> Regardless of what YouTube says, they are an advertiser-friendly entertainment website. Why in God's name would you use it to "chronicle history"?

I don't understand this argument at all. The entire Fourth Estate in the US has always been primarily paid for by advertisers, and just saying YouTube is an "entertainment website" seems like a poor attempt to say it can only be used for cat videos or something.

YouTube is the largest video distribution network on the planet. Of course I think someone would use it to chronicle video history.

As a de facto monopoly, it’s certainly the only one that matters right now. But if, say, the porn tubes wanted to wall off a non-NSFW side, they could become a serious competitor overnight. Or if Netflix or Amazon started allowing end-user content, for that matter.

If someone uploaded non adult content to one of the adult sites doing totally non-controversial things, like discussing smart phones or say a 20 part series on linear algebra, would they be kicked off the platform? Is there some effort to titillate requirement?

I'm imagining some vlogger doing an epic trolling email thread with the mods about how "actually, many people find e&m physics lectures erotic..."

PornHub have lots of non-NSFW contents -- they have no issue with that.

You just don't want NSFW ad popup when you view them.

I have no idea why porn sites wouldn't attempt to compete, their technology is solid, sometimes industry leading. Diversify.

I would also just like to remind everyone that there are many video sites out there that aren’t explicitly porn sites (but do generally allow some level of porn) that are not YouTube. They also tend to have NSFW / scammy ads as those are the only advertisers willing to pay to advertise next to content that wouldn’t be acceptable on YT.

> Why in God's name would you use it to "chronicle history"?

Because for better or for worse these platforms have become the public square. They are where modern life happens.

Clearly YouTube doesn’t want to be a public square.

In that case, they should forgo their section 230 protections and stand boldly as the *publisher* they want to be.

You can't forgo them voluntarily, the section makes it a fact that a service and the service's users cannot be treated as the 'publisher' of content if all they do is re-broadcast or propagate said content. The only way this dream scenario happens is if Google's lawyers put out a statement saying "we accept full responsibility for user-generated content and welcome anyone to sue us over such content, and we will not argue that we are protected under section 230 in court" - and even then, the judge of that court case could still rule that they're protected under 230 since it's law.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

That's why section 230 needs to be re-written. I'm fine with moderation, and I'm fine with sites that publish user-generated content defining their own content rules.

What I'm not fine with - and what the parent article is mainly focused on - are rules that are unevenly enforced in order to play favorites.

I would reform section 230 so say that you must post the site's user-generated content rules, and you must post a moderation log. The moderation log would consist of the list of moderation actions taken and the accounts affected, and the time. Any moderation action that appears to not align with the stated content policy should be reviewable by a third party accredited arbitrator, at the plantiff's expense.

The net effect of this scenario would be to cause the sites to write down detailed rules about content, and enforce them fairly on all sides.

Right now there are simply too many flagrantly biased or inaccurate moderation decisions on these sites, and many of them seem to be motivated by political or economic reasons.

It's one thing to ask that sites be the "public square" because of the huge gift of liability protection that section 230 grants. This argument has not held up in courts. It's a totally different thing to require sites play by their own rules, and hold them accountable for each hypocritical moderation action that genuinely hurts the "little guy"

Paragraph b3 says this: “It is the policy of the United States to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet”

I think the technologies where a centralized commercial company controls which information is received by users violates at least the spirit of that law.

Centralized spam filters are an interesting test case. We generally agree they are good, and necessary. How are they different than algorithmic ordering that we agree to in the TOS?

> How are they different than algorithmic ordering that we agree to in the TOS?

People [would be] consuming the spam content being filtered agree with the filtering and are generally happy with it.

Failing that, when people are unhappy with their spam filter they can adjust or disable it.

As a last resort, they can migrate to another e-mail provider, there's no monopoly on e-mail. Moreover, e-mail is delivered almost equally between different providers.

Many people watching youtube or reading facebook are unhappy with their content policies. There's no way to control their filters or opt out of them. There's de-facto monopoly on these markets: the network effect is too strong, and antimonopoly laws don't seem to apply to their acquisitions of competitors.

Interesting points. I don’t think I’m fully sold on it - something like Tinder would seem to be an interesting thought experiment, where people are unable to move due to network effects.

I definitely appreciate you taking the rime to respond. I’m just not sure that I agree that a network effect is monopolistic. It feels more akin to losing a feature by switching off gmail.

Definitely valid points about turning off the filter, although on gmail, I believe that is only for your personal filters. Google still filters huge amounts of malicious stuff before it gets to the spam folder, by silently dropping it.

> I’m just not sure that I agree that a network effect is monopolistic.

A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors.

Source there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

A social network is very similar to railroad network, electricity distribution network, or landline phone network. Yet we allow Facebook or Youtube to do whatever they please with the servers they own, while regulating the hell out of the older ones.

That's not how the CDA works.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

You seem to be asserting that the only options are “public square” (eligible for section 230 protection) or “publisher”.

It’s not clear to me that section 230 has anything to do with public squares, can you elaborate on your position? Why can’t they be neither a publisher nor a public square?

I’m by no means an expert on this bit of legislation; Wikipedia just says:

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

What makes you think publishers don’t have section 230 protections? Have you ever been to the opinion or comments sections on Fox News?

Any argument AGAINST YouTube (and Twitter) being considered common carriers, and legislated accordingly, should be DOA after the past few weeks.

Because people use what they know and have. There are probably way better tools out there for most things, but if people don't know of their existence or how to use them, then they won't use these better tools.

Look at Minecraft. Some people end up building absolutely incredible things in it. Detailed art. Imagine if they had used a 3D modeling program instead! But those are way harder to use and way less inviting. So, Minecraft it is.

But I would not want to turn Minecraft into a 3D modeling program just because some people use it that way. Similarly, I do not want some external institution to force Youtube to become a video storage platform despite some people using it that way.

From a purely journalistic perspective, it is pretty cheap to run your own site. You can use efficient video codecs and there are many cheap VPS and CDN providers. New technology like peertube and IPFS can make this even cheaper. Taking a for-profit platform like Youtube and forcing it to cater to certain needs just makes it an even more entrenched part of peoples lives. Letting Youtube make itself worse for some purposes/topics encourages users to create and use other platforms.

I am also confused by the implication that if something wasn't posted to YouTube, it didn't happen.

YouTube is not just a platform to host vidoes on. It's a search engine, content feed, and social network. There is no adequate replacement. You can back up your videos somewhere else, but there isn't anywhere else that offers a comparable package.

if a tree falls down in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?

No. By definition, sound is just the way that some creatures interpret waves propagating through the air that hit their weird inner ear structures that gets translated through neural pathways into meaningful qualia

so if you publish on an alternative platform and nobody reads it... no sound.

“But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

Unlike hearing a sound vs. just the pressure waves, data's form doesn't change when someone interacts with it. It's the same before and after. Sure, the pressure waves don't change, but it's the interaction with them that we call sound. Data is data before and after you look at it.

pointing out literal discrepancies to a figurative comparison? I like the cut of your jib.