People tend to like these kinds of conclusions where the reality is just a natural result of how things / people are (including myself sometimes), but I really don't think that works with YouTube....
People tend to like these kinds of conclusions where the reality is just a natural result of how things / people are (including myself sometimes), but I really don't think that works with YouTube.
You can reasonably establish that there will be problems at scale no matter what. What does not at all follow from that is that whatever they're doing right now is anywhere near running into those problems with no room to fix anything else. "It's hard to apply a moderation policy across a site this big" is a really tough argument to make when you don't have much of a policy at all and YouTube would still be a broken place even if they could do everything.
This seems like an argument that could gain a lot of traction for hand-waving any suggestions for improvement away, especially in places like Reddit. This might be an okay argument defending the false-positives recently...I don't think it's good at all when it complains why YouTube is a shithole that isn't being made any better.
The thing about Youtube/Reddit/Discord is that they've progressively allowed things to get worse over time and are now wringing their hands about how incredibly high the cost of fixing it would...
The thing about Youtube/Reddit/Discord is that they've progressively allowed things to get worse over time and are now wringing their hands about how incredibly high the cost of fixing it would be. It's not really all that different from arguments against things like accessibility, replacing dysfunctional legacy code, or environmental regulation: the possibilities for full and effective change are discarded because "what if the cost is so high our business tanks as a result".
And it's not exactly bad logic, but it shows how unwilling we are to take chances and attempt to reform the systems we operate in rather than saying "it be like that tho" and hoping everyone will give us a pass.
Yup. They chose to not address these issues when they were small! It's not that people have magically gotten worse and that harmful, abusive, or disruptive content is some brand new thing we're...
Yup. They chose to not address these issues when they were small! It's not that people have magically gotten worse and that harmful, abusive, or disruptive content is some brand new thing we're just discovering as a society. Content moderation has been an issue for every online community I've been in since I first crawled online. The technological meaning of the word "spam" comes from people abusing BBSs back in the 1980s, almost forty years ago.
Nevertheless, we've heard the same chorus over and over again from tech companies. They pursue growth while ignoring or downplaying issues, and then they only begin to address them once they've grown big enough to blame those issues on the very scale they helped create and benefitted from. If I'm being very cynical, I think a lot of internet companies privately like the very content the public is now decrying because it creates engagement and helps their platform and bottom line. For them, growth involves anyone and everyone. It's not until they establish significant market presence or dominance that they then start looking critically at all the people they picked up along the way.
Content moderation falls into the category of "feature" and then shifts to "bug fix"/maintenance very quickly. The only new feature part is implementing the review queue and moderator tools and...
What does not at all follow from that is that whatever they're doing right now is anywhere near running into those problems with no room to fix anything else
Content moderation falls into the category of "feature" and then shifts to "bug fix"/maintenance very quickly. The only new feature part is implementing the review queue and moderator tools and developers at YouTube are probably very happy to work on those things and make themselves look good.
But actually maintaining good content is just a maintenance job. It isn't flashy and the only reward is maintaining a neutral/good status. It doesn't win you awards and hence it doesn't get resources.
[I]t's literally impossible to do content moderation at scale perfectly. … [F]irst off, no one agrees what is the "correct" level of moderation. … Second, even if there were clear and easy choices to make (which there are not), at the scale of most major platforms, even a tiny error rate (of either false positives or false negatives) will still be a very large absolute number of mistakes.
From the comments on TechDirt:
The real problem is not that YouTube is too big to fix, but rather that the Human race is too large to moderate.
Honestly this is the truth. In some ways youtube is already way over moderated, for example banning adult content. There is simply no way we can get the entire planet to agree on a set of rules...
Honestly this is the truth. In some ways youtube is already way over moderated, for example banning adult content. There is simply no way we can get the entire planet to agree on a set of rules for video.
I think the only real solution is to not do things at scale. There should be many smaller websites which each suit the culture of their users. The American video sharing websites could ban all references to adult content while allowing videos of extreme violence and other countries/sub groups get something that suits them.
This is not limited to just youtube. I think humans were just not evolved to be interacting with billions of people daily.
