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The update is more crazy than the initial flagging. Youtube went back and doubled down saying the video violates their "sex and nudity policy". This is a channe

The update is more crazy than the initial flagging. Youtube went back and doubled down saying the video violates their "sex and nudity policy". This is a channel that uploads how a speedrunning record was set https://twitter.com/summoningsalt/status/1575972292395667456 https://twitter.com/summoningsalt/status/1575972292395667456 . The creator only does voiceover explanations, all of the content is gameplay footage, and occasionally a picture in picture video of a speedrunner while they are achieving a specific record. The video is age-restricted again. There comes a point where Youtube is not saving money by automating their content moderation but Youtube decides to keep pushing forward. At some point a competitor that is good enough will arrive and once large creators like this one, around 1.5 million followers, almost every video with over 2 million views, 8 videos with over 5 million views, leave they will pay attention. Until content creators have an alternative choice, Youtube knows they can implement any black box policy and ignore 99% of the backlash. My personal theory is that they are doing manual review but only after an appeal. They definitely have software that flags videos for vulgar language internally, and I imagine only those parts and a couple minutes surrounding it are reviewed. They refuse to elaborate or make their methods public because they see it as a way to combat spam. It's becoming clear that the moderation team is mostly software at this point. I have a different theory that Youtube is also classifying channels into kid friendly and unfriendly based on video content while ignoring the context the channel was made for. Game are generally much more popular among kids, and so this channel was marked as kid friendly. The channel is getting treated with rules that should only apply to kid targeted channels, unfortunately this benefits Youtube way more than the creator. Youtube Kids has ads.

