able to recover other metals? I don't mean this antagonistically, this is a serious question (in case you know).
      - blacksmith_tb 6y ago
        Good question, but I don't know the answer - my sense is the bigger problem is the recycling tends to happen at low rates, and often involve nasty pollution/byproducts[1] 1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/02/10bn-precious-metals-dumped-each-year-electronic-waste-un-toxic-e-waste-polluting https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/02/10bn-pre...
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    Commercial chips still use gold bond wires (except flip chips), but that's fairly little. Apart from that it's just copper or aluminium for the metal layers, a bunch of silicon and a bunch of silica dust bound with some epoxy resin. Most of this isn't worth anything to reuse.
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
It sounds like you may hold a common misconception about rare-earth minerals. IIUC, they're not (extremely) rare in the traditional sense; it's more that it's hard to economically extract them from ore. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element#:~:text=The%2017%20rare%2Dearth%20elements,%2C%20and%20yttrium%20(Y) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element#:~:text=The....
- pydry 6y ago
  Even harder and even more expensive to extract if you give a damn about the environment.
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    Good point! Your comment has made me curious about the total lifecycle of the waste products from these processes.
  - paulcole 6y ago
    This is an unpopular opinion here on HN but essentially everything the largest nations have done show that they don't give a damn about the environment at all. Like my dad said, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them."
    - clairity 6y ago
      your two sentences led to some cognitive dissonance... yes, institutions like governments can be amoral/immoral on longer timescales (in fact, i'd posit institutions are employed specifically for this purpose), but people rarely exhibit such attributes statically, as your dad's quote alludes. it's at best "believe them in the moment". rare is the "bad" person; more common is the "bad" institution. expect the best of people (which is not the same as "be naïve").
      - paulcole 6y ago
        It doesn't matter if the people are bad or the institution is bad. The end result is the same: > everything the largest nations have done show that they don't give a damn about the environment at all. I do expect the best of people. It's just been shown that the "best" a very large group of people can do re: climate change is pretty fucking pathetic.
pfdietz 6y ago
You need rare earth elements to make chips? Name one. And it had better be a rare earth, not something that is just rare and comes from the Earth. (slight amounts of REEs are used in amplifiers in optical fibers, and also in permanent magnets, but those aren't what you were talking about)
- sabujp 6y ago
  https://semiengineering.com/more-rare-earth-rumblings/#:~:text=They%20include%20scandium%2C%20yttrium%2C%20lanthanum,%2C%20thulium%2C%20ytterbium%20and%20lutetium https://semiengineering.com/more-rare-earth-rumblings/#:~:te....
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Nowhere does that say that REEs are used in chips.
boogies 6y ago
Not as scary as the fact that Alphabet pressures local governments to let them drain aquifers to cool the machines¹, and powers them using vast swaths of bulldozed former habitats of endangered desert tortoises and focused beams of light that literally burn alive thousands of birds, including threatened predators². 1: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/google-s-controversial-groundwater-withdrawal-sparks-question-of-who-owns/article_bed9179c-1baa-11e7-983e-03d6b33a01e7.html https://www.postandcourier.com/news/google-s-controversial-g... 2: https://www.sbsun.com/2014/08/18/emerging-solar-plants-in-mojave-desert-scorch-birds-in-mid-air/ https://www.sbsun.com/2014/08/18/emerging-solar-plants-in-mo... "Once built, U.S. government biologists found the plant's superheated mirrors were killing birds. In April, biologists working for the state estimated that 3,500 birds died at Ivanpah in the span of a year, many of them burned alive while flying through a part of the solar installment where air temperatures can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit." — https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-to-deliver-1434138485 https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#Birds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#B...
- robotnikman 6y ago
  Thats just one of their datacenters?! Thats huge!
  - boogies 6y ago
    The aquifer draining article linked is about one in South Carolina, the Ivanpah plant is in California's Mojave Desert, and IIUC is the largest bird incinerator in the world, burning a bird out of the sky every other minute. From the Sun article: Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair. Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version. They do seem to have reduced some of the more dramatic deaths by unfocusing the beams when the plant is idle and clearing even more land around it to keep birds away, although there were still thousands of deaths every year afterwards.

