12 ms·

The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be

by b3kart 6y ago

The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? Would that work with the current society's attention span? Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of human moderators and/or a drastically reduced scale as a result? I don't know, but I have my doubts. Yes, moderation/suspensions can be a pain, and pointing out embarrassing mistakes is important to add pressure on Google to put more resources into it. At the same time, YouTube is full of great content and content creators. Anyone can upload a video and make it viewable by billions, instantly. I think we shouldn't forget how amazing this actually is.

izacus 6y ago
What if... instead of YouTube you'd have several intereset based sites which could actually handle their moderation and workload instead of being a giant uncaring behemoth?
- b3kart 6y ago
  Isn't that basically how reddit operates? And last I heard they have their native video hosting as well. Sounds like this could work, but doesn't quite at the moment. Is YouTube handling content discovery better? Network effects maybe?
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Reddit is interest-based but gets free labor from most subreddit moderators that remove bad content for them. Reddit is also much less lucrative of a content platform given you have limited ways to make money (usually limited to linking to your patreon), so the content is constrained to whatever people do with no expectation of money.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Who pays for the moderators? You still need a lot of manpower if you don't want algorithms, regardless of whether you have one Youtube or a thousand SpecialInterestTube.
  - foepys 6y ago
    Tech is very special in a way where they can get away with claiming that quite a lot is not possible at their scale. Imagine this for other industries. "We cannot do quality control before sending products out. We make too much stuff." "We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people." "Cleaning the entire building is not possible. It's too much space."
    - b3kart 6y ago
      All the examples you provide have to do with tangible, physical things. Tech is in some sense special because we're dealing with intangibles. It costs a bad actor next to nothing to upload the same video with harmful content to YouTube a thousand times, a million times even. And YouTube has to deal with all of this. That's why they still use physical ballots in most elections: as soon as you're dealing with physical things the costs for a bad actor to do bad things at scale balloon up.
      - SamoyedFurFluff 6y ago
        But a bad actor can only do so much if manual reviews are involved. If they’re a completely new account because their previous accounts have been banned, accessing on a new device because their previous Alphabet-surveilled fingerprint had been banned, or on a VPN because their IP has been banned, YouTube could just implement manual review which would slow such a bad actor down. And if the intent is to clog up the manual review process with whatever copies of a single illegal video Alphabet we already have technology that is used to automatically identify specific videos or images and remove them, usually for purposes of preventing the spread of illegal depictions of children.
        5y ago
- criley2 6y ago
  >What if... instead of YouTube you'd have several intereset based sites which could actually handle their moderation and workload instead of being a giant uncaring behemoth? What if... the average viewer was willing to pay for video content instead of requiring a free, unprofitable service run as a "Free add-on" to an Ad Empire? Youtube may finally be profitable in the past few years but the first 90% of its existence, the entire rise to power, it was unprofitable and run at a loss. There aren't other major providers because no one else wants to lose that much money
  - JoBrad 6y ago
    That will end up just like paywalls on news sites. It’s the best way forward (with tweaks), but ultimately will fail unless everyone participates. Services like Brilliant and others are attempting what you’re suggesting, though.
  - b3kart 6y ago
    > What if... the average viewer was willing to pay for video content That would solve all of our problems, wouldn't it? Too bad there's likely always going to be someone willing to offer the same service for free + ads and/or selling users data. Unless people start valuing their privacy/data much more than they do at the moment (or regulation comes in), it's just wishful thinking.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      It would solve a couple problems. I don't see how it would solve this problem.
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    Have you forgotten abour Netflix and the innumerable streaming services out there as every studio and their dog's mother wants to claim 100% of the pie? The money isn't an issue - it is a freudian slip that either you want it to be like cable or are blindly repeating the words of someone who does. If you don't like youtube's free service you can get your money back.
- JohnWhigham 6y ago
  That may have worked in the pre-iPhone Internet, where it took effort to become a part of communities, and everyone implicitly understood that. Now, it's a rock vs. a hard place: the masses want centralized platforms, but those centralized platforms are proving cancerous to society.
  - api 6y ago
    The masses don’t want centralized platforms or decentralized platforms. The masses don’t care how things work. What the masses want is an easy to use, fast platform. Centralized systems have been the best at providing that because they are easier to engineer and because there is an economic model via ads and surveillance.
- rapnie 5y ago
  You mean, like the open standards-based Fediverse, where there are also no ads and algoritmic feeds optimizing for engagement?
- amelius 5y ago
  What if... people could make their own websites and host their own videos, and people could link to each other's content?
SamoyedFurFluff 6y ago
