8 ms·

The problem is not the content of the video, crypto or not. The problem is not that YT moderates aggressively (it doesn't do enough IMHO) or even how it moderat

by bambax 5y ago

The problem is not the content of the video, crypto or not. The problem is not that YT moderates aggressively (it doesn't do enough IMHO) or even how it moderates. The problem is that there is no serious appeals process, and no third party oversight of moderation decisions. This is true for all the big platforms. How do we fix that, IDK, but probably at the government level.

rodolphoarruda 5y ago
We may fix this by decentralizing the original source of the content and making the social end, the account used to post/share that content, ephemerous. How can we still build reputation in this model? Making sure the original source is visible and accessible. It all boils down to reputation management, which needs to be re-engineered.
thijser 5y ago
I totally agree. If they had had a message "this is a problem with your account, fix it or else within 3 days we suspend you", that wouldn't have been nice but not completely impossible like the current solution. How is it not possible for Google to implement that? I understand they also have some very bad cases of spam to deal with, but if I take my account as an example, the 'bad' video was uploaded 4 months ago and has 133 views in total, how can the system not determine there's no harm in leaving it up for another 3 days (in which it probably will get 0 views)? So sad that the big tech companies can't manage to change from the inside but need to be forced by regulation to do good for their customers.
giansegato 5y ago
It could be remunerated. Like: pay 100$ to have a human look at your case. You can appeal (and pay) up to 3 times. This would partially solve the scalability problem + provide partial disincentives for scammers and spammers. I would happily pay 100$ to recover my lost Google account. Of course this would in turn create the bad incentive of having Google not create good models. Ideally the law would require to cap prices somehow. Hard problem for sure.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  Why is it my problem that a fair moderation process must be cost-effective for Google, et. al.? Edit: Google's profit margins aren't my problem. If they want to be such a big, all-encompassing force in the "digital lives" of individuals they need to be held to account with fair policies for dealing with Customers. If that creates an untenable business for them they can either innovate in a manner that results in a fair deal for users and lower expense to themselves or they can suck it up and take the hit on their margin. I don't use Google's various services beyond search, personally, but it's clear that some regulation is needed. Non-technical individuals don't understand the ramifications of relying so heavily on a platform that can be pulled out from under them with no notice and no recourse. Heck, even technical people don't seem to grasp it.
  - mst 5y ago
    If you legislate a non-cost-effective model you're making it substantially harder for possible future competitors. If we're assuming that "youtube as a permanent monopoly" is inevitable then, sure, fair enough, but I think if you're making that assumption it's worth making it explicitly.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    Because the process requires people and people cost money. And without attaching a cost to it, there would be far more requests for manual review coming in than any team Google hires could handle.
    - pixl97 5y ago
      "There are too many safety considerations for us to effectively mitigate, it would be too expensive, so we should be allowed to ignore safety altogether" --average 19th century industrialists
      - ziml77 5y ago
        The context here is a proposal on how to make an appeals process viable instead just saying it's impossible.
otrahuevada 5y ago
Google famously sucks at customer service, mostly because they've figured that they'd have to pay a moderation team more money than whatever they'll lose from the few and far between problem cases there might be. There is no fixing that without massive corporate reorganization, which won't be voluntary, and thus will take 10x the time with worse results. At this point this is just the Google way to do things, and making smaller fry follow this rules will probably only end up making Google bigger. The one real way out there might be is making one-click self hosting viable again.
- cft 5y ago