komali2 6y ago

One the one hand it's sad that it'll be impossible, practically and perhaps even physically, to archive all of Youtube should Google ever decide to axe it, on the other hand even though I'm fanatically a datahoarder, the thought of archiving youtube just seems... exhausting? Pointless? Haha I'm not sure. Then again just imagine how fantastically useful 40 years worth of video a day could be to a historian 200 years from now. I think the most important technology going forward will be analysis and indexing software, to make searching videos like this possible. Ted Chiang wrote a short story about that, where you could search like "that time I got in a fight with my wife about the toilet seat being up," and you'd get a video from the incident.

Fiveplus 6y ago
Given we are living in 2020, there have to have been efforts or thought-experiments dedicated to archiving YouTube (would love to read about them if they exist). It seems 'almost' impossible like you said, even if we disregard, say channels with less than 100 subscribers (just as an example).
- 3pt14159 6y ago
  It's not impossible. It's merely a matter of resources and will. Google not only has to store all that video they also need to transmit it over and over again. An archivist would only have to write to store the video. If humanity makes it to the year 3000 we're going to be pretty disappointed that all that video was lost due to a lack of foresight.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    I bet the number of times the typical youtube upload is watched is zero. I think YouTube itself already fills the archival, non-transmitting role here.
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      Average views per video is around 10k. I don't know what the mode (most frequent number of views) is, but I'm almost certain it's not zero, since the uploader checking if the video uploaded correctly already counts as a view. Anyway, for archival purposes you don't need to save the plethora of formats Youtube keeps at hand for each video, you just need one size in one codec, and it probably doesn't have to be 4K or 8K, which probably reduces the storage requirements by one order of magnitude or so.

foobiekr 6y ago

I think we give google too much credit by assuming sophisticated moderation _algorithms_.

pvarangot 6y ago
There's algorithms for sure, but the sophisticated part is the scale at which they run. And by sophisticated I mean it was sophisticated five years ago.
- actuator 6y ago
  Way before than that. It sounds easy in theory but it was amazing how their platform auto moderated content. People used to go around finding new ways like clipping the video frame and adding unrelated content. Slowing down video, audio etc.
  - barbecue_sauce 6y ago
    They still do that.
    - Avicebron 6y ago
      And it still actually works, the algorithms are sophisticated, but the heavy reliance on them leads to some serious blind spots.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      The obfuscation techniques are getting more and more intrusive. Google hasn't won, but they seem to be gaining ground against an enormous number of clever and lively human adversaries. That's impressive.
      - pvarangot 6y ago
        More than not won I think Google already lost. They wanted to empower individual creators but their automatic moderation algorithms are already at a level where they flag fair use and legal use of user generated content in a way that usually backfires on them with small PR fires within internet communities. But I guess that's the price to pay to be able to be "friends" with big media.

krick 6y ago

I don't know how these estimates are made or if they are even close to being true, but it always surprises me that there is claimed to be 50x daily emails than daily google searches. I've seen these numbers several times before (never sourced, ironically), and this one always seems weird. People don't even open any websites other way than googling the name, and most people don't send dozens of emails daily. I think the only way you can get 300B daily emails is if you multiply every automatically sent email by the number of recipients.

huac 6y ago
probably includes spam emails too
CydeWeys 6y ago
> and most people don't send dozens of emails daily. What you're missing is that the vast majority of emails aren't sent individually from one person to another; they're sent by programs. In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing lists, etc. Looking through my emails now I have an incredible volume of GitHub notifications and various other auto-generated emails. In total I definitely receive hundreds of emails per day. And I don't actually do that many Google searches per day (maybe only a couple dozen) mainly because I tend to go back to the same websites over and over again, and the browser URL bar autocompletes the name rather than performing a Google search on the name of the site. You really have to go out of your way these days to perform a Google search on the name of a site rather than just go to the site directly.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing lists, etc. Much of that flow could be replaced by RSS-based notifications and the like. E-mail might be justified when you want your stuff to be auto-archived, but perhaps any message you would delete immediately after skimming it should just not be sent in the first place.
  - 6y ago

ericmcer 6y ago

That was one big takeaway from watching the antitrust case. They definitely view these tech giants as having infinite power over technology with little regard for the complexity and scale of what is going on. I am in favor of breaking up some of these giants, but at the same time how can people with no concept of technology legislate it. They could very easily make a policy that is difficult for google to enforce, and completely impossible for a smaller player to even contemplate. I’m always reminded of the Louis CK bit where a person is introduced to WiFi in an airplane and then is complaining about it not working 15 minutes later.