I’d be shocked if the best and the brightest that Alphabet can buy can’t figure out a reputation system, manually-reviewed with AI assistance, or some other way to approve content in a convenient manner. Don’t forget also that Alphabet is swimming in money. They can certainly afford the manpower to make it relatively seamless for the user. And I really doubt users can’t be trained to associate a few hours’ wait of a completely new, reputationless user, or a user who is using an unknown device or VPN, with a better quality of site experience because the videos are screened.
- water8 5y ago
  How about you don't believe everything you read on the internet. Even 5 star people are wrong too.
- MonsterBurger 5y ago
  this! they could have a page entirely of "reported videos" by person or AI and the severity would rank how high on this page the content is. Things like timestamp of when in the video was reported might help for scanning "content" e.g. "50 people reported this 20 minute video in the 3-5 minute mark" or similar average.
kodablah 6y ago
I think the argument is framed as wanting a human during take down dispute, not pre-approval. There's no need to treat this as an absolute. Why are human contact and reasonable expediency considered mutually exclusive? There is a lot of room in the middle. Can allow human dispute resolution for non-free accounts (i.e. paid or earning). Can limit upload frequency site wide while dispute/abuse queues are backed up (knowing YouTube would be incentivized to prevent backup). Can have non-profit reviewer company that charge very minimal amounts for human review. Etc. Let's be clear, the lack of humans anywhere in the pipeline for uploaders is because they don't have to, not because it is impossible. Having said that, I really hope we do not see government intervention here.
- b3kart 6y ago
  Agree wholeheartedly: there's definitely a spectrum between what Google are doing atm and full human moderation. I am a strong believer in using AI to augment humans, not replace them. Nudging Google towards putting more humans in the pipeline is what I am hoping posts like this are achieving.
  - prox 5y ago
    When was the last time Google listened to the public? In spirit, not because there was a backlash? It’s a techno conglomerate with no human face. Google was cool and interesting in 00’s, but nowadays all they create is fodder for those sweet ad dollars.
- thu2111 5y ago
  What's with the assumption here that there aren't humans involved in this decision? The linked post literally quotes Google saying: "Hi Sun Knudsen, Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our harmful and dangerous policy." Google has always had humans in the loop. Not for every decision but certainly the more impactful ones that affect user generated content. When I worked there, there were even humans reviewing requests for account un-suspensions (yes, really! they didn't do a great job though, needless to say). Also, it's quite hard to understand what sort of algorithm could result in this sort of suspension. What training data would give it hundreds of thousands of examples of infosec discussions labelled as harmful? But it's very easy to see how a large army of low paid humans given vague advice like "don't allow harmful or dangerous content" could decide that linking to hacking information is harmful. The problem here is not AI. The problem here is Google allowing vague and low quality thinking amongst the ranks of its management, who have decided to give in to political activists who are determined to describe anything they're ideologically opposed to as "harmful", "dangerous", "unsafe" etc. When management give in to those radicals and tell their human and AI moderators to suspend "harmful" content, they inevitably end up capturing all kinds of stuff that isn't political in nature, simply due to the doublespeak nature of the original rules.
ttt0 6y ago
> The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? Or they could just stop doing that and go back to how it used to be. Let people upload videos and review them only after it was flagged. Novel idea, I know.
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  The media companies made sure that’ll never happen again :/ That’s how we got ContentID: to prevent music and video piracy.
  - feanaro 5y ago
    Why is it a foregone conclusion that we cannot unmake this?
  - syshum 5y ago
    That is why we need Copyright reform to take the teeth out of media companies. Return copyright in the US back to the original constitutional limits
    - kingsuper20 5y ago
      Never'll happen. “Congress shall have power… to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” As I read it, the law should be formed to maximize progress, not to maximize value of an idea. But, a large amorphous group of citizens will never overcome a small, highly-concentrated self interested group. I doubt you'll ever see the copyright-opening version of the NRA or SPCA.
      - syshum 5y ago
        Well the google case put a huge dent in the prevailing idea that Maximum value / profit is the constitutional purpose. The court clearly held that profitability alone should not be a factor.
tw04 6y ago
>The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? Would that work with the current society's attention span? Why should they have to? Youtube makes BILLIONS of dollars, and they can afford to employs 10s of thousands of people to be human moderators, they just don't want to because that would eat into profits. If the video has X views or the publisher has X followers, it should be reviewed within hours by a real human. >Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of human moderators and/or a drastically reduced scale as a result? Nobody is saying there should be 0 AI moderation, just that there should be a human that reviews a clip if AI flags it and the end-user clicks a button saying "this shouldn't have been flagged". The entire premise of google is kind of broken and both technical and non-technical people feel that way from what I've heard. The fact it's nearly impossible to get to a real human on anything, and if you do happen to get to a real human, half the time they aren't even empowered to undo whatever decision their AI has made... it's just not a good way to do business. There's a balance to technology and human interaction and Google (again IMO) has gone too far in the technology direction. Heck, humanity as a whole might need to find someplace in the middle if the studies about the current generation of 20-somethings struggling with stunted social interactions due to social media is to be believed.