  The problem is their monopoly power over video distribution on the internet: disgruntled users have nowhere else to go. All alternatives are stifled by the monopoly.
  - acdha 5y ago
    People have tons of alternatives. The problem is that ad subsidies pay more than most viewers are willing to pay after generations of internet users have been conditioned to think of content as free.
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      Nobody has been "conditioned" to think anything. If they opted to make things free at the start of the internet era then it's now their problem to figure out how to pivot to actually paying their expenses and turn profit. It's not the users' problem per se (unless they get aggressively pushed out but then they go to alternatives so that company still doesn't make profit out of them). Elementary psychology -- one that's studied at 9th grade where I live -- could have told them that it's super hard giving people something for free and then taking it away. People don't react well to that and never have. They only have themselves to blame.
      - 14 5y ago
        From what I read they made well over $19 billion in revenue in 2020. They are making plenty of money they can afford to put towards the problem. They just don’t want to take from their own bottom line.
wayoutthere 5y ago
Quite frankly, now that YouTube has built its media ecosystem, they have an incentive to marginalize the long tail. The big channels (or rather, their distribution companies) have dedicated account managers who can clear this kind of stuff up. Big channels are easier to manage from a platform perspective since there’s someone you can call to clear up any issues (who you already have a contractual relationship with), so you don’t need to trust an unaccountable algorithm. If you’re not a YouTube partner? You’re collateral damage that is baked into the design and considered acceptable by YouTube. Your value as an independent content creator is very low to them. The effort required to moderate independent creators is significantly higher than it is to moderate managed partners on a per-view basis. It’s a lot of work for small dollar amounts. This is a pretty common situation we’ve seen play out over the last century. When a new media paradigm is established, there’s a land rush. But once the initial land rush is over, the industry regulates itself and consolidates for efficiency. The new media landscape eventually becomes the very thing they displaced. Ever wonder why YouTube has as many ads as broadcast TV these days?
- ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
  Honest question, do you actually get as many ads on YouTube as on TV ? With the former, I am used to 2 10-seconds to 1-minutes ads every 10-15 minutes and that are usually skippable (~16% in the worst case). On TV, at least in France, there are at least as many ads, but they can't be skipped.
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    Yes it’s gotten pretty egregious. I generally get 30 seconds of non-skippable ads every 5 mins or so. I haven’t watched broadcast TV in probably 10 years so maybe I’m not remembering how bad it is, but I have a hard time watching YouTube with how frequent (and poorly targeted) the ads are.
    - ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
      Wow, if it gets to this level, I can understand. If you don't mind, what country do you live in ? I am kinda curious of if it is related to location.
genidoi 5y ago
There can’t be any semblance of an appeals process whilst the law treats social media platforms like privately owned property that you have the privilege of being a guest too.
dr-detroit 5y ago
the process is you demonetize
temp8964 5y ago
I don't believe "This is true for all the big platforms." I saw lots of stories here about Google, but I don't remember see one about how Microsoft blocks user account. Did I miss? Anyway. Couple years ago, I received several email notifications from Microsoft about someone tried to reset my account password. I got a little bit concerned and eventually sent a feedback to Microsoft asking what I need to do. Surprise! I got a answering call from Microsoft by a real human! Because of all the bad stories about Google blocks user accounts, I moved all my stuff to Microsoft products and my own NAS.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Hotmail has plenty of stories. Paid email has many great providers like fastmail.. Microsoft doesn't offer a video platform so it doesn't really apply.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    Really? I searched Hotmail here and couldn't find story like this (banning users).
