- shake the money stick at them and they will dance (thanks, of all people, Nestle!)
- they've admitted a serious problem exists that they were unwilling to deal with until external pressure forced them to (i.e. they can't be trusted to self regulate)
- they've all but admitted they can't fix this in reasonable time, if at all
This is the first time I can think of where there has been a seriously material chink in Google's.. cultural armour? Turns out the advertisers are in control, and turns out they don't have a technical cure all. It'll be interesting to see how they attempt to reintroduce comments in the long term, no doubt more ML. Of course, this says nothing about a recommendation system that continues to blindly cluster videos of lithe toddlers together. I wonder if any advertisers are making a stink about that
Favourite summary: kids are safer on YouTube today because of Disney and Nestle, not because of Google. Let that sink in. The subtext here of course is that Nestle and Disney are some of the most evil companies around, and yet they're the ones that were forced to strong-arm Google. The irony of this defies words, and the reality of the only mechanism at play here to protect children is almost as disturbing - these companies don't "care about children", they were only forced into action to maintain their reputation.
(gentle reminder: HN punishes highly commented 'controversial' stories. If you care about this issue being more widely understood, try to limit your commenting)
No, they didn't. The problem that Youtube is dealing with is advertisers leaving, not the actual comments. Dealing with the problem of advertisers leaving is different from dealing with those comments. It's unclear whether dealing with those comments is even desirable, because Youtube would, in essence, become the censor of what is and is not okay to post in the comments sections, even if they don't break any codifiable rules or laws. Would you find it acceptable that what your freedom of expression is filtered by rules as unclear as that?
Laowhy86 got his comments disabled because his daughter appeared in some of his videos. If this standard were to be pushed across the board then it would effectively ban comments on any videos that have underage people appear in them. Is this desirable for our society?
>Favourite summary: kids are safer on YouTube today because of Disney and Nestle, not because of Google. Let that sink in.
But this is not true.
Firstly, kids on YouTube were NOT impacted by this. When a creep watches a video of a person then that person is not negatively impacted by it.
Secondly, all you've done is hide the problem. The videos of the kids still exist, the time stamps can still be created. All the creeps need to do is share that information somewhere else. That's it. And the only way to fight this one is to simply bar kids from appearing in any media content. Good luck posting a video of you walking around town or of an event where somebody underage might be.
This is similar to the discussion about whether you are allowed to let your 9 year old go outside unsupervised. It's a question of how much freedom do we allow people and kids in our society. It seems to be that public opinion is on the side of less freedom and more protection.
Unfortunately this is inaccurate. There are billions of daily adolescent YouTube users, some of whom entering puberty that were exposed and continue to be exposed to the recommendation algorithm that created this mess in the first place, and for periods running into hours every evening.
At such an early stage in development, it is absolutely the company's duty of care to ensure that a 5 year old is not being sent up a gradient of a recommendation system that is encouraging them (with the help of the comments just removed) to view people of their own age in a sexual manner. Not only were children impacted by this, but the mechanism that enables it remains active to this day.
I agree with the idea of allowing children outside, but as per my reply to your previous comment, not if that means spending all day in the back yard of the village creepy old man. Balance is required in every situation, and denial of the kind your comment is riddled with accomplishes nothing.
You are talking about a different issue.
>At such an early stage in development, it is absolutely the company's duty of care to ensure that a 5 year old is not being sent up a gradient of a recommendation system that is encouraging them (with the help of the comments just removed) to view people of their own age in a sexual manner.
Why would it be the company's duty of care and not the parent's? The parent should be the one that controls what the child consumes, not some nameless company or the government.
>I agree with the idea of allowing children outside, but as per my reply to your previous comment, not if that means spending all day in the back yard of the village creepy old man.
Again, this should be done by the parent, not by a faceless corporation or the government. It is the parent's job to deal with this.
It is the company's duty of care for the same reason that
- it is the city's duty of care if the child goes outside and falls down an unmaintained manhole
- it is the school's duty of care if a fire extinguisher malfunctions and kills the child
- it is the driver's duty of care if the child crosses the road and gets struck on a green crossing
In all these cases, the entities assume a certain privilege to operate due to the trust placed in them that enables the freedom for the child to go outside whatsoever. If that duty does not exist, then there is no trust the child can safely leave home unattended. In effect what you're arguing for is total control from the parent -- a much worse outcome for a child than self-moderation on behalf of the trusted entities they would otherwise have had the freedom to interact with.