class4behavior 6y ago
They legislate all walks of life. It is their job to comprehend the abstraction of each issue and seek advice in the right places, not to be knowledgeable in all professions and subjects of interest.
- dantheman 6y ago
  I'd argue that job is impossible - the most heavily legislated areas are the most dysfunctional -- because they don't understand.
  - pedrosbmartins 6y ago
    I don't believe that's true. For instance, banking and electricity are highly regulated markets, and rightly so. In this cases, I think it is obviously critical for the government to draw expertise from the right sources
    - thephyber 6y ago
      Your examples are probably pretty good for explaining the depth of 2 regulated industries (except PG&E is a black eye for regulatory success), but perhaps they were talking about the breadth of all of the industries that Congress chooses to regulate, which is quite extensive. I'd argue that Congress critters and their staff aren't great at finding those "right sources" with enough consistency.

AndrewUnmuted 6y ago

> YouTube where one can't help but ponder about content moderation at this scale being impossible That's precisely why YouTube cares so much about content moderation. They need to figure out some way to not hemorrhage money with all the hosting, transcode, and CDN costs for low-effort, spammy, and controversial content that cannot be monetized. Their actions taken to address content moderation sent the world into a tailspin as a result, proving Google both understands their scale and cares very little about the way their policies disrupt societies. In 2018 YouTube went on a deletion/censorship spree in the name of racism, deleting 50mil videos in the process. But it was clear that they only scapegoated racism as the reason, because only 1% of the video they deleted was racist. [0] The reason for this scapegoating was to avoid culpability in the mistaken business model of being the world's largest beer bong for internet video. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/13/youtube-removed-nearly-2-million-channels-more-than-7-million-videos.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/13/youtube-removed-nearly-2-mil...

dkdk8283 6y ago
YouTube was amazing back in the day but with censorship it has become a mediocre content dumpster fire. I haven’t been interested in anything on trending in a long time.
- AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
  Like every other startup, they pursued "growth at all costs," got acquired by a business that could eat all the red ink, but now over a decade later, that business is sick of it and looking for the mouth wash. It's just too bad they got pretty much the entire first world addicted to it before they decided to ban anti-war content as "racist" and alternative approaches to medicine as "dangerous." Why is YouTube so insistent that we not use our own minds to decide for ourselves? Perhaps because they really would find it more preferable if you didn't do any of that thinking for yourself. That's not how advertising works. [0] [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/781798-universal-literacy-was-supposed-to-educate-the-common-man-to https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/781798-universal-literacy-w...
  - 6y ago

fsociety 6y ago

With content moderation at scale.. having leeway can allow you to prioritize on trending videos, which removes a large subset of things required to moderate

SkyBelow 6y ago

For YouTube moderation, I wonder if they can track bad users for discovering new user created content. Effectively categorize the different sort of content that isn't allowed. When ever content is flagged as being in one of these categories, track the users that viewed it. Keep repeating this until you have users that seem to prefer this sort of rule breaking content. Then, begin tracking what new content those "bad viewers" view while also identifying new users who follow a similar viewing pattern and categorizing them as bad viewers. Once you get a large enough data set, you can begin to things based on what percentage of bad users view new content. If some new account uploads a few videos and 75%+ of views are from bad users all in the same category of not allowed material, what is the chance the material belongs in that category? And what I'm describing is the version 0.0.0.1 variant. You would also track things like length of view, timing of views, sentiment analysis of any comments made on the video (and potentially of any speech in the video), etc.