I happened to watch the video, which was a response to a Tiktok user badmouthing Youtube creators. I didn't really see any bullying, just funny retorts. I guess when it comes to Youtube, they just censor anything as long as enough people complain.

500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute; it's impossible to moderate all of that. "Lots of users reported it in a short timespan" is a reasonable heuristic to quickly remove ISIS beheading videos and whatnot.

It's not perfect, but nothing YouTube does at this kind of scale will be.

Right, but in addition, not providing any transparency to the content creator, or any ability to appeal the decision or re-instate the video in my opinion is unforgivable.

Yeah, the entire process of dealing with exceptions (or indeed, anything that involves human judgement) is atrocious at YouTube, and has been for many years.

jwz wrote about this years ago as well (and there are many more stories): https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/youtubes-joke-of-a-fair-use...

That being said, I feel too many people fail to appreciate the problems YouTube is facing and are too quick to simply shout "censorship!"

That link calls me a brogrammer man child... My ego is hurt.

> 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute; it's impossible to moderate all of that.

Ironically, I hear about this fact every time Youtube makes the news for ... you know ... moderating all of that.

More accurately, they make the news for attempting and failing. Removing something benign is also a failure.

I don't think it's even brigading -- that implies that it's at least humans. The app gained somewhere on the order of tens of millions of one-star reviews over a short period of time. To me, that sounds more like someone's generating the one-star reviews.

CarryMinati has nearly 20 million subscribers[1], and he was just one of many... forces, behind the reviews storm. India has over a billion people with at least 500 million smartphone users[2], tens of millions isn't that out of the way.

[1] https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/addicteda1 [2] https://www.news18.com/news/tech/smartphone-users-in-india-c...

> India has over a billion people with at least 500 million smartphone users, tens of millions isn't that out of the way.

One out of every fifty or so people in a country the size of India getting involved enough in an Internet fight to download and rate an Android app is pretty hard to believe.

10M is a huge number, even for a big country like India.

Indians sure as heck don't need motivation to download TikTok; it was downloaded 323 million times in India over last year.

https://sensortower.com/blog/tiktok-revenue-downloads-2019

In principle I can see the argument that this is low quality content that doesn’t help YT at all, but more salient is how unbelievably easy YT’s moderation system is to abuse. For a company proud of their AI chops, their ability to detect astroturfing is pretty weak.

I posted in other comment, if I tell you that X restaurant sucks because they have rats everywhere, and you go to that restaurant and actually see the rats and rate it as 1 star on Yelp, are those not authentic users? Who counts as authentic user on TikTok, do the people who have viewed videos created on TikTok but shared on Twitter?

> f I tell you that X restaurant sucks because they have rats everywhere, and you go to that restaurant and actually see the rats and rate it as 1 star on Yelp, are those not authentic users?

Yes they are but that's not what's going on here. The barrage of downvotes in this case was the result of a platform feud between Youtube and TikTok content creators who told their userbases to go and vote the app down, and some sort of issue between India and China.

These people likely have not used the app at all, aren't actually evaluating the app itself, and the grievances they have are likely irrelevant to the vast majority of users who look at the rating.

That's not true, there are plenty of disturbing videos of men promoting rapes and assaulting them using chemicals. If those videos were restricted to TikTok, that would have been a different case but TikTok actively promotes sharing these videos on other networks and the viewers have authentic concerns.

I agree that PlayStore is doing it right by removing the reviews that are related to the service but not pertaining to the Android App itself, but then what counts as "using the app"? Seeing the videos created on TikTok counts as "using the app" or just the experience of the app itself? I would describe those reviews as "non-descriptive" than irrelevant, but yes they are very noisy. It's about the same as rating 4chan on trustpilot.

Also, if any country that has banned TikTok, like UAE or Indonesia, because of a different jurisdiction, then it's a valid criticism? If I go to a restaurant, and they only accept Chinese currency, then I would rate it as 1-star since I have only USD and the restaurant is not my preference.