It is the company's duty of care for the same reason that
- it is the city's duty of care if the child goes outside and falls down an unmaintained manhole
- it is the school's duty of care if a fire extinguisher malfunctions and kills the child
- it is the driver's duty of care if the child crosses the road and gets struck on a green crossing
In all these cases, the entities assume a certain privilege to operate due to the trust placed in them that enables the freedom for the child to go outside whatsoever. If that duty does not exist, then there is no trust the child can safely leave home unattended. In effect what you're arguing for is total control from the parent -- a much worse outcome for a child than self-moderation on behalf of the trusted entities they would otherwise have had the freedom to interact with.
But this is not comparable to "going outside" at all. This is "seeking out and going onto private property and seeing stuff you shouldn't". The logic that a company is comparable to public spaces doesn't hold water. YouTube is not a public space any more than Pornhub or 4chan is. If 4chan wanted to cater to 10 year olds (yes yes I know) then the way to do so would clearly not be to remove content not suitable to kids but to create a separate place for those kids.
The ways in which people access community-created content (or commentary) have changed substantially enough that I don't believe this is true any longer. Content providers now bear a portion of this responsibility in addition to child-rearers. That is ethically much more sticky, I'll admit, but I also think that moral imperative does not automatically follow the path of greatest simplicity.
They can, that's enough reason. It's their lawn, they can do whatever they want. If you invite me into your house and I start yelling like crazy (because I have the right to), if you don't like it you would suggest me to get out (gently or not). You will be right. Who am I to complain about what I can or cannot do in your house?
> freedom of expression
Why people always misinterpret what freedom of expression is? It does not apply to the comments section of Youtube. People are not entitled to be heard or to express whatever they want in Youtube comments.
It's not Youtube's responsibility to protect anything, they just need to keep things barely legal. They are doing this because of the dollars and public image. Youtube owes us nothing, let alone guaranteeing our freedom of expression or protecting classes. If they say so, it's just PR.
I don't believe so. We don't let parents send their children down into coal mines, and neither should we allow parents to make their children famous on youtube. Parental rights are secondary to the rights of the child.
Do I want edgelords and abusers all over my screen? Also no.
At this stage I'll take any attempt to do something, even if it is deeply corporate. At least Nestle you can argue with without getting death threats.
(Not always true of e.g. Shell...)
Google already does this, I don't see the issue with it hypothetically happening on YouTube. If you search for a well-known person, place or thing, you'll be presented with information aggregated from trustworthy sources. Can they be wrong? Sure, and it happens. It's not sinister.
It sounds like you're envisioning someone manually tagging things. That would be odd and suboptimal. Instead, just tag helpful Wikipedia pages about the broad scientific consensus of things on relevant videos.
Putting a link under the videos isn’t likely to achieve that, but that’s a separate issue.
The only problem I have with Google doing this, is that I trust corporations and government about the same — i.e. that both will lie and dissemble as much as they are allowed to get away with for their own or their leader’s benefit, without regard for my interests.
Sounds great, I'm all for it.
Sure the truth can be complicated, but I fail to see how implementing software that auto-links to a relevant article on Wikipedia causes Google to be the arbiter of truth.
Even if Google thinks climate change isn't man-made and links to sources backing that up?
There aren't sources backing up that climate change isn't real. That's a hill I'll happily die on. There are plenty of alternative sources which make that claim, but Google does not aggregate facts from them for presentation to its users. Because they don't have evidence.
Like I've said elsewhere in this thread, this isn't a revolutionary idea. Google does it on its search engine and the sky hasn't fallen. I remain unconvinced it would fail if they pushed it out to YouTube.
Note the solution I posed is something which Google already does on its search engine without calamity. Therefore I don't see a reason why it would fail for YouTube. In contrast the example you're giving seems pretty hard to just link to an authoritative source.
Put another way, I'm not advocating for Google to arbitrate the truth on a case by case basis. I'm advocating for Google to identify ahead of time which sources are well-researched and trustworthy, then outsource its fact-linking system to those sources.
If Google were to supply facts on a case by case basis that would be suspect. But that's not how the company operates, so I'm deeply skeptical they would become some kind of arbiter of truth.
There are many things that are debatable, but flat earth? That falls under verifiable facts, and we shouldn't equivocate about those.