insert_coin 5y ago
Apple reviews each app update manually. Not only each app, but each and every one of its updates too.
harpiaharpyja 5y ago
I think it would be great. There would be huge incentives to find other solutions, and a lot of what goes into YouTube would find other outlets. Especially since we've already tasted what's possible. It could be the end of the YouTube monopoly.
bluecalm 5y ago
Maybe we could have that if the uploader is responsible, not the platform. Want to upload fast and not having your content taken down - deal with the legal issues yourself. Want anonymous uploading and/or some protection - deal with automatic systems as employing enough people is just too expensive.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  Maybe we could have that if the uploader is responsible, not the platform. Maybe we could have the uploader host their own content, and do away with hosting platforms and their gatekeeping altogether? I can see little reason today that well-established technologies and individual hosting arrangements couldn't offer similar value to whatever YouTube or some other centralised hosting service offers. We are talking about the World Wide Web. Linking to other people's content is literally the central feature of the real platform here. For a long time, we did just fine with community-operated facilities and everyone linking to other sources of interesting content to help discoverability. We still do, really, but now the links and other community engagement tend to be locked up in places like different YouTube tabs for each channel, not the sidebar of someone's personal website. Of course, these days we also have entire sites (HN among them) built around sharing links to content that might be interesting to like-minded people. So I don't buy the usual arguments about centralised content hosting being the only way interesting content can gain exposure. Numerous individual content creators make demos or livestream games or present tutorials with decent-to-excellent presentation values. They often use specialist software to do it. I therefore don't buy arguments about the technical difficulty of self-hosting either. There could be hosting packages offered by ISPs or other hosting services on a common carrier basis if individuals didn't want to set up all the infrastructure themselves, and those who were good/popular enough to make it more of a regular income would still have the ability to do so but now on their own terms. Even at today's prices, you could serve tens of thousands of videos directly for less than a lot of people are paying for their ISP or mobile/cell phone plan each month. And of course, we know lots about how to efficiently serve interesting content via P2P networks that could be a big amplifier for popular content producers who were happy to share without wanting to monetise or otherwise collect large numbers of viewers on their own site for some reason. The available capacity and prices are surely only going to improve as the technology improves. So that's cost taken care of in most or all cases too. So, if individuals hosting their own content is technically and economically feasible, and if individual creators and community groups facilitating content discovery is a viable culture along with all the other interactions they tend to have anyway, I struggle to see why the likes of YouTube are so valuable or irreplaceable in our society today. Obviously if YT disappeared overnight there would be a gap tomorrow, but we've been adapting and filling gaps and finding better ways to do things on the Internet since some time in the last millennium, and I see no reason to think we wouldn't do so again.
bg24 5y ago
> Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of human moderators and/or a drastically reduced scale as a result? I am curious about the cost of a process that establishes human reviews for conflict scenarios, i.e. situations like this. Is that still the planet-scale numbers?
ipaddr 5y ago
Anyone can upload a video to their website and make it viewable to all. The hosting is not the issue. You could use dropbox, box, etc for easy video hosting and sharing. It's the discovery piece that cannot be replicated. If hosting happened outside moderation can move to automatic with a user/ml flag with manual approve process that follows.
superjan 5y ago
One problem is that there is a single process for all. Certain types of journalism and research should be able to ask for pre-approval of videos without risking a ban. The AI can still deal with the bulk of those requests.
skybrian 5y ago
There are often problems with Reddit moderators, but at least you know who they are (sort of) and can talk to them. It seems like this there is a better relationship between moderators and a community when the moderators are part of the community, versus being an anonymous horde of interchangeable personnel. (And of course there is Hacker News for another example, combining some automatic stuff with manual control.) To get this at scale, though, it seems like you need a larger social network to be divided into many smaller ones in some logical way that’s understood by by everyone involved. It seems like the inherent hierarchy (authors versus subscribers) and subdivision of Substack is likely to work out well for them.
WhompingWindows 5y ago
Why not allow the majority of YTers with a legit posting history to post videos as they wish? You wouldn't have to wait days or weeks for these folks, they are trustworthy already. The vast majority of channels I care about wouldn't need moderation, they're hobbyists like woodworkers, musicians, etc. with dozens of posts already.
coliveira 5y ago
Your question is: would a company based on youtube be hugely profitable without AI? Answer: probably not, but who cares other than the shareholders of Alphabet? I don't really think I should base my decisions about software based on how much the owners of the company are making.
