5 ms·

People forget that they get these free services for free, and a big portion of that is because ML tools are able to cheaply do a really hard job of moderating.

People forget that they get these free services for free, and a big portion of that is because ML tools are able to cheaply do a really hard job of moderating. You hear about things like this because they're so unusual, which is a testament to the amount of time they work correctly without being noticed. Granted, there have been some issues with people getting banned from Google services for what appear to be wrong reasons and then not being able to get any kind of a human response. Those aren't great, but if you ask people whether they want to pay $10/month for YouTube so human moderators can stop this from happening or get it for free and have the .0001% chance that they get banned purely by accident, they'll take the latter. And that's putting aside the fact that there will still be errors with humans doing it, and there will still need to be the same appeal process to resolve those.

0_gravitas 6y ago
The service is not free.
rmrfrmrf 6y ago
Just because the user doesn't need to pay up-front doesn't mean the service operates at a loss (YouTube pulled in $15 billion in 2019, according to a quick search). Furthermore, YouTube Premium is a paid offering. IMO Alphabet just uses YouTube as a playground for its ML experiments because it can moreso than because it needs to for viability.
abnry 6y ago
A YouTuber is a business partner. One that YouTube treats poorly.
ivanhoe 6y ago
Not entirely true. First the platform is free, but also is the content that people provide and without it Youtube wouldn't make sense - so it's not a free service, it's a partnership. Second, for many people YouTube is the primary source of income, and I'm sure there would be plenty of content authors who'd be glad to pay a service with human moderators rather than bots - GIVEN THAT they get to keep access to the same traffic that YouTube provides. That's the key thing, you can't just go somewhere else when all the users are on a few popular platforms. If it's not for that, many high-profile authors who get their videos demonetized on stupidities would have left YouTube long time ago - but they can't, big players keep them in a checkmate position due to the form of monopoly on viewers that they have. And that means you can't just say "If you don't like it, leave, it's a free service", because it's not that simple, as leaving in reality means "give up on your business", and most of people just can't afford that. Youtube has them cornered and thus needs to be careful, since it's not a game, it affects people's lives. For many accidental blocking of channel can mean they'll be living in their cars until the Gods of Google show mercy and fix the error.... and if they do it, since sometimes you don't even get a meaningful reply on what happened, just a template message.
- nautilus12 6y ago
  You just described a monopoly
  - pjanoman 6y ago
    What does youtube do that is monopolistic? Just because all users congregate onto one site doesn't mean that Youtube needs to be broken apart.
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      I don't think Youtube necessarily needs to be broken apart, but they are a natural monopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch. Think of it in terms of paying users: how much would you have to pay someone to switch from Youtube to your site? Multiply the average by the number of users, and that's the advantage Youtube has over competitors.
      - yellowapple 6y ago
        YouTube doesn't really fit the definition of a natural monopoly, particularly because there's nothing fundamentally stopping other services from popping up. YouTube's status as an effective monopoly doesn't come from some sort of scarcity of the means of production. > The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch. Only if we're assuming that users and uploaders will only ever use exactly one service at any given time. No reason why that needs to be the case; nothing stopping people from uploading to YouTube and Vimeo and Twitch and DailyMotion and PornHub and LBRY and PeerTube and whatever other platforms, and nothing stopping people from viewing from those platforms, either.
        sillysaurusx 6y ago
        Then where is the YouTube competitor? The closest seems to be odysee (https://odysee.com/ https://odysee.com/) where you're lucky to break a few hundred views. Suppose YouTube disappeared tomorrow. Where would everyone go? Probably odysee. So why don't they go there now? That's why Youtube is a natural monopoly.
serf 6y ago
> ...that is because ML tools are able to cheaply do a really hard job of moderating I mean , YouTube is huge, but we had moderation-at-scale before ML was a popular phrase to bandy around. 'ML' and 'Algorithms' are just convenient non-human bogeyman that any corporation can pin all their woes on without batting an eye right now -- a convenient explanation tool for when things go wrong. I am going to take a bold stance with this next statement: An algorithm cannot be at fault -- it is always the fault of those that implement such algorithms. YouTube and their community is huge -- YouTube has revenue fifteen times greater than Yahoo. 'Too big to X' should not be a tolerable excuse from any industry -- especially so since YouTube/Google has been pushing the idea for years that being a YTer is an actual profession. Imagine for a moment coming into work and being told that you're fired because an internal corporate policy checker decided that something you did in your past work history was worth of termination; and then 24 hours later being told to continue coming into work because a mistake had been made, but with no further explanation. This kind of 'workplace' would be intolerable in any real 'work environment'. Just more evidence that YTers are not really treated like any other partner or employee anywhere else in the world -- and that they should probably curtail that language if they want expectations to match the reality that their 'employees' experience. >People forget that they get these free services for free, YouTube is not a free service. This fallacy needs to go.
- xmprt 6y ago
  > YouTube is not a free service. This fallacy needs to go. To anyone still not convinced, YouTube takes 45% of all ad revenue generated on videos that YouTube had no part in creating.
- awillen 6y ago
  Okay, fine, so an algorithm can't be at fault. Ultimately it doesn't matter whether it's an algorithm. The point is that at this scale, moderation mistakes will be made. Doesn't matter if it's humans or ML or what have you. People rush to condemn the service and the people who make it as a result of these very, very seldomly occurring mistakes, but there is no system that exists that would allow perfect moderation at this scale. Your work comparison just isn't valid because there is no employer with a number of employees within several orders of magnitude of the number of videos on YouTube.
bsder 6y ago
> Those aren't great, but if you ask people whether they want to pay $10/month for YouTube so human moderators can stop this from happening or get it for free and have the .0001% chance that they get banned purely by accident, they'll take the latter. At this point, I view YouTube like I viewed bars that allowed smoking--it was sufficiently popular that nobody could compete against it even though it was harmful. So, we needed legislation to move us to a different local minimum. And, I find this very painful because I firmly believe that smoking bans have killed live music. But I also understand that nobody was ever going to do the right thing while doing the bad one was so profitable.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > I firmly believe that smoking bans have killed live music What's the connection?
  - gretch 6y ago
    Is an astoundingly extreme claim. First we have to accept the premise that live music is “dead”. Second it’s due to some orthogonal factor like a smoking ban as opposed to recorded music becoming way more accessible through technology. It’s an extreme claim with very little rigor.
    - bsder 6y ago
      > First we have to accept the premise that live music is “dead”. By almost all measures, it is. Number of artists, average age of artists, revenue, number of customers, etc. > as opposed to recorded music becoming way more accessible through technology. Except that by most measures the general public consumes VASTLY less music than they used to, so it isn't accessibility driving it. Now, you could suggest that it's because of a bunch of changes: video games, social media, etc. That would at least be plausible.
      - simiones 6y ago
        > Except that by most measures the general public consumes VASTLY less music than they used to, so it isn't accessibility driving it. Compared to when? 1800? 1970? 2010?
yellowapple 6y ago
> You hear about things like this because they're so unusual I feel like it's the exact opposite: we're hearing about them because these are the ones that slipped into public awareness. The inadequacy of automated moderation without any real semblance of human oversight has been rampant and frequent for about as long as the concept has existed.
xxs 6y ago
>People forget that they get these free services for free This would be true if youtube/google created the content as well. Youtube essentially gets the content "for free"... and then decides what to do with.
jklein11 6y ago
Youtube brought in 15 billion dollars in revenue last year. It is probably most important to the customers of youtube (the ad buyers) that their ads aren't shown on controversial videos. Also, I'd be really interested to know how much the Youtube team payed to build this classifier and how that compares to paying human moderators.