discardedrefuse 5y ago
This all could have been avoided if the same algo that detected the scammy title had been applied during the posting process. A warning from YT saying, "Hey this sounds scammy, we're not posting it" was all that was needed.
politician 5y ago
Corporate appeals processes are watered down arbitration processes which are a loophole to allow a larger company to force a subordinate to give up their rights to the government’s courts. Sue them in small claims court for the value of your music library.
SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
That is not true. I produce content for YouTube full-time. Just a few days ago a well-performing video ended up age-restricted. It was an edge case, and could have gone either way. I appealed, and included the best argument I could put together. A few hours later I received this: We have reviewed your appeal for the following content: [the video title] After taking another look, we can confirm that your content does not violate our Community Guidelines. Thanks for your patience while we reviewed this appeal. Our goal is to make sure content doesn't violate our Community Guidelines so that YouTube can be a safe place for all - and sometimes we make mistakes trying to get it right. We're sorry for any frustration our mistake caused you, and we appreciate you letting us know. ~~~ I appeal YouTube's decisions all the time. Sometimes appeals go my way, other times they don't, but that doesn't mean there is no serious appeals process. As far as I know, almost every adverse decision can be appealed. ~~~ About your last comment, the existence of a problem doesn't mean that government stepping in would be better.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  By being a content creator, you are a money maker for them. Even so, you probably got lucky. thunderf00t has gotten in trouble loads of times for doing nothing but outing bad science. Same with CoffeeZilla and a thousand other YouTubers. I myself got my channel delisted from recommendations entirely (a shadow ban essentially) for making a Covid precaution video about different types of NIOSH masks..
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  Both of you would be right at the same time. You raised high enough to be full-time on Youtube, you have a full history of interactions with their moderators, a track record of videos that performed well, and get to be handle by real humans. That doesn’t mean it’s the same experience for the vast majority of creators, especially those who upload a video once in a while and have no reputation in the system. On any Google service I think both sides exist, and the difference is usually pretty stark, like night and day. PS: on the gov. part, the issue is that Google is economically big enough that there is no counterpart to make them do what they don’t want to. People are turning to govs. because there is basically no other recourse in many situations.
_fat_santa 5y ago
We don't need the government to step in, we need another video streaming company to come in and really compete with Youtube. The problem is that right now, Youtube has no direct competitors. Sure there is Vimeo and Rumble, but both aren't big enough to really threaten Youtube's bottom line. The Rumble SPAC deal is interesting because it seems they may be the first company to have the capital to compete with Youtube. I have a strong feeling that once an actual competitor emerges, Youtube will tamp down on their censorship. They censor all day long now because they know creators don't have another option. Once that other option arises, the only thing that censorship will do for Youtube is loosing customers.
- meeech 5y ago
  "We don't need the government to step in, we need another video streaming company to come in and really compete with Youtube. The problem is that right now, Youtube has no direct competitors" This is incredibly naive. All that would happen is both services would use similar automated systems for moderation - it is cheaper for them. They would have no incentive to provide good support. We need regulations that require access to human judgement for digital services. When millions of people use a service, even a 1% error rate in moderation / account disabling has a real impact on a lot of peoples lives.
  - joshsyn 5y ago
    An easy way to provide good support would be for youtube to charge the content up-loaders for a small fee. That would be a source of revenue for them to provide support in return for monetary value. Else there is simply no incentive. Introducing regulations for every digital human interaction is a waste of taxpayers money and incredibly naive way of thinking.
