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This kind of scam is enabled by the way Youtube, Facebook, and others offer no way to contact an actual human for help (or if you find a way, you get a useless
by eloff 5y ago
This kind of scam is enabled by the way Youtube, Facebook, and others offer no way to contact an actual human for help (or if you find a way, you get a useless canned response.) People who realize something is wrong have no forum to air their concerns.
- travoc 5y agoIs there a word for this new world where we find ourselves without the ability to appeal our problems to human rationality, where instead we are continually subjected to the whims of automated systems that no human fully understands?
- derekjdanserl 5y ago[flagged]
- dd36 5y agoUnregulated.
- Jach 5y agoAh yes, the free market system known as copyright.
- conanbatt 5y agoI don't think the URSS had a Customer XP department. Or the government in general for that matter.
- acta_non_verba 5y agoI don't know how helpful a deliberate misunderstanding of the current economic model is to this conversation. Capitalism doesn't forbid sensible regulation, it just hasn't happened as politicians don't really understand the space. China, which runs a completely different economic system has similar issues.
- jklinger410 5y agoCapitalism is anti regulation by nature.
- themaninthedark 5y agoHuman nature is anti-regulation by nature. Communism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay Totalitarianism: There were several regulatory oversight failures in Germany during their stint with Fascism
- jklinger410 5y agoThat's crazy considering how much more regulation humans have had than any other observable creature.
- derekjdanserl 5y agoThis just isn’t true. Every social species found in the wild relies on brutal social regulating behaviors that maintain social conditions necessary for group survival.
- pydry 5y ago>Capitalism doesn't forbid sensible regulation It doesnt forbid but it strongly inhibits. A system under which you are able to acquire vast resources then creates the ability to use those vast resources to sway the political process in your favor. Even when the regulations exist (e.g. antitrust) regulatory capture will inhibit their enforcement. It's surprising how many people consider this process to be somehow irrelevant or out of scope when you analyze how capitalism functions. It's a core feature.
- JackFr 5y agoCapitalism means different things to different people and in different contexts. Separation of ownership from management. Tradeable claims on the firm. Legal personhood of the firm. Private property. Free trade between countries. Market determined prices. But it’s lazy and wrong to use it as a synonym for greed. Despite Gordon Gecko, greed is not good. Just seeing something we consider bad and saying “Capitalism” is a pose and not an argument.
- jd115 5y agoLife. Right? Is Life a bad word? No. It's a beautiful word. Does it contain the good, the bad and the ugly? Of course. Is Capitalism a bad word? No. It's a beautiful idea, and it works significantly better than anything else humans have ever been able to think of on a mass-scale. Does it contain the good the bad and the ugly? Sure.
- jklinger410 5y agoA capitalist society has told you that capitalism is good and you think you're so smart parroting this opinion around. It's getting very old.
- hackflip 5y agoI don't think capitalism is good, I just think the alternatives are worse.
- 7sidedmarble 5y agoIs it not a little pessimistic (and not to mention, very convenient for the ruling class) to believe that we've reached the peak process of resource allocation and community building in the western world of 2021? There is no possibility for an alternative to the current system that is slightly more equitable to slightly more people? I think that's why these statements sound like cheerleading for the status quo.
- mistermann 5y agoIt's like propaganda (Our most sacred institution) has killed people's imagination and hardened their hearts.
- finiteseries 5y agoThe twentieth century and its experiments in alternative resource allocation and community building are not propaganda, it happened. It wasn’t live tweeted, but we do, actually, have records. Some people were even there!
- g_p 5y agoKafkaesque?
- gostsamo 5y agoKafka's processing distopia.
- nono-no-no 5y agoDystopia
- domador 5y agoDystopAI
- HenryKissinger 5y agoThe 21st century.
- me_me_me 5y agoIts the same when trying to get mortgage when you are not on fixed salary income. "Computer says no", "But on average over last 5 years I make 5x what you need me to earn", "Sorry, but computer says no"
- boringg 5y agoOh yah the mortgage thing is hilarious in that you would think banks were smarter than they are (spoiler alert: they arent). Really demoralizing to see how mechanic a bank is, also means that you can understand how risk accrues secretly in a bank due to them being so mechanical.
- sharperguy 5y agoCustomer service
- junon 5y agoBroken.
- tibbetts 5y agoUtopia of Rules - our culture thinks that if we just had the right set of rules and everyone fallowed them then everything would work well. This is a flawed belief, like other utopias.