Ex: „If banks stop allowing strangers to withdraw money from my account, how will I ever get my money“
And, no, questions of fact aren’t different. The earth is round, not flat. One tree does not a forest make, but a thousand does. Even if we can’t agree on the specific cutoff (is 15 trees a forest? 50? 500?), that does not prevent us from accurately describing the extremes.
This idea that because nobody has a monopoly on the truth then we can't make decision is utterly futile and silly; I have no idea where it originates, except perhaps in the darkest places where reason has utterly collapsed.
There is no reason behind the idea that because we can't totally differentiate between good and bad where the line is blurry then we can't do anything at all. I'd also question whether free speech is intrinsically valuable, more than other actions are. I have seen no convincing reason to think so.
We can approve of good actions (like putting a Wikipedia link about earth science under a flat earther's video) and disapprove of bad ones (like putting flat earth propaganda underneath a scientific video). I see no issue here.
Here we see the vacuity of the harm principle: one can claim anything is (or isn't) harmful in order to attach their favorite idea to it. As an example, some people may be said to be harmed simply by the knowledge that someone is watching pornography in their house. You'd likely say that doesn't "count" as harm - well then what does? As it turns out, controlling speech under your schema is simply a matter of defining what counts as harm and what doesn't. Yet philosophers such as Joel Feinberg and Catherine MacKinnon have pointed out, very few people (if any) would like to live in a society in which only harmful speech (or acts, since there is no meaningful distinction between speech and acts other than invoking body-mind dualism) is not permitted.
Then we get to ideas: who's to say that threats or child porn can't carry ideas in them? In censoring them, aren't we censoring ideas too? Some would say the idea that "it's not so bad to have sex with children" is encoded in every instance of child pornography. What if I made my threat into an art piece?
> In censoring them, aren't we censoring ideas too?
Ideas are by definition abstract and so they should be communicable through some other medium.
Obviously I'm not defending child pornography here, but I think there's a logical flaw in your reasoning.
The fact that ideas can be communicated through other media is irrelevant, since it would mean that we can censor whatever ideas we like in any major category (e.g ideas conveyed in photography and film) but thereby only farcically allow them otherwise (e.g the expression of the idea is only allowed through physical speech).
But censoring one particular medium is not censoring the idea. So your attempt at finding a contradiction doesn't hold water.
>What differentiates the free speech content of child pornography from other pornography, or even art which required harm in its creation?
Consent.
>since it would mean that we can censor whatever ideas we like in any major category
This doesn't follow from my argument that censoring one particular medium is OK. Child porn is a genuine special case (direct harm in its production, lack of consent in dissemination) that doesn't transfer to other mediums that don't have the same problems.
>This doesn't follow from my argument that censoring one particular medium is OK.
It does, since by your own admission, censoring a particular medium does not entail censoring the idea.
>Child porn is a genuine special case (direct harm in its production, lack of consent in dissemination)
So this is what I was getting at - you say it's fine to censor a particular way of conveying an idea due to other harms being associated with that particular way of conveying. In child pornography it's the violation of consent in its production and violation of privacy in its reproduction. Extending this argument from child pornography to regular pornography, some would say there are significant harms involved there too (e.g it conveys the idea that women ought to be subservient to men), and then to hate speech.
The core idea is that speech is not absolute, just like actions aren't absolute. You're free to swing your fist so long as it doesn't hurt anyone, and you're free to say things so long as they don't hurt anyone (or require anyone to be hurt, of course). This means that with a sufficiently convincing empirical dataset, we can outlaw regular pornography and hate speech.
And letting google choose which responses to choose to a search request is essentially also asking them to decide what's true (how many people even go to the second page of results, much less later ones?)
I agree with your sentiment (and am not a gmail user -- yuck!!) but I do sometimes use their search engine...and know that when I use ddg I'm ceding the same authority to them.
My mail and other services run on hardware of mine in a colo. I've had a rack of personal machines in a colo since the mid 90s; before then I simply plugged my machines in at work.
You: sue them out of existence.
We both know what you just typed is bullshit, for good reason.
> You: sue them out of existence.
Well, no, so I wouldn't say that, but, OTOH, saying that might be problematic from an employment noon-discrimination standpoint. And there are other things Google might say that would be problematic from a standpoint of either consumer or securities fraud. Or libel. But none of that is germane to the point under discussion.
This just isn't in touch with reality, but public opinion and pressure has no incentive to be rational, so blunt, restrictive policies like this one are the only path left open to these companies.
I think that the reality is that until very recently there wasn’t a huge bag of money attached the having fantastic moderation tools. I don’t moderate a large YouTube channel, but I will go out on a limb and guess that the tools are rudimentary.