joshsyn 5y ago
How does the government do it better? And why is it the government business to step in?
Hard_Space 5y ago
> that there is no serious appeals process, and no third party oversight of moderation decisions Yes there is, see [0] - also posted by me in another reply in this thread, where I mention that my own YouTube account was suspended identically to OP earlier this year, but was restored 3-4 hours after filling out the form. The decision may or may not have been AI-driven, but I'm pretty sure there was a human in the loop behind the solution. Don't mistake me for a Google fanboy - I had my primary Gmail account locked last week for daring to use a VPN, so I'm currently looking at de-Googling myself a bit. But to be fair, I was able to fix both issues within a few hours. [0] https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/suspended?p=youtube&visit_id=637744028008188719-2596566682&rd=1 https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/suspended?p=yout...
- LegitShady 5y ago
  >had my primary Gmail account locked last week for daring to use a VPN, yikes I check my gmail behind a VPN semi regularly. Now I'm worried.
  - Hard_Space 5y ago
    I forgot, to be honest, that I had two other Gmail logins running on my headless tower at the other end of the room, so requests were coming from my country and from the US simultaneously. Since I wasn't trying to evade geoblocking, I now use a VPN that's set to my own city AND I shut down the applications on the headless machine. But that still leaves my phone sucking in mails on a non-VPN connection, and that's not so easy to fix, because I'm damned if I'll switch it off every time I need a VPN, or trouble myself to use a VPN on that too. So, yeah, in general I'm worried too. Personally I think we'll look back on VPN use in five years the way that early 20thC cocaine addicts fondly remember when you could just buy the stuff over the counter without a scrip in pharmacies. Sorry to see China setting the pace on this one.
s17n 5y ago
People talk about creating an appeals process like it's something Google could just snap their fingers and do, like the commenter in this thread who suggested they should just "hire 100000 moderators". The problem is, scaling a human system like this is extremely difficult and human appeals are notoriously weak against social engineering attacks. It's far from clear that a manual review process capable of handling billions of users and reliably producing the correct outcome is even possible at any kind of plausible cost. Think about how much a court case in the US costs - orders of magnitude more than a company could possibly afford to spend on moderation. Does everybody really think it's possible to design a process that's orders of magnitude cheaper without also being orders of magnitude less accurate?
- shkkmo 5y ago
  >It's far from clear that a manual review process capable of handling billions of users and reliably producing the correct outcome is even possible at any kind of plausible cost. I would hope that the reason that scaling is hard is because violators would spam the system. If there really are so many legitimate users losing access, then this is a huge problem that we need to hold companies legally accountable for. What we need is a system that disincentives large companies from having too many false positives while disncentiving bad actors from using the appeals process. > Think about how much a court case in the US costs - orders of magnitude more than a company could possibly afford to spend on moderation. You shouldn't need a full court case, it seems like a small claims court type approach would be sufficient. One answer is a solution is used in many places already is to allow the judge to assign court costs to one party or the depending on the facts of the case. > Does everybody really think it's possible to design a process that's orders of magnitude cheaper without also being orders of magnitude less accurate? I absolutely think it is feasible to build a system that doesn't cost too much vs. the level of supplementary accuracy it would provide. I also don't see how we have a choice. In this era where we own nothing and everything is a service, we absolutely need to be able to have accountability for the companies that provide those services. We can't just allow them to cut the services off at their whim with no legal recourse.
  - nybble41 5y ago