- Goronmon 5y agoUtopia of Rules - our culture thinks that if we just had the right set of rules and everyone fallowed them then everything would work well. This is a flawed belief, like other utopias. I don't see what about ContentID is related to the "Utopia of Rules" issue. ContentID seems more like a problem related to issues of capitalism, where a corporation will make decisions to maximum profits at the expense of any human or social impacts. Alongside the inability to effectively reign in corporations who make such decisions.
- sidewndr46 5y agoContentID is less of a "Utopia of Rules" and more of a "Kingdom of dictates". Google dictates you are subject to ContentID if you want to participate in YouTube. If you don't want to be subject to that, leave the kingdom.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago> ContentID seems more like a problem related to issues of capitalism, where a corporation will make decisions to maximum profits at the expense of any human or social impacts. Capitalism is the thing where there is supposed to be vigorous free market competition and ContentID would have no power. Because even if 70% of the services were getting it wrong, anyone could switch to any of the other 30% with minimal friction, and then the original 70% would fix their shit or lose market share. Capitalism isn't a synonym for anarchy. It needs, for example, government enforcement of property rights. But it also needs antitrust. Constraints on vertical integration. The lack of effective antitrust enforcement has allowed markets to concentrate. Which removes competitive pressure, which allows incumbents to make rules that benefit them and their business partners at the expense of customers who now have high switching costs. Enabling the "Utopia of Rules."
- CoastalCoder 5y agoI don't think this answers your question, but it was exemplified in the movie "Brazil", iirc.
- dmos62 5y agoIt's an automated bureaucracy (bureaucrazy). It's tyrannical, in that it has power over you and it's unjust and cruel in how it disregards you. You can lump those words together however you like. Tyrannical automated bureaucracy, autotyranny, bureautyranny. You could put the word tech or technological somewhere in there, but I don't think there's much technology in this form of oppression. After all, bureaucracy in itself is a technology (a tool). That's all from the point of view that this tyranny is external. I'd actually prefer to look at it as something we're subjecting ourselves to. We're half-knowingly turning our tools against us; painting ourselves into a corner; becoming increasingly entangled by our conflicting goals. We're not the victim, but the fool.
- rPlayer6554 5y agoBur-auto-cracy?
- thechao 5y agoBureaucomputation. (Byur-ah-computation?)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Humdeee 5y agoIn - internal issue Comp - computer/tech Pet - sub-human, regarded as secondary if at all Tence - (tense), as in past tense and you will be forgotten
- raisedbyninjas 5y agoThis implies that implementing a fair system is beyond their capabilities. I think profitable convenience is more apt to their design choices.
- xyzzyz 5y ago> It's tyrannical, in that it has power over you and it's unjust and cruel in how it disregards you. Welcome to new bureaucracy, same as old bureaucracy.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dangoor 5y agoweb3
- routerl 5y agoKafkaesque. Maybe cyber-kafkaesque, but that feels redundant, since the only difference is that it is being done by computers, rather than thoughtless people.
- nullc 5y agocomputational-Kafkarcy -- the difference is in the scale and efficiency. Millions of people can be abused at once at practically no cost.
- domador 5y agoHow about "autocratic", with an emphasis on "auto"?
- AlwaysRock 5y ago"new" haha. Check out the trial by franz kafka
- quercusa 5y agoHarlan Ellison described it in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
- remram 5y agoThat machine is actually sentient thought, and openly hateful.
- goblin89 5y agoThe situation with almost-no-appeal big tech platforms reminds me of an article titled “the human-built world is not build for humans”[0]. Related phenomenons keep coming up (cities for cars, ecosystems of tokens and identities dependent on remembering secret passkeys, and so on). Desires to profit and to not have to trust each other keeps motivating humans’ attempts to devise environments that are hostile to humans themselves. [0] https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-human-built-world-is-not-built https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-human-built-w...
- HPsquared 5y ago"Computer says no"
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoIts kafkaesque, the established world for inconprehensible and cruel bureaucracy that destroys lives for no reason. The term predates internet.
- loceng 5y agoCriminal [for the parties facilitating it by allowing it], comes to mind as a naming option.
- tlb 5y agoIt’s a strong assumption that humans are more rational than machines. Certainly typical customer service reps get bamboozled frequently, such as with SIM-swap scams. Even supposedly highly rational professionals like judges are often wrong. You might find that overall, human failures are worse than code-as-policy failures.