deleted 5y ago
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ravenstine 5y ago
I'd say it's infeasible without AI moderation based on their revenue model. They will never make enough money off intellectual content in order to pay for enough humans to moderate their system. Content for the lowest common denominator is not only easy as hell for an AI to moderate but it makes orders of magnitude more revenue than anything about technology, science, philosophy, etc. The answer is to simply not rely on YouTube for anything besides lifestyle and self-help vlogs, marketing, instructions on how to put together your IKEA bookshelf, and of course cat videos. There are plenty of other video hosting sites that won't ruin your day as a creator because you accidentally used the word "doodie" or because the AI thinks your video on writing "hello world" in Rust is teaching people to hack computers.
throwaway_kufu 5y ago
> Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? Well presumably Google being one of the worlds wealthiest corporations could hire and pay people a living wage to match the demand of users looking to upload videos to YouTube. It is in YouTube’s interest as it only exists and makes money on this very user generated content. Yeah it’s great YouTube exists and can market to content creators about its market capture audience, but maybe it would be a better system without the middleman as anyone can upload a video anywhere on the internet making it instantly viewable by billions
- deleted 5y ago
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doublejay1999 5y ago
The answers to all your questions is no, which is precisely the point the author is trying to make. If we made the case for operating "at human scale" Youtube would be amongst first casualties. to your last point : > Anyone can upload a video and make it viewable by billions, instantly. I think we shouldn't forget how amazing this actually is. By the same reasoning, COVID-19 is similarly amazing. Opinions move on : Youtube is 15 years old now. It's a practical monopoly, being the worlds 2nd most visited website. I wont deny it's utility - but it's a gross centralisation who's modus operandi present significant questions - chiefly, Is it right that it has for years circumvented nearly all regulation applied to other media, and should it remains largely unaccountable to any elected power ? So the challenge it seems is thus : how do preserve the good things that self published video content has done for us, but prevent or limit the consequences and attendant injustice caused by a service so infeasibly large. it's impossible to administer ?
- ehsankia 5y ago
  Do you have reason to believe it can be done better than how Youtube does it? Again, there are two approach: 1. Limit who can post content You'll end up with only the powerful being able to push content, you're taking the voice away from the masses. 2. Try to gradually improve content moderation and live with the rare false-positives or false-negatives. This is the current approach, and while not perfect, I personally much prefer it to the former.
  - doublejay1999 5y ago
    I dont think it could be done better much better than youtube aat the scale youtube does it, but i would insist they need to be plugged in to existing national media regulators and bound by the same standards- flawed as they are. > You'll end up with only the powerful being able to push content, you're taking the voice away from the masses. i think the algorithms already do that. the channels with the most followers have the loudest voice >. Try to gradually improve content moderation and live with the rare false-positives or false-negatives. its better than it was, and will likely improve but it's still drowing in shills and scammers. i think this would be rooted out by more community centric model. exactly how that looks, i dont know - but i think self policing would play a part.
libraryatnight 5y ago
> The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? People will eventually be fine with however the system works. If that's how it works, they assume that's how it has to be. Most of users have no idea how this stuff functions. We're in it now because the expectation has been set for instant uploads, so there would be outrage, but eventually it becomes "the way things are." As an example see any change users hate - users complain, TPTB either concede completely (rare) and revert, make minor concessions but change little, or apologize for the inconvenience and do nothing. Eventually nobody cares anymore and forgets they were angry. Most of this stuff barely matters. Frankly it might be good if my nephews had to wait longer between any number of irritating youtube videos they binge and parrot.
jjk166 5y ago
This line of thinking leads to non-solutions. There are potentially many options beyond the dichotomy of crude AI automation and an army of human employees. First, I think most of us would just like a relatively transparent method of escalating issues that will eventually get to a qualified human. Put some time delays and recaptchas to stop spammers from abusing it but if someone is willing to put in the time and effort to fight for a video, they should get a clear response as to why it was taken down and who made that determination. Then there is the immense potential for crowdsourcing moderation. You can both get data by polling users (again with basic checks to prevent exploits) and promote certain users to a moderator role such that they can keep the community in which they participate reasonable. Especially for disinformation, how hard would it be to find volunteers to tell other people they're wrong on the internet? And finally, if erroneous moderation has the potential to cause many problems, it is worth re-evaluating how much is actually necessary. For legal reasons there is some content that you really need an AI to quickly scan for, such as child porn, but in a lot of cases the harm in leaving up a video is insignificant. There are a lot of sites on a similar scale to youtube that have substantially better (even if not necessarily perfect) content moderation despite working with substantially lower resources. If they can do it, so can Google.