0_gravitas 6y ago

The service is not free.

rmrfrmrf 6y ago

Just because the user doesn't need to pay up-front doesn't mean the service operates at a loss (YouTube pulled in $15 billion in 2019, according to a quick search). Furthermore, YouTube Premium is a paid offering. IMO Alphabet just uses YouTube as a playground for its ML experiments because it can moreso than because it needs to for viability.

abnry 6y ago

A YouTuber is a business partner. One that YouTube treats poorly.

ivanhoe 6y ago

Not entirely true. First the platform is free, but also is the content that people provide and without it Youtube wouldn't make sense - so it's not a free service, it's a partnership. Second, for many people YouTube is the primary source of income, and I'm sure there would be plenty of content authors who'd be glad to pay a service with human moderators rather than bots - GIVEN THAT they get to keep access to the same traffic that YouTube provides. That's the key thing, you can't just go somewhere else when all the users are on a few popular platforms. If it's not for that, many high-profile authors who get their videos demonetized on stupidities would have left YouTube long time ago - but they can't, big players keep them in a checkmate position due to the form of monopoly on viewers that they have. And that means you can't just say "If you don't like it, leave, it's a free service", because it's not that simple, as leaving in reality means "give up on your business", and most of people just can't afford that. Youtube has them cornered and thus needs to be careful, since it's not a game, it affects people's lives. For many accidental blocking of channel can mean they'll be living in their cars until the Gods of Google show mercy and fix the error.... and if they do it, since sometimes you don't even get a meaningful reply on what happened, just a template message.

