Who pays for the moderators? You still need a lot of manpower if you don't want algorithms, regardless of whether you have one Youtube or a thousand SpecialInterestTube.

Tech is very special in a way where they can get away with claiming that quite a lot is not possible at their scale. Imagine this for other industries.

"We cannot do quality control before sending products out. We make too much stuff."

"We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people."

"Cleaning the entire building is not possible. It's too much space."

All the examples you provide have to do with tangible, physical things. Tech is in some sense special because we're dealing with intangibles. It costs a bad actor next to nothing to upload the same video with harmful content to YouTube a thousand times, a million times even. And YouTube has to deal with all of this.

That's why they still use physical ballots in most elections: as soon as you're dealing with physical things the costs for a bad actor to do bad things at scale balloon up.

But Tech also enjoys the benefits of this. You make a product once, sell it thousands of times. Or allow thousands/millions of people access without much overhead. I'm simplifying here of course, but compared to e.g. a machine which you have to produce new for each customer I think we are in a very good situation. And with that advantage comes a price tech should be forced to pay.

But a bad actor can only do so much if manual reviews are involved. If they’re a completely new account because their previous accounts have been banned, accessing on a new device because their previous Alphabet-surveilled fingerprint had been banned, or on a VPN because their IP has been banned, YouTube could just implement manual review which would slow such a bad actor down. And if the intent is to clog up the manual review process with whatever copies of a single illegal video Alphabet we already have technology that is used to automatically identify specific videos or images and remove them, usually for purposes of preventing the spread of illegal depictions of children.

If you change the MAC address on your cable modem you can get tons of different IPs. Same thing with cellular networks. With raspberryPis so cheap, fingerprints don't work that well for all devices.

There are relatively few people capable of doing this compared to the population of the world that uses YouTube, and there’s even fewer people who, even with capacity, will be doing this just to upload illegal content into YouTube. I think this sizes down the problem of manual review quite easily.

So what you’re saying is that their’s market for obtaining different ip numbers.. its almost exactly like a commercial VPN service

IPs are very cheap. Botnets are huge and residential IPs are easy to come by.

"We cannot do quality control before sending products out. We make too much stuff."

Ever buy strawberries?

"We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people."

Train conductors often check tickets after the train has started moving.

"Cleaning the entire building is not possible. It's too much space."

Climate change. Dirty streets.

Very much so. Tech companies have a way of confusing "this is difficult" with "this is impossible," or "this is impossible" with "this isn't free," or "this is impossible" with "we don't want to."

They are incentivized to have that confusion. So no surprise.

There are few other industries where users expect to get everything for free.

And those things are paid for. It would be perfectly reasonable if you had to pay per minute for uploading video and people had to pay for a subscription to watch it. That's just not what is expected for a mass platform today.

Vimeo has an “uploader pays” system (of sorts), and, while it prevents garbage on the platform, it stops creators from wanting to use it when YouTube is free.

Yes. It's of course a perfectly valid (and widely-used) model to pay for hosting. But, by and large, only "serious" users who probably otherwise have a business model will do so. And there will inevitably be far less content on the platform.

On the one hand, I think it's sort of unfortunate that so much of the Web has come to be about "free" access (though paying for access with attention and time) but that does come from the perspective of someone who would be able and happy to pay with money instead.

It's expected because the expectations are set by the existing platforms. And the reason why Google specifically is actively promoting those expectations, is that it makes ads the only viable business model for content creators; and Google's primary source of income is their ad services, so it maintains their dominant market position.

"We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people."

This happens in some public transport operators already.

It's argued that in some cities public transport systems the price of the ticket doesn't cover the cost of its own infrastructure, the machines to buy them, the ones to validate them the salaries of the agents verifying, etc. It can be more cost effective to drop the concept of ticket and make it a free public service.

I agree with all that, but some central governments such as Turkey go to great lengths to make public transport a paid service. The best public transport is the free one indeed.

There's a massive difference between centralized production of physical goods vs user-generated digital assets. Scale itself becomes the challenge.

Google had a revenue of $180B in 2020, and their EBITDA was $55B. I'm no accountant but that sounds like an absolutely insane profit margin. 8-12% would seem much more palatable, so that means they have over 25B of excess profits they could spend on 500.000 middle class incomes for content moderators.

YouTube represents 10% of Google's income BTW, so the other 90% of middle class incomes could do moderation for their other services.

Is that naieve?