by b3kart 6y ago

izacus 6y ago

What if... instead of YouTube you'd have several intereset based sites which could actually handle their moderation and workload instead of being a giant uncaring behemoth?

b3kart 6y ago
Isn't that basically how reddit operates? And last I heard they have their native video hosting as well. Sounds like this could work, but doesn't quite at the moment. Is YouTube handling content discovery better? Network effects maybe?
- judge2020 5y ago
  Reddit is interest-based but gets free labor from most subreddit moderators that remove bad content for them. Reddit is also much less lucrative of a content platform given you have limited ways to make money (usually limited to linking to your patreon), so the content is constrained to whatever people do with no expectation of money.
adrianN 6y ago
Who pays for the moderators? You still need a lot of manpower if you don't want algorithms, regardless of whether you have one Youtube or a thousand SpecialInterestTube.
- foepys 6y ago
  Tech is very special in a way where they can get away with claiming that quite a lot is not possible at their scale. Imagine this for other industries. "We cannot do quality control before sending products out. We make too much stuff." "We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people." "Cleaning the entire building is not possible. It's too much space."
  - b3kart 6y ago
    All the examples you provide have to do with tangible, physical things. Tech is in some sense special because we're dealing with intangibles. It costs a bad actor next to nothing to upload the same video with harmful content to YouTube a thousand times, a million times even. And YouTube has to deal with all of this. That's why they still use physical ballots in most elections: as soon as you're dealing with physical things the costs for a bad actor to do bad things at scale balloon up.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 6y ago
      But a bad actor can only do so much if manual reviews are involved. If they’re a completely new account because their previous accounts have been banned, accessing on a new device because their previous Alphabet-surveilled fingerprint had been banned, or on a VPN because their IP has been banned, YouTube could just implement manual review which would slow such a bad actor down. And if the intent is to clog up the manual review process with whatever copies of a single illegal video Alphabet we already have technology that is used to automatically identify specific videos or images and remove them, usually for purposes of preventing the spread of illegal depictions of children.
      - 5y ago
criley2 6y ago
>What if... instead of YouTube you'd have several intereset based sites which could actually handle their moderation and workload instead of being a giant uncaring behemoth? What if... the average viewer was willing to pay for video content instead of requiring a free, unprofitable service run as a "Free add-on" to an Ad Empire? Youtube may finally be profitable in the past few years but the first 90% of its existence, the entire rise to power, it was unprofitable and run at a loss. There aren't other major providers because no one else wants to lose that much money
- JoBrad 6y ago
  That will end up just like paywalls on news sites. It’s the best way forward (with tweaks), but ultimately will fail unless everyone participates. Services like Brilliant and others are attempting what you’re suggesting, though.
- b3kart 6y ago
  > What if... the average viewer was willing to pay for video content That would solve all of our problems, wouldn't it? Too bad there's likely always going to be someone willing to offer the same service for free + ads and/or selling users data. Unless people start valuing their privacy/data much more than they do at the moment (or regulation comes in), it's just wishful thinking.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    It would solve a couple problems. I don't see how it would solve this problem.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  Have you forgotten abour Netflix and the innumerable streaming services out there as every studio and their dog's mother wants to claim 100% of the pie? The money isn't an issue - it is a freudian slip that either you want it to be like cable or are blindly repeating the words of someone who does. If you don't like youtube's free service you can get your money back.
JohnWhigham 6y ago
That may have worked in the pre-iPhone Internet, where it took effort to become a part of communities, and everyone implicitly understood that. Now, it's a rock vs. a hard place: the masses want centralized platforms, but those centralized platforms are proving cancerous to society.
- api 6y ago
  The masses don’t want centralized platforms or decentralized platforms. The masses don’t care how things work. What the masses want is an easy to use, fast platform. Centralized systems have been the best at providing that because they are easier to engineer and because there is an economic model via ads and surveillance.
rapnie 5y ago
You mean, like the open standards-based Fediverse, where there are also no ads and algoritmic feeds optimizing for engagement?
amelius 5y ago
What if... people could make their own websites and host their own videos, and people could link to each other's content?