Basic things like scoring the comment poster as well as the comment itself, the ability to have verified commenters (but why should this have to be a manual switch?), the ability to adjust the sensitivity of the classifier based on the intended audience of the video...
There is a massive valley of opportunity in between what we have today, and “magic wands to enforce arbitrarily nuanced moderation policies at scale” and perhaps the biggest comment platform on the Internet just decided they need to turn off comments entirely and if you do turn them back on, you need to do manual human pre-approval on each one.
Uh, spam? Spam has a pretty damn massive bag of money attached to it and nobody has managed to get it right. Every single spam filter catches a ridiculous amount of false-positives and spam is far easier to classify than what's required here. Youtube catches a ridiculous amount of comments as false positives in their spam filter. I can't imagine this new category is going to be any better.
Not to mention quite a few false negatives. And the stakes on this are possibly higher, so it will be tuned toward an even higher false-positive rate.
The existence of the gap also doesn't change the fact that my experience is that implicit in the majority of the mainstream conversation about these topics is is an imagining of tech giants as wielders of unlimited power over their billions of users, and I'm skeptical that they'd be satisfied with most/any of the points in the valley you describe.
Not to mention that the flipside of public opinion is that the caprices of an algorithm are even more hated than their cases of leniency! All of the suggestions you make are going to increase false positives, and the PR backlash I've seen from that is far worse than the backlash to unmoderated content.
That isn't to say that there isn't room for reasonable complaint, but most people are really, really stupid, and even worse, entirely unconcerned with the consistency of their objections (a problem exacerbated by the fact that different vocal subgroups complain about different problems, and our various media will happily signal-boost all of them). Again, I don't see a solution that threads the needle effectively other than blunt restrictions, leaving everyone worse off but neutering the worst of the PR damage.
This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one: the responsibility line is unclear to me, but it seems to me that there's a level of Ludditic absolutism around the topic of Internet platforms that I don't see anywhere else, and it's possible that I'm missing the variable that makes it relevant here where it wasn't elsewhere.
> ensure comments meet a basic level of decency
Decency is famously difficult to define [0]. One person's idea of decency is another's idea of "free and open debate", is another's idea of alternative culture, etc. And the truly bad actors are using throwaway accounts anyway, or will start as soon as you start banning them.
I think active moderation and community curation is the only real solution to this. Sub-communities (formed around particular channels or topics) have to define and enforce their own standards of decency. In this case, I can understand Youtube taking the conservative approach of not trusting communities to do that, especially given a lot of the stories that have come out showing that they aren't.
Have you tried to make a throwaway Google account lately? It's kind of useless to do so. Not so much in the sign-up, but due to the fact that accounts with no history and no clear ties to a physical identity have nothing "vouching" for them, so constantly trip the "Are you a robot?" checks. (And, I imagine, {email, comments, Google Docs shares, etc.} from such accounts also are invisibly thresholded lower on any spam filters they are run through. This is why people write viruses to take over people's existing Google accounts—accounts without "reputation" are kind of worthless for doing anything public-visible.)
This type of system solves a lot of the throwaway-for-purposes-of-evil-behavior problem, and may well be able to do that algorithmically, in lieu of human moderators. In return, it requires people to give up a lot of privacy/anonymity to participate. I don't think that's an inherently good or bad tradeoff, but it is definitely one people should be aware of.
If your company has a platform that is beyond your capacity to manage responsibily, then your platform needs to shrink, or be chopped up.
Google+ started with a requirement for real names didn't it, no adopted identities. They stuck with it for quite some time.
IIRC it did largely cure YouTube comments. But, it damaged engagement, so ...
For Youtube, these kinds of comments threaten to alienate advertisers. Comments only have a miniscule impact on viewer retention and engagement, so if the actual business is threatened by comments you just get rid of the comment system.
Like the big game companies and their kiddie casino business model, it will eventually be slapped down if they can’t control themselves first.
Did it? I don't remember that being true.
This is how I feel about fake new too. It's not exactly what you said, but if your business can't afford to moderate what spews out of it, then adjust your business or shut down.
Those solutions are not perfect and every time Google implemented them they caused collateral damage or even major changes to the whole platform (see the demonetization situation). I believe that they refrain from using them unless pressured to because fixing a problem that is not know to the general public isn't worth the negative PR, complaints, investigations and the damage to stability of the platform.
