7 ms·

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 uncari

by 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 6y 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.
      - water8 6y ago
        If you change the MAC address on your cable modem you can get tons of different IPs. Same thing with cellular networks. With raspberryPis so cheap, fingerprints don't work that well for all devices.
        SamoyedFurFluff 6y ago
        There are relatively few people capable of doing this compared to the population of the world that uses YouTube, and there’s even fewer people who, even with capacity, will be doing this just to upload illegal content into YouTube. I think this sizes down the problem of manual review quite easily.
        water8 6y ago
  - da_chicken 6y ago
    Very much so. Tech companies have a way of confusing "this is difficult" with "this is impossible," or "this is impossible" with "this isn't free," or "this is impossible" with "we don't want to."
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      It is impossible is the polite way of telling you that your idea is incredibly illbconsidered and contrary to the actual purpose of the program and please fuck off and get cancer. Linus Torvalds was one of the few who operated under that style. Sadly for transparency and clarity it is the diplomatic ignore the elephant in the room which has become the standard. I blame all of the professional emotional manipulator sophist whiners who don't even try to understand reality. "Do it yourself then." is embedded in it as a message to fuck off because everyone knows they either cannot do it because they asked in the first place in those terms.
    - LegitShady 6y ago
      They are incentivized to have that confusion. So no surprise.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    There are few other industries where users expect to get everything for free.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    There's a massive difference between centralized production of physical goods vs user-generated digital assets. Scale itself becomes the challenge.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    And those things are paid for. It would be perfectly reasonable if you had to pay per minute for uploading video and people had to pay for a subscription to watch it. That's just not what is expected for a mass platform today.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      Vimeo has an “uploader pays” system (of sorts), and, while it prevents garbage on the platform, it stops creators from wanting to use it when YouTube is free.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        Yes. It's of course a perfectly valid (and widely-used) model to pay for hosting. But, by and large, only "serious" users who probably otherwise have a business model will do so. And there will inevitably be far less content on the platform. On the one hand, I think it's sort of unfortunate that so much of the Web has come to be about "free" access (though paying for access with attention and time) but that does come from the perspective of someone who would be able and happy to pay with money instead.
    - int_19h 6y ago
      It's expected because the expectations are set by the existing platforms. And the reason why Google specifically is actively promoting those expectations, is that it makes ads the only viable business model for content creators; and Google's primary source of income is their ad services, so it maintains their dominant market position.
  - BigGreenTurtle 6y ago
    "We cannot do quality control before sending products out. We make too much stuff." Ever buy strawberries? "We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people." Train conductors often check tickets after the train has started moving. "Cleaning the entire building is not possible. It's too much space." Climate change. Dirty streets.
  - anticensor 6y ago
    "We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people." This happens in some public transport operators already.
    - jobigoud 6y ago
      It's argued that in some cities public transport systems the price of the ticket doesn't cover the cost of its own infrastructure, the machines to buy them, the ones to validate them the salaries of the agents verifying, etc. It can be more cost effective to drop the concept of ticket and make it a free public service.
      - anticensor 6y ago
        I agree with all that, but some central governments such as Turkey go to great lengths to make public transport a paid service. The best public transport is the free one indeed.
- viraptor 6y ago
  I think it's much less work on SpecialInterestTube. On YouTube there's a huge amount of decisions and ideas the moderator has to take into account. The other one can filter a large amount of spam with "the first 5 seconds make it clear it's not SpecialInterest". For example comparing to HN, I can go on "New" and see "Places to Spray a Fragrance on for a Long Lasting Effect-Ajulu's Thoughts" - I know it's immediately flaggable, even if it could be a valid post on another website. (and require a full review there to check it doesn't break some specific rules)
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  Let people have the detestable YouTube TV for free as mods.
- tinco 6y ago
  Google had a revenue of $180B in 2020, and their EBITDA was $55B. I'm no accountant but that sounds like an absolutely insane profit margin. 8-12% would seem much more palatable, so that means they have over 25B of excess profits they could spend on 500.000 middle class incomes for content moderators. YouTube represents 10% of Google's income BTW, so the other 90% of middle class incomes could do moderation for their other services. Is that naieve?
  - izacus 6y ago
    I usually frame it this way - Mazda Motor Corporation, an order of magnitude smaller company can provide me with a several salons in my < 2mil population country where there are physical people that will fix my problem. And Google, the mighty megacorporation, can't even clear a basic phone support bar, much less a local user support office in each region? Something normal for other corporations?
    - adrianN 6y ago
      Mazda earns several hundred to several thousand dollars of profit from the sale of a car to you. Google earns an order of magnitude or two less per user.
      - tinco 6y ago
        Mazda spends several hours in pre- and after sales on each car. Google could automate 99.99% of moderation, and spend literal seconds on 90% of all further moderation per user. A magnitude or 3 less human attention than Mazda's sales pipeline spends on a user would be worlds better than what Google does now. I've seen YouTube channels with thousands of dollars of monthly revenue be closed over issues that would've taken a trained human less than 10 minutes to resolve. YouTubers with that kind of revenue are literally one in a million users or so.
      - izacus 6y ago
        They also had to source parts, manufacture it, transport it via boat and train, then pay someone to show me through all the buttons, clean it and then offer service at least once every year. Besides that they also provide 24 hour support for breakdowns and plenty of other services. And at best, they made 10% (!!) gross margin on my car - which is of a range of 2500$. Meanwhile Google has 45-60% (!!) profit margins while not giving a crap.
- atat7024 6y ago
  Hackaday.com does just fine. YouTube was fine before Google. Stop centralising.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    YouTube was bought in 2006 - not much time to even think about having a content problem or adpocalypse. 0: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15196982 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15196982
- tclancy 6y ago
  Without disagreeing with your point, I do think there's something to be said for the more specialized sites the Internet used to specialize in. Places that foster a sense of community tend to wind up with users who are happy to pitch in when something doesn't look right (or get overrun by spammers if the community isn't able to deal with the issues). I am happy to pull weeds in a community garden in a way I will not at some factory farm. This approach isn't a utopia; people are people and everything is political, but at smaller scales, saying "Well, just start your own [niche] video site" isn't snark, it's a realistic thing and perhaps both sites contribute to the marketplace of ideas. YouTube is the marketplace of the unthinking.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  It's definitely not just a money thing, because even major channels that bring in lots of money can't get someone to review their cases.
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 6y ago
    It would solve a couple problems. I don't see how it would solve this problem.
- Nasrudith 6y 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 6y ago
You mean, like the open standards-based Fediverse, where there are also no ads and algoritmic feeds optimizing for engagement?
amelius 6y ago
What if... people could make their own websites and host their own videos, and people could link to each other's content?