laumars 4y ago
> There comes a point where Youtube is not saving money by automating their content moderation but Youtube decides to keep pushing forward. When you deal with the scale that YT are operating at, automating content moderation is the only cost effective way. > At some point a competitor that is good enough will arrive Competitors have always existed. They existed before YT got big, still exist, and new competitors have been created since. The problem isn’t lack of competition, it’s the network effect. People go on YT, few specifically load YT to go on specific channels. Or to put it in an old world context, people don’t buy a TV for a specific TV show. They buy one to watch lots of TV shows knowing there are multiple shows they could enjoy. So content creators leaving YT doesn’t equate to all their subscribers leaving YT. If anything, what that actually equates to is that content creator loosing viewers. And bare in mind that most content creators will have significantly more viewers (regular + irregular) than the number who’ve subscribed.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  > When you deal with the scale that YT are operating at, automating content moderation is the only cost effective way. Why? If youtube had 30 million in revenue, could they afford a couple moderators? Their revenue is 1000x higher, so can they not afford 1000x as many moderators? Let's take some ballpark estimates. Half a million videos are uploaded per day (probably accurate), and 10% of them reach a thousand views or are on channels that typically reach a thousand views (probably accurate), and 10% of those need a human moderator (probably way too high). Investigation takes 10 minutes with each moderator doing 40 per work day (just a guess, should be sufficient), and averaging 25 per day over the entire year. Multiply all those numbers together, and you get an estimate of 200 moderators to handle all videos of any import. For a company with 30 billion dollars in revenue. Am I super far off on one of those numbers? The fact that it's so hard for medium to large channels to get the attention of a human seems entirely like mismanagement to me, not a real cost issue.
  - glandium 4y ago
    It was 30,000 hours of new content an hour on average a few months ago. That's 720,000 hours a day. The average video is reportedly 11.7 minutes, which makes it about 4M new videos per day. You're off by about an order of magnitude. Edit: 10% of videos with more than a thousand views is reportedly acurate. That makes it 50,000 videos per day according to your numbers, and with 25 videos reviewed a day on average by person, that makes it 2,000 persons with your numbers, not 200, so you're off by another order or magnitude. For 10% of 4M, that would be 16,000 people, or, what, 10% of Alphabet's workforce? Youtube itself reportedly has 2,800 employees.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      Huh, I didn't think a 2016 number would be that wildly different. Okay, 4 million videos. So if we adjust the moderation percent to 5% that would mean 800 moderators. And focusing on videos with 10k views would need 1/4 of that. Videos with 100k views would be 1/10 of that. And this is a channel that gets millions of views. There's only going to be a couple thousand videos per day at the million+ tier. A handful of people could provide white glove moderation to all of them. Edit to your edit: I think you skipped the part where most videos don't need to be reviewed. Take that 16k and divide it by 10 or 20 or 50.
hot_gril 4y ago
Funny, last time I watched a YouTube Kids video, it was a tutorial on how to create a blowtorch using Febreeze and a lighter. The kid nearly burns his hand in the video because he holds it at the wrong angle.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
benj111 4y ago
Surely they should be asking creators whether they classify their vids as kid friendly? For young kids I wouldn't want any swearing or other allusions to adult themes (not that I want my young kids watching YouTube). If you want to aim at young kids the rules should be a lot stricter than the current ones. The current mess is too lax for young kids and too strict for anyone older. And seems to treat educational and entertainment content equally. I want kids to know about the Holocaust. I don't want them watching a possibly racist comedy sketch about gassing Jews though.
- knaik94 4y ago
  I wonder when AI will reach a point where it can reasonably detect and classify more esoteric forms of humor. Deadpan humor is very difficult to explain to a computer, the reason it is funny is because the delivery sounds like it is not a joke. You have to intuit that the speaker would never ever believe what they are saying for it to be funny. At some point even comments will become a signal Youtube uses to decide how to classify videos. And no, there have been many channels over the years that have complained about the age-restriction issue even though they expressed clearly that the are a mixed-audience channel. To show a much much more severe example, here's a tweet showing youtube misclassifying Happy Tree Friends as kids friendly, a cartoon style animated show about cute looking animals that get gruesomely killed in various cruel and disturbing situations. Clearly a parody of things like Tom and Jerry in many ways. Reasonable and artistically meaningful, especially when it came out in 1999, but clearly no human was in that misclassification process. They are 1 to 5 minute episodes. https://twitter.com/Rat_Tail_Tony/status/1215015868515655680 https://twitter.com/Rat_Tail_Tony/status/1215015868515655680
  - benj111 4y ago
    >And no, there have been many channels over the years that have complained about the age-restriction issue even though they expressed clearly that the are a mixed-audience channel. I know. What I'm saying is channels should have the choice of declaring themselves kid friendly and be judged accordingly. The current rules are too lax for kid friendly videos and videos are automatically being put in that slot which is the worst solution for everyone.
rightbyte 4y ago
> It's becoming clear that the moderation team is mostly software at this point. I always assumed that the appeal process was manned by "Mechanical Turks" kind of employees that have to fill insane KPI quotas and don't have the time to do proper reviews. However most appeals probably just hits some brick wall before even reaching the staff.
xani_ 4y ago
> There comes a point where Youtube is not saving money by automating their content moderation but Youtube decides to keep pushing forward. At some point a competitor that is good enough will arrive and once large creators like this one, around 1.5 million followers, almost every video with over 2 million views, 8 videos with over 5 million views, leave they will pay attention. We're waiting for that competitor for last 10 years. It ain't fucking happening. Hell, MS tried that with Mixer, they outright bought out few of the big content creators on Twitch, didn't worked.
faeriechangling 4y ago
I think to address this specific situation all YouTube literally needs to do is to allow you to check your video for copyright/content/etc violations before upload in a robust way. That REALLY shouldn't be impossible for google, literally just run all the checks you're running now at upload time. Then if the robust check failed, a human moderator should be able to apply a manual override. This sort of thing would both be more economical, allow you to get a more through review in advance, and actually be less arbitrary than wholly human moderation.

laumars 4y ago

> There comes a point where Youtube is not saving money by automating their content moderation but Youtube decides to keep pushing forward. When you deal with the scale that YT are operating at, automating content moderation is the only cost effective way. > At some point a competitor that is good enough will arrive Competitors have always existed. They existed before YT got big, still exist, and new competitors have been created since. The problem isn’t lack of competition, it’s the network effect. People go on YT, few specifically load YT to go on specific channels. Or to put it in an old world context, people don’t buy a TV for a specific TV show. They buy one to watch lots of TV shows knowing there are multiple shows they could enjoy. So content creators leaving YT doesn’t equate to all their subscribers leaving YT. If anything, what that actually equates to is that content creator loosing viewers. And bare in mind that most content creators will have significantly more viewers (regular + irregular) than the number who’ve subscribed.