Maybe the problem is that they don't actually know that much about us.
Since one of the other threads (which one, I cannot remember right now -- one of the adtech ones I think) brought up how much supremely accurate location data Google or FB etc knows about any given user, I have been thinking about how much the megacorps actually know, you know, about us.
If someone knows that I go to the grocery store two or three times per week, do they also know that I detest going to the grocery store? I do it for a reason, of course, but e.g. showing me ads for grocery stores is likely to create negative feelings in me.
So, someone might know I go there a lot, but that doesn't mean they know enough about me to make my world better in any useful way.
I don't doubt that some companies know a lot of objective facts about me -- where I go, what I spend money on, with whom I associate -- but I would be surprised if any of them know much about me, about who I am, about what I really like and dislike, about what motivates me, about what I care about, et cetera.
Maybe they know more than I can possibly imagine; maybe they know less.
Maybe that's not at all why moderating comments programmatically is so difficult. I certainly have no idea. But it makes me wonder.
In reality, if they wanted to fix comments, they could easily do it without any high-tech stuff, through basic UI redesign.
It's the quintessential broken window effect. The comment section design is horrible for actual discussions. People who have something intelligent to day simply don't bother. On the other hand, anyone who wants a place to put some hostile nonsense with high visibility gets exactly that. The behavior gets normalized and the ratio of hostile nonsense keeps itself at a high level.
Do tell.
This is a step in the right direction for google.
The other option is the shadowban, where toxic commenters are hidden without notice. It sounds like a good idea, but just about led to a user revolt when Reddit tried it.
Simply turning off comment sections that have the potential to become toxic may not be the most technologically interesting solution, but it's the safest PR move.
The option available to them is clear, it's just not something anyone is willing to accept: connecting untrustworthy anonymous third parties to the bedrooms of 5 year olds cannot be done safely within the limits of existing technology.
> Would you ban beaches as well, because creeps might watch others on a beach?
No, but nor would I pretend people can shower and change without cubicles, or permit the nearby village to drown during the first storm because I deluded myself in the belief there was no need for a seawall.
There is no rationality to be found in an absolute "save the children at all costs" position, much as there is none in "freedom of speech at all costs". This issue like so many more is nuanced, and I'm surprised people here are so easily willing to deny its possibility, but prefer to get worked up by its very existence or the plain reality nuance is required to solve the problem. Progress is never due to people like that.
No, but you're saying that if we can't limit people from posting bad things then we should remove or change the ability to post. Take that same idea into real life. It's impossible to stop people from saying and doing things without excessively infringing on their freedoms and as a result people say and do bad things. You're arguing that we should excessively infringe on their freedoms to prevent that from happening. This leads me to believe that you are against freedom of expression and speech.
>There is no rationality to be found in an absolute "save the children at all costs" position, much as there is none in "freedom of speech at all costs".
But you didn't express nuance. You categorically said that if a service can't do it, then the service needs to change. If you want to paint a picture of nuance, then express nuance.
And I would argue that freedom of speech is a necessity for a free society, meaning that it is almost "at all costs". I've seen what the Soviet era did with people. I don't want to live in such a society.
Would you categorically state that if the service can't do it, the service should continue in its present form?
Walls are some of the oldest inventions of civilization, and YouTube currently lacks /any/ walls. I'm arguing for some walls in the right places, you're arguing for no walls whatsoever. We have a difference of opinion, it's fine.
I'm not trying to be prickly here, but I've thought quite a lot about freedoms of speech, and I believe for it to concisely work, it cannot unto itself guarantee an audience, as that would still be mandating opinion, only in the other direction. It can provide legal protections, but not protections from social ramifications, as again, this would be mandating opinion one way or the other. We can live in a free society without that freedom meaning I can help myself to my neighbor's wife. THAT is nuance.
They can even make it relatively accurate with 1 error out of 1000 detections.
Sooner or later they will have a false positive that gets a lot of bad publicity as censorship or a false negative on somebody truly horrible.
Just cutting all comments on kid seem like the only option that will allow them to give the impression that they are taking the problem seriously.
Just like they could not afford to have google photo call dark skinned people gorilla 1 time out of 100000 photos. Better to just remove that label entirely.
> It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did.
> But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
> Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons.
...
> The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time.
> Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
I think they’ve given up on ethics and the greater fight for what’s right long ago.
... What? Your evidence is that Salon.com had one article about people who specifically avoid acting on their urges?