by bambax 5y ago

rodolphoarruda 5y ago

We may fix this by decentralizing the original source of the content and making the social end, the account used to post/share that content, ephemerous. How can we still build reputation in this model? Making sure the original source is visible and accessible. It all boils down to reputation management, which needs to be re-engineered.

thijser 5y ago

I totally agree. If they had had a message "this is a problem with your account, fix it or else within 3 days we suspend you", that wouldn't have been nice but not completely impossible like the current solution. How is it not possible for Google to implement that? I understand they also have some very bad cases of spam to deal with, but if I take my account as an example, the 'bad' video was uploaded 4 months ago and has 133 views in total, how can the system not determine there's no harm in leaving it up for another 3 days (in which it probably will get 0 views)? So sad that the big tech companies can't manage to change from the inside but need to be forced by regulation to do good for their customers.

giansegato 5y ago

It could be remunerated. Like: pay 100$ to have a human look at your case. You can appeal (and pay) up to 3 times. This would partially solve the scalability problem + provide partial disincentives for scammers and spammers. I would happily pay 100$ to recover my lost Google account. Of course this would in turn create the bad incentive of having Google not create good models. Ideally the law would require to cap prices somehow. Hard problem for sure.

EvanAnderson 5y ago
Why is it my problem that a fair moderation process must be cost-effective for Google, et. al.? Edit: Google's profit margins aren't my problem. If they want to be such a big, all-encompassing force in the "digital lives" of individuals they need to be held to account with fair policies for dealing with Customers. If that creates an untenable business for them they can either innovate in a manner that results in a fair deal for users and lower expense to themselves or they can suck it up and take the hit on their margin. I don't use Google's various services beyond search, personally, but it's clear that some regulation is needed. Non-technical individuals don't understand the ramifications of relying so heavily on a platform that can be pulled out from under them with no notice and no recourse. Heck, even technical people don't seem to grasp it.
- mst 5y ago
  If you legislate a non-cost-effective model you're making it substantially harder for possible future competitors. If we're assuming that "youtube as a permanent monopoly" is inevitable then, sure, fair enough, but I think if you're making that assumption it's worth making it explicitly.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Because the process requires people and people cost money. And without attaching a cost to it, there would be far more requests for manual review coming in than any team Google hires could handle.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    "There are too many safety considerations for us to effectively mitigate, it would be too expensive, so we should be allowed to ignore safety altogether" --average 19th century industrialists
    - ziml77 5y ago
      The context here is a proposal on how to make an appeals process viable instead just saying it's impossible.

otrahuevada 5y ago

Google famously sucks at customer service, mostly because they've figured that they'd have to pay a moderation team more money than whatever they'll lose from the few and far between problem cases there might be. There is no fixing that without massive corporate reorganization, which won't be voluntary, and thus will take 10x the time with worse results. At this point this is just the Google way to do things, and making smaller fry follow this rules will probably only end up making Google bigger. The one real way out there might be is making one-click self hosting viable again.

cft 5y ago
The problem is their monopoly power over video distribution on the internet: disgruntled users have nowhere else to go. All alternatives are stifled by the monopoly.
- acdha 5y ago
  People have tons of alternatives. The problem is that ad subsidies pay more than most viewers are willing to pay after generations of internet users have been conditioned to think of content as free.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    Nobody has been "conditioned" to think anything. If they opted to make things free at the start of the internet era then it's now their problem to figure out how to pivot to actually paying their expenses and turn profit. It's not the users' problem per se (unless they get aggressively pushed out but then they go to alternatives so that company still doesn't make profit out of them). Elementary psychology -- one that's studied at 9th grade where I live -- could have told them that it's super hard giving people something for free and then taking it away. People don't react well to that and never have. They only have themselves to blame.
    - 14 5y ago
      From what I read they made well over $19 billion in revenue in 2020. They are making plenty of money they can afford to put towards the problem. They just don’t want to take from their own bottom line.

wayoutthere 5y ago

Quite frankly, now that YouTube has built its media ecosystem, they have an incentive to marginalize the long tail. The big channels (or rather, their distribution companies) have dedicated account managers who can clear this kind of stuff up. Big channels are easier to manage from a platform perspective since there’s someone you can call to clear up any issues (who you already have a contractual relationship with), so you don’t need to trust an unaccountable algorithm. If you’re not a YouTube partner? You’re collateral damage that is baked into the design and considered acceptable by YouTube. Your value as an independent content creator is very low to them. The effort required to moderate independent creators is significantly higher than it is to moderate managed partners on a per-view basis. It’s a lot of work for small dollar amounts. This is a pretty common situation we’ve seen play out over the last century. When a new media paradigm is established, there’s a land rush. But once the initial land rush is over, the industry regulates itself and consolidates for efficiency. The new media landscape eventually becomes the very thing they displaced. Ever wonder why YouTube has as many ads as broadcast TV these days?

ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
Honest question, do you actually get as many ads on YouTube as on TV ? With the former, I am used to 2 10-seconds to 1-minutes ads every 10-15 minutes and that are usually skippable (~16% in the worst case). On TV, at least in France, there are at least as many ads, but they can't be skipped.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  Yes it’s gotten pretty egregious. I generally get 30 seconds of non-skippable ads every 5 mins or so. I haven’t watched broadcast TV in probably 10 years so maybe I’m not remembering how bad it is, but I have a hard time watching YouTube with how frequent (and poorly targeted) the ads are.
  - ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
    Wow, if it gets to this level, I can understand. If you don't mind, what country do you live in ? I am kinda curious of if it is related to location.

genidoi 5y ago

There can’t be any semblance of an appeals process whilst the law treats social media platforms like privately owned property that you have the privilege of being a guest too.