- gpderetta 5y agoWell, the amount of damage an incompetent human can deal is much more limited than an incompetent but very efficient machine.
- routerl 5y agoMachines aren't rational at all. That is, they do not respond to reasons. Machine behaviour is only ever caused (i.e. syntactic), not reasoned. When a human follows a rule, for example as part of a bureaucracy, then our behaviour is merely caused. But we can also be given reasons to not follow the given rule. This is precisely why "I was just following orders" is not a valid defence; even soldiers are expected to use their reasoning to disobey illegal orders.
- treeman79 5y agoThis is the purpose of a court system.
- rchaud 5y agoHow about: "You get what you pay for"
- hindsightbias 5y agoIt’s interesting how people expect all sorts of protections for services they pay nothing to. Get a record label or agent if you want or need “protection”
- soperj 5y agoIs this really new? This is pretty much exactly what Kafka writes.
- travoc 5y agoIt’s new in the sense that it suddenly afflicts my family on an almost daily basis.
- munificent 5y agoAutomatacracy.
- kansface 5y agoCheck out The Trial or The Castle for examples of old world systems that existed outside of the grace of human rationality, indifferent to justice and human suffering alike.
- robomartin 5y ago> Is there a word for this new world where we find ourselves without the ability to appeal our problems to human rationality How about a term like "millennial business ethics"? Seriously. I know some will take this as an insult. I don't offer it in that way. Hear me out for a minute. The generation that grew up without the internet was just as sophisticated --if not more in some areas-- than millennials. I have news for you, we were doing pretty amazing things with computers and hardware in the 80's an 90's and very little of it was about tricking people to click on ads. Go back and look at AI books from that era and you will find pretty much everything being done today...we just didn't have the hardware and the speed. Excuse the digression. Growing up without the internet and with conventional brick-and-mortar, in-person businesses meant that person-to-person relationships were important. Nobody --nobody-- from my generation would seriously consider running a business where you absolutely ghost your customers and users. That's just unthinkable. That is not the way human beings related to each other in any pursuit. However, for a generation who's reality has been looking at a screen and clicking buttons far more so than engaging with other humans in person, the idea of not bothering with real person-to-person problem solving might just be perfectly logical and sensible. Why bother? You can do everything with buttons on a touchscreen. Except, you can't. To me this is a cultural problem. I have often imagine that some of the people who built these companies had the social skills and maturity of a brick. I know this isn't entirely accurate. Yet, how else does one explicitly make these choices? I can excuse social ineptitude as a sign of the time. The alternative would be to make such a choice while knowing just how harmful it could be. That is pure evil. They have built mechanisms where destroying someone's business overnight, with no path to having a proper person-to-person business discussion, is deemed normal and acceptable. Talk to people who's lives were turned upside-down by the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google and you'll learn just how horrific this kind of thing can be on the receiving end of the algorithms. On this planet, today, if these three companies ban your from using their services, you do not exist. Period. Try running a business without using these channels (and their associated properties) for marketing and delivery and see how well you can do. I am not a big government guy at all, quite to the contrary. However, I have, for some time, felt that this particular issue is one that needs truly intrusive government intervention. Companies of this scale and importance should not be able to kill your business on any given Monday and just ghost you forever. That is just plain wrong. And evil.
- bserge 5y agoIt's amazing considering they could hire a small army of good employees for ~$500/person in one of the many developing countries. Don't need an office, don't even need to bother with taxes if they don't want to, just remote hire and work.
- noodlesUK 5y agoSurely there is some case that could be brought against YouTube by an EU citizen or someone else in a country where automated decision making is limited without human review, no?
- kevincox 5y agoI don't know what the argument is though. You have agreed to this Content ID system and automatically distributing the ad revenue based on YouTube's discretion when you signed up. Note that the system also has advantages. As a publisher you are protected from lawsuits most of the time, the worst case outcome is that you don't get revenue from a video or that you get banned from YouTube. I'm not saying that the tradeoff is optimal for creators but I don't see how what YouTube is doing is illegal. Unless you try to assert that you were forced to accept the ToS because YouTube is effectively a monopoly. But I find that a really hard argument to make.
- mellavora 5y agoThe argument is that the GDPR requires companies to provide human review.
- Nextgrid 5y agoThe GDPR is very poorly enforced and regulators have shown no desire to enforce it. At least in the UK, the process requires you to try and get in touch with the company to resolve it and give them 30 days to reply, providing evidence of your attempts (a bit difficult with online forms as opposed to emails - I guess you have to take screenshots of the contact form before you submit?), and if you still don't get a satisfactory response you can raise a complaint with the regulator where from my experience it just goes to a black hole where you're lucky to get a (useless) response in a few months.
