Just a thought experiment, does Youtube need to be as big as it is? Can’t Youtube say “given the current accuracy/precision of ML based solutions and how much our manual operations can scale, we are going to rate limit the content that circulates to match our ability of giving the best judgment on what videos to take down and what videos to keep”. Physical stores have maximum occupancy limits, and with coronavirus some even shown proactive rate limiting to say “hey, we can’t ensure transmission control above a certain density”. Those are corporations too, those also have fiduciary duty.
I think “growth at all costs” is a major driver of these types of failures, especially when costs are externalized and distributed to the userbase; one annoying notification, one abuse feature change, one harmful policy decision at a time.
> Go find rates, not anecdotes, then you might have something
Youtube has near perfect knowledge of the warm data of their operations, and use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it, while we only get to know others are being abused when news make it to Hacker News. The inability to find the rates is inherent to the problem. Short of sneaking into Youtube data centers, there is only so much data you can find without Youtube’s say so. Which brings the question, for such a massive policy layer operation, why is this data not made transparent?
A few scattered moderation complaints compared to wholesale rate limiting of incoming content... I can only imagine the madness of content producers if YouTube tried that.
>Youtube has near perfect knowledge of the warm data of their operations, and use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it
YouTube content moderation isn't human spaceflight. Having a goal of never failing is, well, a very inexperienced way of thinking about failure. On the order of half a million hours of new video content a day goes on YouTube, or something like 6 million uploads.
Let's just pretend that the moderation decision is only made once on upload, you make 6 million decisions a day, how many ridiculous decisions are you going to make every day?
Do you think that number is ever going to be zero? The reality is that there is an exponential relationship.
Let's just say you can double your cost to cut failures in half. If it's not that relationship it'll be something like it.
You can just keep doing it. Doubling your cost over and over, and you're still going to fail all the time. When a "one in a million" chance means something happens several times a day, well, you have to have a different attitude about failure.
And when you're just about the only game in town, whatever you do to mitigate failure is going to attract people trying to screw with you to upset you and your users, to take advantage. Not only are you trying not to fail every day, you're trying to avoid people exploiting those attempts. It's just reality that you have a popular service, there is going to be some nonzero number of very upset users with just cause to be upset. That's just reality.
I'm sure there is already some per-user upload rate limits in place to prevent gross abuse. It is a matter of playing with these parameters. Rate limits don't have to be distributed mindlessly equally globally. Just like in Hacker News or in Twitter, certain proxy variables like the account age and karma scores are used to assess abuse potential and certain capabilities of the platform is unlocked to the user. Most probably something like this also exists. Again, it is a matter of playing with these parameters.
Additionally, "few scattered complaints" suffer from selection bias in telling what is actually going on. Not all policy (mis)applications transform into a complaint. If I had to guess, the ratio could be at least an order of magnitude but obviously we have no data on this.
> Do you think that number is ever going to be zero?
Zero complaints is a straw-man end-state. Of course there is going to be diminishing returns. You can aim to minimize user complaints at 80% to save from diminishing returns, or you can aim to maximize platform usage and ad revenue and take user frustration into account only to the extent it affects platform usage maximization. You can operate on either goals while paying attention to diminishing returns.
Very simplistically, there is a relationship such that "for every x dollars we don't spend on reducing abuse, we lose y dollars in user frustration". Who decides the satisficing ratio between x and y? This optimization is done asymmetrically by these types of services and in general there is no way for us to say "wait a second, turns out you were abusing your users/letting them get abused more than you should while making a smidge more profit out of it" with such information asymmetry.
Yet that's what the grandparent comment is suggesting:
> Can’t Youtube say “given the current accuracy/precision of ML based solutions and how much our manual operations can scale, we are going to rate limit the content that circulates to match our ability of giving the best judgment on what videos to take down and what videos to keep”.
YT already does this abuse-prevention, they just lean towards letting more content on rather than less. The grandparent suggests that they start limiting uploads in a way that more regular uploaders (eg. a few videos a day) would feel, which would warrant some explanation or statement from the company.
Come on. It is more than a lean. Growth is an explicit, fractal goal at every level.
> The grandparent suggests that they start limiting uploads in a way that more regular uploaders (eg. a few videos a day) would feel
I didn't give implementation details on the rate limit, because as I preambled, this was a thought experiment, not a design document. They whole point is to underline the fact that, there is a cost of making the review process better (whether automatic or manual) and to what extent corners should be cut versus this cost should be paid seems to be informed by the objective to grow at any cost.
The comment of yours I was responding to
>use it to optimize user frustration rather than minimize it
It is not at all a straw man. You are criticizing nonzero optimization and encouraging minimization. To minimize is to have a goal of zero. What other definitions do minimize and optimize have in the dichotomy you are trying to make here?
That's not what minimize means at all, hence my straw man argument. Minimize means reducing the amount as much as possible while still satisfying other parameters of your equation. Zero makes the whole operation nonviable as we agree due to diminishing returns, so it doesn't satisfy that definition.
The dichotomy of optimizing user frustration and minimizing user frustration is basically a question of what parameter gets what valence in the whole objective function. Maximizing profit at the expense of user frustration is optimizing user frustration, meaning having the perfect amount of user frustration in which their leaving the platform and the cost of reducing the frustration is on balance. Minimizing user frustration means doing this the other way around and having a product that, as Google claims, serves "the user first". If you understood that to be zero, I hope it is clear now. At any rate my point doesn't hinge on what the minimal point is. It is clear that any goal other than optimizing user frustration will be an improvement to current situation as far as what users get out of the transaction, and it is unlikely to be adopted.