Dylan16807 4y ago
> When you deal with the scale that YT are operating at, automating content moderation is the only cost effective way. Why? If youtube had 30 million in revenue, could they afford a couple moderators? Their revenue is 1000x higher, so can they not afford 1000x as many moderators? Let's take some ballpark estimates. Half a million videos are uploaded per day (probably accurate), and 10% of them reach a thousand views or are on channels that typically reach a thousand views (probably accurate), and 10% of those need a human moderator (probably way too high). Investigation takes 10 minutes with each moderator doing 40 per work day (just a guess, should be sufficient), and averaging 25 per day over the entire year. Multiply all those numbers together, and you get an estimate of 200 moderators to handle all videos of any import. For a company with 30 billion dollars in revenue. Am I super far off on one of those numbers? The fact that it's so hard for medium to large channels to get the attention of a human seems entirely like mismanagement to me, not a real cost issue.
- glandium 4y ago
  It was 30,000 hours of new content an hour on average a few months ago. That's 720,000 hours a day. The average video is reportedly 11.7 minutes, which makes it about 4M new videos per day. You're off by about an order of magnitude. Edit: 10% of videos with more than a thousand views is reportedly acurate. That makes it 50,000 videos per day according to your numbers, and with 25 videos reviewed a day on average by person, that makes it 2,000 persons with your numbers, not 200, so you're off by another order or magnitude. For 10% of 4M, that would be 16,000 people, or, what, 10% of Alphabet's workforce? Youtube itself reportedly has 2,800 employees.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Huh, I didn't think a 2016 number would be that wildly different. Okay, 4 million videos. So if we adjust the moderation percent to 5% that would mean 800 moderators. And focusing on videos with 10k views would need 1/4 of that. Videos with 100k views would be 1/10 of that. And this is a channel that gets millions of views. There's only going to be a couple thousand videos per day at the million+ tier. A handful of people could provide white glove moderation to all of them. Edit to your edit: I think you skipped the part where most videos don't need to be reviewed. Take that 16k and divide it by 10 or 20 or 50.

hot_gril 4y ago

Funny, last time I watched a YouTube Kids video, it was a tutorial on how to create a blowtorch using Febreeze and a lighter. The kid nearly burns his hand in the video because he holds it at the wrong angle.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

benj111 4y ago

Surely they should be asking creators whether they classify their vids as kid friendly? For young kids I wouldn't want any swearing or other allusions to adult themes (not that I want my young kids watching YouTube). If you want to aim at young kids the rules should be a lot stricter than the current ones. The current mess is too lax for young kids and too strict for anyone older. And seems to treat educational and entertainment content equally. I want kids to know about the Holocaust. I don't want them watching a possibly racist comedy sketch about gassing Jews though.

knaik94 4y ago
I wonder when AI will reach a point where it can reasonably detect and classify more esoteric forms of humor. Deadpan humor is very difficult to explain to a computer, the reason it is funny is because the delivery sounds like it is not a joke. You have to intuit that the speaker would never ever believe what they are saying for it to be funny. At some point even comments will become a signal Youtube uses to decide how to classify videos. And no, there have been many channels over the years that have complained about the age-restriction issue even though they expressed clearly that the are a mixed-audience channel. To show a much much more severe example, here's a tweet showing youtube misclassifying Happy Tree Friends as kids friendly, a cartoon style animated show about cute looking animals that get gruesomely killed in various cruel and disturbing situations. Clearly a parody of things like Tom and Jerry in many ways. Reasonable and artistically meaningful, especially when it came out in 1999, but clearly no human was in that misclassification process. They are 1 to 5 minute episodes. https://twitter.com/Rat_Tail_Tony/status/1215015868515655680 https://twitter.com/Rat_Tail_Tony/status/1215015868515655680
- benj111 4y ago
  >And no, there have been many channels over the years that have complained about the age-restriction issue even though they expressed clearly that the are a mixed-audience channel. I know. What I'm saying is channels should have the choice of declaring themselves kid friendly and be judged accordingly. The current rules are too lax for kid friendly videos and videos are automatically being put in that slot which is the worst solution for everyone.

rightbyte 4y ago

> It's becoming clear that the moderation team is mostly software at this point. I always assumed that the appeal process was manned by "Mechanical Turks" kind of employees that have to fill insane KPI quotas and don't have the time to do proper reviews. However most appeals probably just hits some brick wall before even reaching the staff.

xani_ 4y ago

> There comes a point where Youtube is not saving money by automating their content moderation but Youtube decides to keep pushing forward. At some point a competitor that is good enough will arrive and once large creators like this one, around 1.5 million followers, almost every video with over 2 million views, 8 videos with over 5 million views, leave they will pay attention. We're waiting for that competitor for last 10 years. It ain't fucking happening. Hell, MS tried that with Mixer, they outright bought out few of the big content creators on Twitch, didn't worked.

faeriechangling 4y ago

I think to address this specific situation all YouTube literally needs to do is to allow you to check your video for copyright/content/etc violations before upload in a robust way. That REALLY shouldn't be impossible for google, literally just run all the checks you're running now at upload time. Then if the robust check failed, a human moderator should be able to apply a manual override. This sort of thing would both be more economical, allow you to get a more through review in advance, and actually be less arbitrary than wholly human moderation.