nautilus12 6y ago
You just described a monopoly
- pjanoman 6y ago
  What does youtube do that is monopolistic? Just because all users congregate onto one site doesn't mean that Youtube needs to be broken apart.
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    I don't think Youtube necessarily needs to be broken apart, but they are a natural monopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch. Think of it in terms of paying users: how much would you have to pay someone to switch from Youtube to your site? Multiply the average by the number of users, and that's the advantage Youtube has over competitors.
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      YouTube doesn't really fit the definition of a natural monopoly, particularly because there's nothing fundamentally stopping other services from popping up. YouTube's status as an effective monopoly doesn't come from some sort of scarcity of the means of production. > The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch. Only if we're assuming that users and uploaders will only ever use exactly one service at any given time. No reason why that needs to be the case; nothing stopping people from uploading to YouTube and Vimeo and Twitch and DailyMotion and PornHub and LBRY and PeerTube and whatever other platforms, and nothing stopping people from viewing from those platforms, either.
      - sillysaurusx 6y ago
        Then where is the YouTube competitor? The closest seems to be odysee (https://odysee.com/ https://odysee.com/) where you're lucky to break a few hundred views. Suppose YouTube disappeared tomorrow. Where would everyone go? Probably odysee. So why don't they go there now? That's why Youtube is a natural monopoly.

serf 6y ago

> ...that is because ML tools are able to cheaply do a really hard job of moderating I mean , YouTube is huge, but we had moderation-at-scale before ML was a popular phrase to bandy around. 'ML' and 'Algorithms' are just convenient non-human bogeyman that any corporation can pin all their woes on without batting an eye right now -- a convenient explanation tool for when things go wrong. I am going to take a bold stance with this next statement: An algorithm cannot be at fault -- it is always the fault of those that implement such algorithms. YouTube and their community is huge -- YouTube has revenue fifteen times greater than Yahoo. 'Too big to X' should not be a tolerable excuse from any industry -- especially so since YouTube/Google has been pushing the idea for years that being a YTer is an actual profession. Imagine for a moment coming into work and being told that you're fired because an internal corporate policy checker decided that something you did in your past work history was worth of termination; and then 24 hours later being told to continue coming into work because a mistake had been made, but with no further explanation. This kind of 'workplace' would be intolerable in any real 'work environment'. Just more evidence that YTers are not really treated like any other partner or employee anywhere else in the world -- and that they should probably curtail that language if they want expectations to match the reality that their 'employees' experience. >People forget that they get these free services for free, YouTube is not a free service. This fallacy needs to go.

xmprt 6y ago
> YouTube is not a free service. This fallacy needs to go. To anyone still not convinced, YouTube takes 45% of all ad revenue generated on videos that YouTube had no part in creating.
awillen 6y ago
Okay, fine, so an algorithm can't be at fault. Ultimately it doesn't matter whether it's an algorithm. The point is that at this scale, moderation mistakes will be made. Doesn't matter if it's humans or ML or what have you. People rush to condemn the service and the people who make it as a result of these very, very seldomly occurring mistakes, but there is no system that exists that would allow perfect moderation at this scale. Your work comparison just isn't valid because there is no employer with a number of employees within several orders of magnitude of the number of videos on YouTube.

bsder 6y ago

> Those aren't great, but if you ask people whether they want to pay $10/month for YouTube so human moderators can stop this from happening or get it for free and have the .0001% chance that they get banned purely by accident, they'll take the latter. At this point, I view YouTube like I viewed bars that allowed smoking--it was sufficiently popular that nobody could compete against it even though it was harmful. So, we needed legislation to move us to a different local minimum. And, I find this very painful because I firmly believe that smoking bans have killed live music. But I also understand that nobody was ever going to do the right thing while doing the bad one was so profitable.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> I firmly believe that smoking bans have killed live music What's the connection?
- gretch 6y ago
  Is an astoundingly extreme claim. First we have to accept the premise that live music is “dead”. Second it’s due to some orthogonal factor like a smoking ban as opposed to recorded music becoming way more accessible through technology. It’s an extreme claim with very little rigor.
  - bsder 6y ago
    > First we have to accept the premise that live music is “dead”. By almost all measures, it is. Number of artists, average age of artists, revenue, number of customers, etc. > as opposed to recorded music becoming way more accessible through technology. Except that by most measures the general public consumes VASTLY less music than they used to, so it isn't accessibility driving it. Now, you could suggest that it's because of a bunch of changes: video games, social media, etc. That would at least be plausible.
    - simiones 6y ago
      > Except that by most measures the general public consumes VASTLY less music than they used to, so it isn't accessibility driving it. Compared to when? 1800? 1970? 2010?

yellowapple 6y ago

> You hear about things like this because they're so unusual I feel like it's the exact opposite: we're hearing about them because these are the ones that slipped into public awareness. The inadequacy of automated moderation without any real semblance of human oversight has been rampant and frequent for about as long as the concept has existed.

xxs 6y ago

>People forget that they get these free services for free This would be true if youtube/google created the content as well. Youtube essentially gets the content "for free"... and then decides what to do with.

jklein11 6y ago

Youtube brought in 15 billion dollars in revenue last year. It is probably most important to the customers of youtube (the ad buyers) that their ads aren't shown on controversial videos. Also, I'd be really interested to know how much the Youtube team payed to build this classifier and how that compares to paying human moderators.