by 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 6y 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.
    - water8 6y ago
      If you change the MAC address on your cable modem you can get tons of different IPs. Same thing with cellular networks. With raspberryPis so cheap, fingerprints don't work that well for all devices.
      - SamoyedFurFluff 6y ago
        There are relatively few people capable of doing this compared to the population of the world that uses YouTube, and there’s even fewer people who, even with capacity, will be doing this just to upload illegal content into YouTube. I think this sizes down the problem of manual review quite easily.
        water8 6y ago
- da_chicken 6y ago
  Very much so. Tech companies have a way of confusing "this is difficult" with "this is impossible," or "this is impossible" with "this isn't free," or "this is impossible" with "we don't want to."
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    It is impossible is the polite way of telling you that your idea is incredibly illbconsidered and contrary to the actual purpose of the program and please fuck off and get cancer. Linus Torvalds was one of the few who operated under that style. Sadly for transparency and clarity it is the diplomatic ignore the elephant in the room which has become the standard. I blame all of the professional emotional manipulator sophist whiners who don't even try to understand reality. "Do it yourself then." is embedded in it as a message to fuck off because everyone knows they either cannot do it because they asked in the first place in those terms.
  - LegitShady 6y ago
    They are incentivized to have that confusion. So no surprise.
- adrianN 6y ago
  There are few other industries where users expect to get everything for free.
- manigandham 6y ago
  There's a massive difference between centralized production of physical goods vs user-generated digital assets. Scale itself becomes the challenge.
- ghaff 6y ago
  And those things are paid for. It would be perfectly reasonable if you had to pay per minute for uploading video and people had to pay for a subscription to watch it. That's just not what is expected for a mass platform today.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    Vimeo has an “uploader pays” system (of sorts), and, while it prevents garbage on the platform, it stops creators from wanting to use it when YouTube is free.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Yes. It's of course a perfectly valid (and widely-used) model to pay for hosting. But, by and large, only "serious" users who probably otherwise have a business model will do so. And there will inevitably be far less content on the platform. On the one hand, I think it's sort of unfortunate that so much of the Web has come to be about "free" access (though paying for access with attention and time) but that does come from the perspective of someone who would be able and happy to pay with money instead.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    It's expected because the expectations are set by the existing platforms. And the reason why Google specifically is actively promoting those expectations, is that it makes ads the only viable business model for content creators; and Google's primary source of income is their ad services, so it maintains their dominant market position.
- BigGreenTurtle 6y ago
  "We cannot do quality control before sending products out. We make too much stuff." Ever buy strawberries? "We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people." Train conductors often check tickets after the train has started moving. "Cleaning the entire building is not possible. It's too much space." Climate change. Dirty streets.
- anticensor 6y ago
  "We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people." This happens in some public transport operators already.
  - jobigoud 6y ago
    It's argued that in some cities public transport systems the price of the ticket doesn't cover the cost of its own infrastructure, the machines to buy them, the ones to validate them the salaries of the agents verifying, etc. It can be more cost effective to drop the concept of ticket and make it a free public service.
    - anticensor 6y ago
      I agree with all that, but some central governments such as Turkey go to great lengths to make public transport a paid service. The best public transport is the free one indeed.
viraptor 6y ago