dr-detroit 5y ago

the process is you demonetize

temp8964 5y ago

I don't believe "This is true for all the big platforms." I saw lots of stories here about Google, but I don't remember see one about how Microsoft blocks user account. Did I miss? Anyway. Couple years ago, I received several email notifications from Microsoft about someone tried to reset my account password. I got a little bit concerned and eventually sent a feedback to Microsoft asking what I need to do. Surprise! I got a answering call from Microsoft by a real human! Because of all the bad stories about Google blocks user accounts, I moved all my stuff to Microsoft products and my own NAS.

ipaddr 5y ago
Hotmail has plenty of stories. Paid email has many great providers like fastmail.. Microsoft doesn't offer a video platform so it doesn't really apply.
- temp8964 5y ago
  Really? I searched Hotmail here and couldn't find story like this (banning users).

discardedrefuse 5y ago

This all could have been avoided if the same algo that detected the scammy title had been applied during the posting process. A warning from YT saying, "Hey this sounds scammy, we're not posting it" was all that was needed.

politician 5y ago

Corporate appeals processes are watered down arbitration processes which are a loophole to allow a larger company to force a subordinate to give up their rights to the government’s courts. Sue them in small claims court for the value of your music library.

SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago

That is not true. I produce content for YouTube full-time. Just a few days ago a well-performing video ended up age-restricted. It was an edge case, and could have gone either way. I appealed, and included the best argument I could put together. A few hours later I received this: We have reviewed your appeal for the following content: [the video title] After taking another look, we can confirm that your content does not violate our Community Guidelines. Thanks for your patience while we reviewed this appeal. Our goal is to make sure content doesn't violate our Community Guidelines so that YouTube can be a safe place for all - and sometimes we make mistakes trying to get it right. We're sorry for any frustration our mistake caused you, and we appreciate you letting us know. ~~~ I appeal YouTube's decisions all the time. Sometimes appeals go my way, other times they don't, but that doesn't mean there is no serious appeals process. As far as I know, almost every adverse decision can be appealed. ~~~ About your last comment, the existence of a problem doesn't mean that government stepping in would be better.

goldenkey 5y ago
By being a content creator, you are a money maker for them. Even so, you probably got lucky. thunderf00t has gotten in trouble loads of times for doing nothing but outing bad science. Same with CoffeeZilla and a thousand other YouTubers. I myself got my channel delisted from recommendations entirely (a shadow ban essentially) for making a Covid precaution video about different types of NIOSH masks..
makeitdouble 5y ago
Both of you would be right at the same time. You raised high enough to be full-time on Youtube, you have a full history of interactions with their moderators, a track record of videos that performed well, and get to be handle by real humans. That doesn’t mean it’s the same experience for the vast majority of creators, especially those who upload a video once in a while and have no reputation in the system. On any Google service I think both sides exist, and the difference is usually pretty stark, like night and day. PS: on the gov. part, the issue is that Google is economically big enough that there is no counterpart to make them do what they don’t want to. People are turning to govs. because there is basically no other recourse in many situations.

_fat_santa 5y ago

We don't need the government to step in, we need another video streaming company to come in and really compete with Youtube. The problem is that right now, Youtube has no direct competitors. Sure there is Vimeo and Rumble, but both aren't big enough to really threaten Youtube's bottom line. The Rumble SPAC deal is interesting because it seems they may be the first company to have the capital to compete with Youtube. I have a strong feeling that once an actual competitor emerges, Youtube will tamp down on their censorship. They censor all day long now because they know creators don't have another option. Once that other option arises, the only thing that censorship will do for Youtube is loosing customers.

meeech 5y ago
"We don't need the government to step in, we need another video streaming company to come in and really compete with Youtube. The problem is that right now, Youtube has no direct competitors" This is incredibly naive. All that would happen is both services would use similar automated systems for moderation - it is cheaper for them. They would have no incentive to provide good support. We need regulations that require access to human judgement for digital services. When millions of people use a service, even a 1% error rate in moderation / account disabling has a real impact on a lot of peoples lives.
- joshsyn 5y ago
  An easy way to provide good support would be for youtube to charge the content up-loaders for a small fee. That would be a source of revenue for them to provide support in return for monetary value. Else there is simply no incentive. Introducing regulations for every digital human interaction is a waste of taxpayers money and incredibly naive way of thinking.

joshsyn 5y ago

How does the government do it better? And why is it the government business to step in?