How is that bad? It's pointless to have it on the site; there are alternative sites that offer the same thing, and preventing itself from having a monopoly is undeniably a good thing, no?
Honestly this is the truth. In some ways youtube is already way over moderated, for example banning adult content.
How is that bad? It's pointless to have it on the site; there are alternative sites that offer the same thing, and preventing itself from having a monopoly is undeniably a good thing, no?
We have hardcore porn websites but not websites for youtube like content with some sexual themes. Forcing the two to be separate has removed the middle ground and pushed the idea that sex is...
We have hardcore porn websites but not websites for youtube like content with some sexual themes. Forcing the two to be separate has removed the middle ground and pushed the idea that sex is something that can't be spoken about in public and is something you only ever mention on separate websites you view in incognito mode.
People tend to like these kinds of conclusions where the reality is just a natural result of how things / people are (including myself sometimes), but I really don't think that works with YouTube.
You can reasonably establish that there will be problems at scale no matter what. What does not at all follow from that is that whatever they're doing right now is anywhere near running into those problems with no room to fix anything else. "It's hard to apply a moderation policy across a site this big" is a really tough argument to make when you don't have much of a policy at all and YouTube would still be a broken place even if they could do everything.
This seems like an argument that could gain a lot of traction for hand-waving any suggestions for improvement away, especially in places like Reddit. This might be an okay argument defending the false-positives recently...I don't think it's good at all when it complains why YouTube is a shithole that isn't being made any better.
The thing about Youtube/Reddit/Discord is that they've progressively allowed things to get worse over time and are now wringing their hands about how incredibly high the cost of fixing it would be. It's not really all that different from arguments against things like accessibility, replacing dysfunctional legacy code, or environmental regulation: the possibilities for full and effective change are discarded because "what if the cost is so high our business tanks as a result".
And it's not exactly bad logic, but it shows how unwilling we are to take chances and attempt to reform the systems we operate in rather than saying "it be like that tho" and hoping everyone will give us a pass.
Yup. They chose to not address these issues when they were small! It's not that people have magically gotten worse and that harmful, abusive, or disruptive content is some brand new thing we're just discovering as a society. Content moderation has been an issue for every online community I've been in since I first crawled online. The technological meaning of the word "spam" comes from people abusing BBSs back in the 1980s, almost forty years ago.
Nevertheless, we've heard the same chorus over and over again from tech companies. They pursue growth while ignoring or downplaying issues, and then they only begin to address them once they've grown big enough to blame those issues on the very scale they helped create and benefitted from. If I'm being very cynical, I think a lot of internet companies privately like the very content the public is now decrying because it creates engagement and helps their platform and bottom line. For them, growth involves anyone and everyone. It's not until they establish significant market presence or dominance that they then start looking critically at all the people they picked up along the way.
Content moderation falls into the category of "feature" and then shifts to "bug fix"/maintenance very quickly. The only new feature part is implementing the review queue and moderator tools and developers at YouTube are probably very happy to work on those things and make themselves look good.
But actually maintaining good content is just a maintenance job. It isn't flashy and the only reward is maintaining a neutral/good status. It doesn't win you awards and hence it doesn't get resources.
From the article:
From the comments on TechDirt:
Honestly this is the truth. In some ways youtube is already way over moderated, for example banning adult content. There is simply no way we can get the entire planet to agree on a set of rules for video.
I think the only real solution is to not do things at scale. There should be many smaller websites which each suit the culture of their users. The American video sharing websites could ban all references to adult content while allowing videos of extreme violence and other countries/sub groups get something that suits them.
This is not limited to just youtube. I think humans were just not evolved to be interacting with billions of people daily.
How is that bad? It's pointless to have it on the site; there are alternative sites that offer the same thing, and preventing itself from having a monopoly is undeniably a good thing, no?
We have hardcore porn websites but not websites for youtube like content with some sexual themes. Forcing the two to be separate has removed the middle ground and pushed the idea that sex is something that can't be spoken about in public and is something you only ever mention on separate websites you view in incognito mode.
There are plenty of YouTube videos where the topic is sexual.