SamoyedFurFluff 6y ago

I’d be shocked if the best and the brightest that Alphabet can buy can’t figure out a reputation system, manually-reviewed with AI assistance, or some other way to approve content in a convenient manner. Don’t forget also that Alphabet is swimming in money. They can certainly afford the manpower to make it relatively seamless for the user. And I really doubt users can’t be trained to associate a few hours’ wait of a completely new, reputationless user, or a user who is using an unknown device or VPN, with a better quality of site experience because the videos are screened.

water8 5y ago
How about you don't believe everything you read on the internet. Even 5 star people are wrong too.
MonsterBurger 5y ago
this! they could have a page entirely of "reported videos" by person or AI and the severity would rank how high on this page the content is. Things like timestamp of when in the video was reported might help for scanning "content" e.g. "50 people reported this 20 minute video in the 3-5 minute mark" or similar average.

kodablah 6y ago

I think the argument is framed as wanting a human during take down dispute, not pre-approval. There's no need to treat this as an absolute. Why are human contact and reasonable expediency considered mutually exclusive? There is a lot of room in the middle. Can allow human dispute resolution for non-free accounts (i.e. paid or earning). Can limit upload frequency site wide while dispute/abuse queues are backed up (knowing YouTube would be incentivized to prevent backup). Can have non-profit reviewer company that charge very minimal amounts for human review. Etc. Let's be clear, the lack of humans anywhere in the pipeline for uploaders is because they don't have to, not because it is impossible. Having said that, I really hope we do not see government intervention here.

b3kart 6y ago
Agree wholeheartedly: there's definitely a spectrum between what Google are doing atm and full human moderation. I am a strong believer in using AI to augment humans, not replace them. Nudging Google towards putting more humans in the pipeline is what I am hoping posts like this are achieving.
- prox 5y ago
  When was the last time Google listened to the public? In spirit, not because there was a backlash? It’s a techno conglomerate with no human face. Google was cool and interesting in 00’s, but nowadays all they create is fodder for those sweet ad dollars.
thu2111 5y ago
What's with the assumption here that there aren't humans involved in this decision? The linked post literally quotes Google saying: "Hi Sun Knudsen, Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our harmful and dangerous policy." Google has always had humans in the loop. Not for every decision but certainly the more impactful ones that affect user generated content. When I worked there, there were even humans reviewing requests for account un-suspensions (yes, really! they didn't do a great job though, needless to say). Also, it's quite hard to understand what sort of algorithm could result in this sort of suspension. What training data would give it hundreds of thousands of examples of infosec discussions labelled as harmful? But it's very easy to see how a large army of low paid humans given vague advice like "don't allow harmful or dangerous content" could decide that linking to hacking information is harmful. The problem here is not AI. The problem here is Google allowing vague and low quality thinking amongst the ranks of its management, who have decided to give in to political activists who are determined to describe anything they're ideologically opposed to as "harmful", "dangerous", "unsafe" etc. When management give in to those radicals and tell their human and AI moderators to suspend "harmful" content, they inevitably end up capturing all kinds of stuff that isn't political in nature, simply due to the doublespeak nature of the original rules.

ttt0 6y ago

> The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? Or they could just stop doing that and go back to how it used to be. Let people upload videos and review them only after it was flagged. Novel idea, I know.

colejohnson66 5y ago
The media companies made sure that’ll never happen again :/ That’s how we got ContentID: to prevent music and video piracy.
- feanaro 5y ago
  Why is it a foregone conclusion that we cannot unmake this?
- syshum 5y ago
  That is why we need Copyright reform to take the teeth out of media companies. Return copyright in the US back to the original constitutional limits
  - kingsuper20 5y ago
    Never'll happen. “Congress shall have power… to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” As I read it, the law should be formed to maximize progress, not to maximize value of an idea. But, a large amorphous group of citizens will never overcome a small, highly-concentrated self interested group. I doubt you'll ever see the copyright-opening version of the NRA or SPCA.
    - syshum 5y ago
      Well the google case put a huge dent in the prevailing idea that Maximum value / profit is the constitutional purpose. The court clearly held that profitability alone should not be a factor.

tw04 6y ago

>The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? Would that work with the current society's attention span? Why should they have to? Youtube makes BILLIONS of dollars, and they can afford to employs 10s of thousands of people to be human moderators, they just don't want to because that would eat into profits. If the video has X views or the publisher has X followers, it should be reviewed within hours by a real human. >Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of human moderators and/or a drastically reduced scale as a result? Nobody is saying there should be 0 AI moderation, just that there should be a human that reviews a clip if AI flags it and the end-user clicks a button saying "this shouldn't have been flagged". The entire premise of google is kind of broken and both technical and non-technical people feel that way from what I've heard. The fact it's nearly impossible to get to a real human on anything, and if you do happen to get to a real human, half the time they aren't even empowered to undo whatever decision their AI has made... it's just not a good way to do business. There's a balance to technology and human interaction and Google (again IMO) has gone too far in the technology direction. Heck, humanity as a whole might need to find someplace in the middle if the studies about the current generation of 20-somethings struggling with stunted social interactions due to social media is to be believed.