- sofixa 5y agoNo. It just takes a lot of time to deal with all the transgressions. https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
- INTPenis 5y agoI know it's awful and true, BUT, can you blame them? Think about the infrastructure required to allow direct human contact for someone like Google, Youtube or Facebook. Just a regular ISP in my country of Sweden needs an entire call centre to handle the calls it gets from customers. Now scale that up to the levels of Google. I can totally see why they've made the decision to avoid consumer contact. Their consumers are the entire internet. I know this is controversial but one solution would be to break their monopoly up so that smaller companies could handle consumer contact.
- Neil44 5y agoJust because it's hard doesn't mean they should get away with not doing it. Google 2020 revenues were 181 Billion, you can build a VERY big call centre with that.
- Orionos 5y agoI'm failing to understand your logic. Google could put a call center in every country to handle local user's requests could'nt they ? Your ISP can afford to do so... But yes, as they have a monopoly, they can afford not putting any call center anywhere.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ratww 5y agoYep. And it doesn't even have to be a call center, manual verification would be enough.
- ahahahahah 5y agoI pay my ISP a lot more than I pay Google.
- jimhefferon 5y agoSo, this business does things that take away people's rights, but it is OK because otherwise their cost of business would be too high?
- reactspa 5y agoSilver Lining in this trend: The beginning of the end of Amazon may be at hand. The other day, I really really needed to get in touch with a human at Amazon to resolve an issue (Amazon issued me a refund, apparently in error). After an hour of researching how, I gave up. The last time I needed to get in touch with a human there was 15 years or so ago. I was able to send an email to an actual human there, who responded! And was able to resolve the issue after 3 or 4 emails back and forth. Now, all you get is a "Chat AI" who can't help you. It's the beginning of their end folks. And that's a good thing (Martha Stewart voice). (The other canary in the Amazon coal mine: their search engine results seem manipulated.)
- lil_dispaches 5y agoAt some point these companies have to be on the wrong side of negligence.
- paulpauper 5y agoAlso, relying on algos to detect spam instead of using humans, means that scammers are able to run their scams much longer.
- pokot0 5y ago100% agree. They reap the benefits of the automation efficiency while not paying the costs of it. I think these companies should be considered directly responsible if they don't pay royalties to the rightful owners. This should include how the royalties are split when multiple properties are connected to the same Ad (ex: one video that contains a song and a commentary). Right now, for their convenience they only pay the stronger party (usually the song rights holder) and ignore the other party. I think they should be legally required to split the revenues fairly. Is it a hard problem to solve and risk a lawsuit hell? Sure, but they did solve way harder problems when they had the incentive to do so and certainly have the resources to solve this one. It's also rather easy to solve 90% of the problem and not being blatantly unfair, and I think 90% is way better than 0%.
- SR2Z 5y agoTo put this really bluntly, these companies would _prefer_ that kind of system. Right now the problem is that they are held legally liable if they incorrectly reject a copyright complaint (which, by the way, can only be determined to be valid in court) but only run the risk of pissing off users if they accept a fraudulent one. The problem here is not convenience, it's that copyright was designed for an era when it was kind of hard to copy things. The DMCA was a good shim to make it feasible for Internet companies to even exist, but it's not enough to fix things in a world where literally every single bit of IP can be copied or downloaded in less than a day. If, for example, Congress required content owners to submit copies of their works to some centralized US copyright database as a condition for being eligible to receive damages from platforms, that would go a long way to fix things on its own. Expanding the explicit set of fair use exemptions and allowing them to matter outside of a court would also be a big help.
- toss1 5y agoExactly >>Over the years, countless YouTube users have complained that their videos have been claimed and monetized by entities that apparently have no right to do so but, fearful of what a complaint might do to the status of their accounts, many opted to withdraw from battles they feared they might lose. This fact and the aggressive-anti-support policies should setup Youtube for a class action suit. Merely to avoid the expense of actually sorting out who is the actual copyright owner, Alphabet (& others) setup a system that systematically enables this type of fraud against artists, and provides no way to resolve it, and so they happily pay millions to fraudsters like these instead of the actual owners. It'd be nice if the actual artists could get paid and if Google etc. could get the point that some things require actual support. Unlikely, but it'd be nice.