I think it's much less work on SpecialInterestTube. On YouTube there's a huge amount of decisions and ideas the moderator has to take into account. The other one can filter a large amount of spam with "the first 5 seconds make it clear it's not SpecialInterest". For example comparing to HN, I can go on "New" and see "Places to Spray a Fragrance on for a Long Lasting Effect-Ajulu's Thoughts" - I know it's immediately flaggable, even if it could be a valid post on another website. (and require a full review there to check it doesn't break some specific rules)
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
Let people have the detestable YouTube TV for free as mods.
tinco 6y ago
Google had a revenue of $180B in 2020, and their EBITDA was $55B. I'm no accountant but that sounds like an absolutely insane profit margin. 8-12% would seem much more palatable, so that means they have over 25B of excess profits they could spend on 500.000 middle class incomes for content moderators. YouTube represents 10% of Google's income BTW, so the other 90% of middle class incomes could do moderation for their other services. Is that naieve?
- izacus 6y ago
  I usually frame it this way - Mazda Motor Corporation, an order of magnitude smaller company can provide me with a several salons in my < 2mil population country where there are physical people that will fix my problem. And Google, the mighty megacorporation, can't even clear a basic phone support bar, much less a local user support office in each region? Something normal for other corporations?
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Mazda earns several hundred to several thousand dollars of profit from the sale of a car to you. Google earns an order of magnitude or two less per user.
    - tinco 6y ago
      Mazda spends several hours in pre- and after sales on each car. Google could automate 99.99% of moderation, and spend literal seconds on 90% of all further moderation per user. A magnitude or 3 less human attention than Mazda's sales pipeline spends on a user would be worlds better than what Google does now. I've seen YouTube channels with thousands of dollars of monthly revenue be closed over issues that would've taken a trained human less than 10 minutes to resolve. YouTubers with that kind of revenue are literally one in a million users or so.
    - izacus 6y ago
      They also had to source parts, manufacture it, transport it via boat and train, then pay someone to show me through all the buttons, clean it and then offer service at least once every year. Besides that they also provide 24 hour support for breakdowns and plenty of other services. And at best, they made 10% (!!) gross margin on my car - which is of a range of 2500$. Meanwhile Google has 45-60% (!!) profit margins while not giving a crap.
atat7024 6y ago
Hackaday.com does just fine. YouTube was fine before Google. Stop centralising.
- judge2020 6y ago
  YouTube was bought in 2006 - not much time to even think about having a content problem or adpocalypse. 0: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15196982 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15196982
tclancy 6y ago
Without disagreeing with your point, I do think there's something to be said for the more specialized sites the Internet used to specialize in. Places that foster a sense of community tend to wind up with users who are happy to pitch in when something doesn't look right (or get overrun by spammers if the community isn't able to deal with the issues). I am happy to pull weeds in a community garden in a way I will not at some factory farm. This approach isn't a utopia; people are people and everything is political, but at smaller scales, saying "Well, just start your own [niche] video site" isn't snark, it's a realistic thing and perhaps both sites contribute to the marketplace of ideas. YouTube is the marketplace of the unthinking.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Dylan16807 6y ago
It's definitely not just a money thing, because even major channels that bring in lots of money can't get someone to review their cases.

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 6y ago
  It would solve a couple problems. I don't see how it would solve this problem.
Nasrudith 6y 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 6y ago

You mean, like the open standards-based Fediverse, where there are also no ads and algoritmic feeds optimizing for engagement?

amelius 6y ago

What if... people could make their own websites and host their own videos, and people could link to each other's content?