> basically a question of what parameter gets what valence in the whole objective function
You're splitting extremely fine hairs there, your difference between minimize and optimize seems to be not much more than how much you like a term "satisfying other parameters of your equation".
>Minimize means reducing the amount as much as possible while still satisfying other parameters of your equation.
You have to stop after "as much as possible". Adding a "while still" makes it optimization, your value judgment doesn't get to determine what does and does not fit inside the "while still" of minimize.
Once somebody calls me out for a logical fallacy based on their own difficult to understand definitions of seemingly common words... if that can't be resolved there really isn't a point in continuing, it's not like we could really communicate anything much less make arguments if we can't agree what minimize means.
I'll try to simplify it. Imagine a function with dependent and independent variables. Choosing an independent variable so that the dependent variable is the minimum is minimizing. Imagine the plotting of the equation, we are still trying to be on the curve. That's what "as much as possible" means. You are saying minimizing has to be when that dependent variable is zero. That is only possible if the equation crosses the x axis. For our case, it doesn't because diminishing returns make that impossible. Hence my calling strawman.
> You're splitting extremely fine hairs there
The thing I've been trying to separate is not optimization and minimization because minimization is a particular type of optimization. I'm trying to distinguish what particular variable is given valence while solving the whole system of equations. Because in a case where two of those variables are correlated (user frustration & revenue), picking one over the other chooses different optima for both (optimizing for user frustration vs optimizing for revenue yields different optimum values for their correlated counter-parts; for revenue and user frustration respectively). I want to emphasize, these variables are not independent with respect to each other. So there is no simple "revenue is max and frustration is min" solution for which we could say "youtube should just optimize the whole thing". There is picking to be made and max revenue is picked over min frustration, always.
Picking up on me using words "optimize" vs "minimize" for two different variables appears to me as further strawmanning. I don't ascribe malintent, but what we have been discussing has been irrelevant to the conclusion of the original post from the beginning.
In other words, if you can't afford to buy cars and hire drivers and comply with all regulations then don't compete with Uber. The missing part is, Uber intentionally cuts these things out of its business model so you can't… I guess it would be, drive for Uber until you can afford a real taxi medallion.
Likewise, I think being a YouTuber you will NEVER be able to earn enough money that you can jump ship to a competing video service with better conditions, because no such service (?) exists at the scale and audience of YouTube, because YouTube runs at a substantial loss in order to completely own the market for non-trivial uses.
That's valuable. How valuable? Stock market valuable: as in, people with money THINK it is valuable, and I don't think the reality has been well tested yet. We're still in the world where dominating and monopolizing is seen as super valuable, because of some immense perceived payback that you apparently get to do.
That said there would be some privacy concerns if that data was just floating around out there.
Of course that might create another incentive for Google not to provide any customer service at all until people pay.
But YouTube is still a platform you must be on if you care about expanding your viewership.
Of course it's not easy. You have to figure out growth for yourself, and most indie businesses and projects fail. Then again, so do most YouTube channels. So it's up to you to choose the indie path or choose YouTube.
I don't remember any of the Internet idealism of the 90s mentioning the great progress of sharing information involving the creator of every piece of data available making a fraction of a cent every time it was consumed.
I don't mind people getting paid to do things of course, but I do mind a culture dominated by selling each other's attention to advertisers in exchange for creative output, or creative output solely for the dopamine shot from attention and likes.
I don't see that at all. Encouraging people to do things for their own merit and not just to make money – and we have to be realistic here, most people trying to make money on YouTube or anywhere by creating content won't ever see a single dollar from it, so it's more like trying to win a crappy lottery.
It's this constant sense of entitlement or talking like people are forced into making videos for a living which bothers me. It's a crappy job that is pretty easy to know how it works before you get into it. I keep seeing "no choice", well you can always do something else.
I guess I don't like the entitlement/blame cycle where people who help create a problem complain about the consequences.
Be the change we want to see in the world. Stop posting on YT/FB/IG/wherever, and create your own site, attract your own audience.
I'll come watch you/read it/listen to it. I'm sick of FB/YT/IG/wherever.
I have seen that, particularly in history channel circles were the content get demonetized for things like saying Hitler, many of them band together and publish to youtube last or not at all and promote these other channels in their videos. I don't know if any of them will be successful, but staying on youtube simply isn't an option for them either.
I think if/when youtube falters it will be death be a thousand cuts, it won't be a single movement with organization and it won't be to something else as centralized.
If one is not willing, capable, or even interested in trying to solve problems they help create, as an individual or a group, I have very little interest in sympathy for their difficulty.
Refusing your pet idea isn't a refusal to do anything at all.
At some point, people need to realize what constantly wanting things for free is costing them and the people they watch.
It's not free, we pay for the content by buying products, it's just very very indirect.
Which is the Star Trek model. It's the future of 'nobody has to work to eat, and so now people go insane trying to pursue popularity since survival's a solved problem'.
That makes it interesting in its own right, and we can already see both the possibilities and the 'race to the bottom' factor that ensues.
If you aren't making enough money on YouTube to be able to afford paying someone to host your content and provide better, paid customer service, then you have to consider that the risk of being on a mostly automated, poorly supported platform is the only thing keeping you from losing money, or in other words, is the sole source of your income.
When you are as big as Google, very improbable failures happen all the time, pointing them out doesn't tell the story of how well they're doing unless your expectation is constant perfection. Go find rates, not anecdotes, then you might have something.
Also, if you're being blackmailed and harassed, it would seem to be a matter for the police and the courts, not Google, to fix.