>But what is kind of shocking is how anti-free-speech so many on this site are. I'm old enough to remember the idealistic - although rather fatuous in hindsight - early days of the "internet culture" which promoted John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" [0] and John Gilmore's sentiment that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." [1]
The difference is that many of us have seen how bad groups have benefited from the current state of affairs since then. It was easy to be idealistic about free speech on the internet back when it was almost solely populated by academic types. But the world changed, and we don't have to be dogmatic about old ideals.
https://shift.newco.co/2017/12/26/My-Internet-Mea-Culpa/
https://medium.com/@hondanhon/no-ones-coming-it-s-up-to-us-d...
>>When Barlow said “the fact remains that there is not much one can do about bad behavior online except to take faith that the vast majority of what goes on there is not bad behavior,” his position was that we should accept the current state of affairs because there is literally no room for improvement. [...] In my opinion, Barlow’s opinions on online behavior, given his standing and influence were irresponsible. [...] Saying “we can do nothing” is like saying it’s not worth having laws or standards because we can’t achieve perfection.
>and "racist" sentiments, are quite popular in America, Europe, and in all countries among all human populations on earth.
Just because it might be natural or common doesn't make it acceptable and worth spreading.
Exactly my point. This is simply a minority political faction using their political and economic power to silence those they don't agree with, all the while hypocritically pretending it's about pedophilia, which they, more than anyone, have been attempting to mainstream.
>Just because it might be natural or common doesn't make it acceptable and worth spreading.
Unacceptable - to you - you are simply asserting moral superiority. Why should anyone accept your assertion? The left certainly has no objective definition of "racist" which is why certain kinds of "racist" speech are acceptable to leftists. Again, this is the point. You, Google, Facebook, the SPLC and the ADL are simply declaring themselves the moral authority and censoring speech. The pretense at morality is just that, a pretense. It's just a display of raw political and economic power, couched - as naked displays of power typically are - in the language of morality. Many people find your ideas unacceptable and not worth spreading.
> Your evidence is that Salon.com had one article about people who specifically avoid acting on their urges?
That is called "an example" and one could give 100 more from the last 50 years, for instance, the German Green party chairman, who admitted in his own book to molesting children at his leftist school as part of "sexual liberation." But I obviously can't give anymore, because YCombinator doesn't allow expressions of opposition to the Silicon Valley/Democratic party political establishment, hence the removal of my comment.
Now that I think about it, imagine the equivalent of that for other services. For example, imagine if all of Reddit's "default" subreddits (the ones that make up the front page when you're not logged in) had no comments attached to posts. To get comments, you'd have to opt into a community. (Which might very well just be a post-for-post mirror of a "default" community, but with comments enabled.)
Seems like it'd be kind of... nice?
Here are two examples I came across a few minutes ago:
> Grady, to gain a variable flow control, could you use the horizontal angle of a folder weir? If the point of the folded weir was say 5 degrees higher than the outer sides, a slow flowing river would only flow over the lowest parts of the crest. As the flow increased, more of the weir's crest is used by the water, This would effectively self regulate the weir's geometry.
response:
> Such structures exist and they're called compound weirs. These structures come in various cross-section geometries which can be tailored to provide better control of water levels under various discharge rates. The structures discussed with a fixed crest height, also have a fixed relationship between the upstream water level and discharge capacity.
I think that's an interesting exchange, don't you? Nobody is tossing around profanities, neither claimed the earth is flat, called the other a 12 year old, or anything like that. Insightful and constructive comments are common on decent channels, and non-existent on trash channels. That's not really a reflection of how youtube works, but probably a symtom of something more fundamental about human nature.
But yes, in general YouTube commenters are enough to make one question the long-held conventional wisdom that a nuclear war would be a bad thing. I don't envy the people at Google who have to support and maintain the commenting system on YouTube.
Not shocking at all, it's like a typical "welcome to Internet" thing that somebody outside of "computer people culture" gets.
Internet is the future of ads, Internet is also the end of ads.
Ads are made and used by rich, well fed people, and in their majority targeted at people on other side of social ladder.
The TV was perfect for that, it was one sided.
Now, the "reflux" that comes back from the Internet culture is hurting them. When some random nobody can pour dirt and bile on videos of pierre cardin toating, avocado munching "successful people" it destroys that image.
Google really should do it that way: you either agree to have your ads run on every type of scatalogic content, and your image covered by a metre of dirt, or you don't advertise at all.
They can do that.
In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet a basic level of decency.