insert_coin 5y ago

Apple reviews each app update manually. Not only each app, but each and every one of its updates too.

harpiaharpyja 5y ago

I think it would be great. There would be huge incentives to find other solutions, and a lot of what goes into YouTube would find other outlets. Especially since we've already tasted what's possible. It could be the end of the YouTube monopoly.

bluecalm 5y ago

Maybe we could have that if the uploader is responsible, not the platform. Want to upload fast and not having your content taken down - deal with the legal issues yourself. Want anonymous uploading and/or some protection - deal with automatic systems as employing enough people is just too expensive.

Silhouette 5y ago
Maybe we could have that if the uploader is responsible, not the platform. Maybe we could have the uploader host their own content, and do away with hosting platforms and their gatekeeping altogether? I can see little reason today that well-established technologies and individual hosting arrangements couldn't offer similar value to whatever YouTube or some other centralised hosting service offers. We are talking about the World Wide Web. Linking to other people's content is literally the central feature of the real platform here. For a long time, we did just fine with community-operated facilities and everyone linking to other sources of interesting content to help discoverability. We still do, really, but now the links and other community engagement tend to be locked up in places like different YouTube tabs for each channel, not the sidebar of someone's personal website. Of course, these days we also have entire sites (HN among them) built around sharing links to content that might be interesting to like-minded people. So I don't buy the usual arguments about centralised content hosting being the only way interesting content can gain exposure. Numerous individual content creators make demos or livestream games or present tutorials with decent-to-excellent presentation values. They often use specialist software to do it. I therefore don't buy arguments about the technical difficulty of self-hosting either. There could be hosting packages offered by ISPs or other hosting services on a common carrier basis if individuals didn't want to set up all the infrastructure themselves, and those who were good/popular enough to make it more of a regular income would still have the ability to do so but now on their own terms. Even at today's prices, you could serve tens of thousands of videos directly for less than a lot of people are paying for their ISP or mobile/cell phone plan each month. And of course, we know lots about how to efficiently serve interesting content via P2P networks that could be a big amplifier for popular content producers who were happy to share without wanting to monetise or otherwise collect large numbers of viewers on their own site for some reason. The available capacity and prices are surely only going to improve as the technology improves. So that's cost taken care of in most or all cases too. So, if individuals hosting their own content is technically and economically feasible, and if individual creators and community groups facilitating content discovery is a viable culture along with all the other interactions they tend to have anyway, I struggle to see why the likes of YouTube are so valuable or irreplaceable in our society today. Obviously if YT disappeared overnight there would be a gap tomorrow, but we've been adapting and filling gaps and finding better ways to do things on the Internet since some time in the last millennium, and I see no reason to think we wouldn't do so again.

bg24 5y ago

> Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of human moderators and/or a drastically reduced scale as a result? I am curious about the cost of a process that establishes human reviews for conflict scenarios, i.e. situations like this. Is that still the planet-scale numbers?

ipaddr 5y ago

Anyone can upload a video to their website and make it viewable to all. The hosting is not the issue. You could use dropbox, box, etc for easy video hosting and sharing. It's the discovery piece that cannot be replicated. If hosting happened outside moderation can move to automatic with a user/ml flag with manual approve process that follows.

superjan 5y ago

One problem is that there is a single process for all. Certain types of journalism and research should be able to ask for pre-approval of videos without risking a ban. The AI can still deal with the bulk of those requests.

skybrian 5y ago

There are often problems with Reddit moderators, but at least you know who they are (sort of) and can talk to them. It seems like this there is a better relationship between moderators and a community when the moderators are part of the community, versus being an anonymous horde of interchangeable personnel. (And of course there is Hacker News for another example, combining some automatic stuff with manual control.) To get this at scale, though, it seems like you need a larger social network to be divided into many smaller ones in some logical way that’s understood by by everyone involved. It seems like the inherent hierarchy (authors versus subscribers) and subdivision of Substack is likely to work out well for them.

WhompingWindows 5y ago

Why not allow the majority of YTers with a legit posting history to post videos as they wish? You wouldn't have to wait days or weeks for these folks, they are trustworthy already. The vast majority of channels I care about wouldn't need moderation, they're hobbyists like woodworkers, musicians, etc. with dozens of posts already.

coliveira 5y ago

Your question is: would a company based on youtube be hugely profitable without AI? Answer: probably not, but who cares other than the shareholders of Alphabet? I don't really think I should base my decisions about software based on how much the owners of the company are making.

