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[disclaimer] I work at Google, all opinions are my own. I don't deal with Youtube but have had exposure to moderation operations. It is not an easy task. Googl

[disclaimer] I work at Google, all opinions are my own. I don't deal with Youtube but have had exposure to moderation operations. It is not an easy task. Google already has more than 10k people working on this: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/expanding-our-work-against-abuse-of-our https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/expanding-our-work-agai... . If 100 people solved the issue, it would have been solved. You are incorrect about your assumptions in many respects. Let me list out a few: 1) There is a big difference between watching a 15 min video at 2X for fun vs watching 8 hours of videos a day while having to follow laid down policy with complexity. Videos are not taken down only for one reason and there is a lot of complexity involved with edge cases. Humans are not robots and this is not a task we are inherently good at. Give it a shot yourself for a day and see how easy it is. 2) Your overhead does not consider any additional complexity in terms of languages, specialty, regional expertise etc. This is not a simple problem either. Sure maybe you can hire 1000 reviewers in lets say Indonesia but you cannot find a native Kswahili speaker there. Its not cheap to setup an office for 2 people in Kenya. Scale this to the world which has 193 countries and 6,500 languages. 3) People dont work without any management overhead. You need frontline reviewers. Then you need a layer of experts above them. The you need managers to take care of the operations. The managers to manage those managers. Then recruiters to hire those people. Then HR to deal with their issues. 4) Turnover is a big deal. Very few people in the world can watch beheadings 40 hours a week. An even smaller proportion can handle child safety material. What happens when those people need to take time off? You need additional people. If you want a humane operation then you might have to get them to work only 2 hours a day. Here is some more reading if you are interested in understanding this from the moderators / reviewers view: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21021005/google-youtube-moderators-ptsd-accenture-violent-disturbing-content-interviews-video https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21021005/google-youtube-... It continues to amaze me how some of the smartest and technically savvy people on HN either do not recognize or refuse to admit how complicated a problem planet scale moderation is.

Sebb767 6y ago
> It continues to amaze me how some of the smartest and technically savvy people on HN either do not recognize or refuse to admit how complicated a problem planet scale moderation is. It's probably a variation of the trivial-core-problem [0]. When looked at roughly, it seems very easy; only when you start implementing it, you'll see all the edge cases appear. I made pretty similar points above to the ones you made - but on a quick napkin calculation, Retric's math checked out, to be fair. And when you're not in the business, missing the inherent complexity is easy. [0] See https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/
salawat 6y ago
Perhaps that's because not everyone believes planet scale moderstion is a task any one entity should be tasked with?
Retric 6y ago
Building systems is clearly a major effort which was specifically excluded from that estimate. However, while you’re right it’s complicated, I would point out my overall estimate was close to Google’s own. “Since we started using machine learning to flag violent and extremist content in June, the technology has reviewed and flagged content that would have taken 180,000 people working 40 hours a week to assess.” That said, I am surprised Google isn’t using machine translation for obscure languages. Props to them that’s going above and beyond in my personal opinion.
zelos 6y ago
I'm not saying it's not complicated, but complaints about expense and overheads for a company that makes something like $40 billion a year in profit ring a little hollow. That's roughly the size of the UK's defence budget.

Sebb767 6y ago

> It continues to amaze me how some of the smartest and technically savvy people on HN either do not recognize or refuse to admit how complicated a problem planet scale moderation is. It's probably a variation of the trivial-core-problem [0]. When looked at roughly, it seems very easy; only when you start implementing it, you'll see all the edge cases appear. I made pretty similar points above to the ones you made - but on a quick napkin calculation, Retric's math checked out, to be fair. And when you're not in the business, missing the inherent complexity is easy. [0] See https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/

salawat 6y ago

Perhaps that's because not everyone believes planet scale moderstion is a task any one entity should be tasked with?

Retric 6y ago

Building systems is clearly a major effort which was specifically excluded from that estimate. However, while you’re right it’s complicated, I would point out my overall estimate was close to Google’s own. “Since we started using machine learning to flag violent and extremist content in June, the technology has reviewed and flagged content that would have taken 180,000 people working 40 hours a week to assess.” That said, I am surprised Google isn’t using machine translation for obscure languages. Props to them that’s going above and beyond in my personal opinion.

zelos 6y ago

I'm not saying it's not complicated, but complaints about expense and overheads for a company that makes something like $40 billion a year in profit ring a little hollow. That's roughly the size of the UK's defence budget.