Hard_Space 5y ago

> that there is no serious appeals process, and no third party oversight of moderation decisions Yes there is, see [0] - also posted by me in another reply in this thread, where I mention that my own YouTube account was suspended identically to OP earlier this year, but was restored 3-4 hours after filling out the form. The decision may or may not have been AI-driven, but I'm pretty sure there was a human in the loop behind the solution. Don't mistake me for a Google fanboy - I had my primary Gmail account locked last week for daring to use a VPN, so I'm currently looking at de-Googling myself a bit. But to be fair, I was able to fix both issues within a few hours. [0] https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/suspended?p=youtube&visit_id=637744028008188719-2596566682&rd=1 https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/suspended?p=yout...

LegitShady 5y ago
>had my primary Gmail account locked last week for daring to use a VPN, yikes I check my gmail behind a VPN semi regularly. Now I'm worried.
- Hard_Space 5y ago
  I forgot, to be honest, that I had two other Gmail logins running on my headless tower at the other end of the room, so requests were coming from my country and from the US simultaneously. Since I wasn't trying to evade geoblocking, I now use a VPN that's set to my own city AND I shut down the applications on the headless machine. But that still leaves my phone sucking in mails on a non-VPN connection, and that's not so easy to fix, because I'm damned if I'll switch it off every time I need a VPN, or trouble myself to use a VPN on that too. So, yeah, in general I'm worried too. Personally I think we'll look back on VPN use in five years the way that early 20thC cocaine addicts fondly remember when you could just buy the stuff over the counter without a scrip in pharmacies. Sorry to see China setting the pace on this one.

s17n 5y ago

People talk about creating an appeals process like it's something Google could just snap their fingers and do, like the commenter in this thread who suggested they should just "hire 100000 moderators". The problem is, scaling a human system like this is extremely difficult and human appeals are notoriously weak against social engineering attacks. It's far from clear that a manual review process capable of handling billions of users and reliably producing the correct outcome is even possible at any kind of plausible cost. Think about how much a court case in the US costs - orders of magnitude more than a company could possibly afford to spend on moderation. Does everybody really think it's possible to design a process that's orders of magnitude cheaper without also being orders of magnitude less accurate?

shkkmo 5y ago
>It's far from clear that a manual review process capable of handling billions of users and reliably producing the correct outcome is even possible at any kind of plausible cost. I would hope that the reason that scaling is hard is because violators would spam the system. If there really are so many legitimate users losing access, then this is a huge problem that we need to hold companies legally accountable for. What we need is a system that disincentives large companies from having too many false positives while disncentiving bad actors from using the appeals process. > Think about how much a court case in the US costs - orders of magnitude more than a company could possibly afford to spend on moderation. You shouldn't need a full court case, it seems like a small claims court type approach would be sufficient. One answer is a solution is used in many places already is to allow the judge to assign court costs to one party or the depending on the facts of the case. > Does everybody really think it's possible to design a process that's orders of magnitude cheaper without also being orders of magnitude less accurate? I absolutely think it is feasible to build a system that doesn't cost too much vs. the level of supplementary accuracy it would provide. I also don't see how we have a choice. In this era where we own nothing and everything is a service, we absolutely need to be able to have accountability for the companies that provide those services. We can't just allow them to cut the services off at their whim with no legal recourse.
- nybble41 5y ago