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ravenstine 5y ago

I'd say it's infeasible without AI moderation based on their revenue model. They will never make enough money off intellectual content in order to pay for enough humans to moderate their system. Content for the lowest common denominator is not only easy as hell for an AI to moderate but it makes orders of magnitude more revenue than anything about technology, science, philosophy, etc. The answer is to simply not rely on YouTube for anything besides lifestyle and self-help vlogs, marketing, instructions on how to put together your IKEA bookshelf, and of course cat videos. There are plenty of other video hosting sites that won't ruin your day as a creator because you accidentally used the word "doodie" or because the AI thinks your video on writing "hello world" in Rust is teaching people to hack computers.

throwaway_kufu 5y ago

> Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? Well presumably Google being one of the worlds wealthiest corporations could hire and pay people a living wage to match the demand of users looking to upload videos to YouTube. It is in YouTube’s interest as it only exists and makes money on this very user generated content. Yeah it’s great YouTube exists and can market to content creators about its market capture audience, but maybe it would be a better system without the middleman as anyone can upload a video anywhere on the internet making it instantly viewable by billions

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doublejay1999 5y ago

The answers to all your questions is no, which is precisely the point the author is trying to make. If we made the case for operating "at human scale" Youtube would be amongst first casualties. to your last point : > Anyone can upload a video and make it viewable by billions, instantly. I think we shouldn't forget how amazing this actually is. By the same reasoning, COVID-19 is similarly amazing. Opinions move on : Youtube is 15 years old now. It's a practical monopoly, being the worlds 2nd most visited website. I wont deny it's utility - but it's a gross centralisation who's modus operandi present significant questions - chiefly, Is it right that it has for years circumvented nearly all regulation applied to other media, and should it remains largely unaccountable to any elected power ? So the challenge it seems is thus : how do preserve the good things that self published video content has done for us, but prevent or limit the consequences and attendant injustice caused by a service so infeasibly large. it's impossible to administer ?

ehsankia 5y ago
Do you have reason to believe it can be done better than how Youtube does it? Again, there are two approach: 1. Limit who can post content You'll end up with only the powerful being able to push content, you're taking the voice away from the masses. 2. Try to gradually improve content moderation and live with the rare false-positives or false-negatives. This is the current approach, and while not perfect, I personally much prefer it to the former.
- doublejay1999 5y ago
  I dont think it could be done better much better than youtube aat the scale youtube does it, but i would insist they need to be plugged in to existing national media regulators and bound by the same standards- flawed as they are. > You'll end up with only the powerful being able to push content, you're taking the voice away from the masses. i think the algorithms already do that. the channels with the most followers have the loudest voice >. Try to gradually improve content moderation and live with the rare false-positives or false-negatives. its better than it was, and will likely improve but it's still drowing in shills and scammers. i think this would be rooted out by more community centric model. exactly how that looks, i dont know - but i think self policing would play a part.

libraryatnight 5y ago

> The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? People will eventually be fine with however the system works. If that's how it works, they assume that's how it has to be. Most of users have no idea how this stuff functions. We're in it now because the expectation has been set for instant uploads, so there would be outrage, but eventually it becomes "the way things are." As an example see any change users hate - users complain, TPTB either concede completely (rare) and revert, make minor concessions but change little, or apologize for the inconvenience and do nothing. Eventually nobody cares anymore and forgets they were angry. Most of this stuff barely matters. Frankly it might be good if my nephews had to wait longer between any number of irritating youtube videos they binge and parrot.

jjk166 5y ago

This line of thinking leads to non-solutions. There are potentially many options beyond the dichotomy of crude AI automation and an army of human employees. First, I think most of us would just like a relatively transparent method of escalating issues that will eventually get to a qualified human. Put some time delays and recaptchas to stop spammers from abusing it but if someone is willing to put in the time and effort to fight for a video, they should get a clear response as to why it was taken down and who made that determination. Then there is the immense potential for crowdsourcing moderation. You can both get data by polling users (again with basic checks to prevent exploits) and promote certain users to a moderator role such that they can keep the community in which they participate reasonable. Especially for disinformation, how hard would it be to find volunteers to tell other people they're wrong on the internet? And finally, if erroneous moderation has the potential to cause many problems, it is worth re-evaluating how much is actually necessary. For legal reasons there is some content that you really need an AI to quickly scan for, such as child porn, but in a lot of cases the harm in leaving up a video is insignificant. There are a lot of sites on a similar scale to youtube that have substantially better (even if not necessarily perfect) content moderation despite working with substantially lower resources. If they can do it, so can Google.