I usually frame it this way - Mazda Motor Corporation, an order of magnitude smaller company can provide me with a several salons in my < 2mil population country where there are physical people that will fix my problem.

And Google, the mighty megacorporation, can't even clear a basic phone support bar, much less a local user support office in each region? Something normal for other corporations?

Mazda earns several hundred to several thousand dollars of profit from the sale of a car to you. Google earns an order of magnitude or two less per user.

They also had to source parts, manufacture it, transport it via boat and train, then pay someone to show me through all the buttons, clean it and then offer service at least once every year.

Besides that they also provide 24 hour support for breakdowns and plenty of other services.

And at best, they made 10% (!!) gross margin on my car - which is of a range of 2500$. Meanwhile Google has 45-60% (!!) profit margins while not giving a crap.

Mazda spends several hours in pre- and after sales on each car. Google could automate 99.99% of moderation, and spend literal seconds on 90% of all further moderation per user. A magnitude or 3 less human attention than Mazda's sales pipeline spends on a user would be worlds better than what Google does now.

I've seen YouTube channels with thousands of dollars of monthly revenue be closed over issues that would've taken a trained human less than 10 minutes to resolve. YouTubers with that kind of revenue are literally one in a million users or so.

Thousands of dollars are only possible with luxury cars.

VW, one of the two largest auto makers, makes around 300€ profit per vehicle sale (excluding luxury brands). For some models it's even less than 100€. You can calculate around 1% profit for a car sale, often less.

The actual money is in leasing and financing, which is why almost all automakers own a bank.

>>VW, one of the two largest auto makers, makes around 300€ profit per vehicle sale (excluding luxury brands).

Seeing as it's absolutely trivial to negotiate 10% discount on any new VW car, I struggle to see how that's true? Unless you mean that VW makes 300 euro and the rest is the profit of the dealership?

Even if that's true, VW makes an absolute mountain of money through financial services. Yes, they will make very little profit selling you a £12k Polo, but VW Financial Services will make £2-3k just providing you with a financial agreement for it.

I don't see how you are contradicting me? That's exactly what I said. The dealer doesn't matter here, it's just about the manufacturer.

Oh it's not about contradiction, I'm just curious where the 300€ value comes from.

Without disagreeing with your point, I do think there's something to be said for the more specialized sites the Internet used to specialize in. Places that foster a sense of community tend to wind up with users who are happy to pitch in when something doesn't look right (or get overrun by spammers if the community isn't able to deal with the issues). I am happy to pull weeds in a community garden in a way I will not at some factory farm. This approach isn't a utopia; people are people and everything is political, but at smaller scales, saying "Well, just start your own [niche] video site" isn't snark, it's a realistic thing and perhaps both sites contribute to the marketplace of ideas. YouTube is the marketplace of the unthinking.

I think it's much less work on SpecialInterestTube. On YouTube there's a huge amount of decisions and ideas the moderator has to take into account. The other one can filter a large amount of spam with "the first 5 seconds make it clear it's not SpecialInterest".

For example comparing to HN, I can go on "New" and see "Places to Spray a Fragrance on for a Long Lasting Effect-Ajulu's Thoughts" - I know it's immediately flaggable, even if it could be a valid post on another website. (and require a full review there to check it doesn't break some specific rules)

It's definitely not just a money thing, because even major channels that bring in lots of money can't get someone to review their cases.

Hackaday.com does just fine.

YouTube was fine before Google.

Stop centralising.

YouTube was bought in 2006 - not much time to even think about having a content problem or adpocalypse.

0: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15196982

Let people have the detestable YouTube TV for free as mods.

What if... people could make their own websites and host their own videos, and people could link to each other's content?

You mean, like the open standards-based Fediverse, where there are also no ads and algoritmic feeds optimizing for engagement?

Isn't that basically how reddit operates? And last I heard they have their native video hosting as well. Sounds like this could work, but doesn't quite at the moment. Is YouTube handling content discovery better? Network effects maybe?

Reddit is interest-based but gets free labor from most subreddit moderators that remove bad content for them. Reddit is also much less lucrative of a content platform given you have limited ways to make money (usually limited to linking to your patreon), so the content is constrained to whatever people do with no expectation of money.

>What if... instead of YouTube you'd have several intereset based sites which could actually handle their moderation and workload instead of being a giant uncaring behemoth?

What if... the average viewer was willing to pay for video content instead of requiring a free, unprofitable service run as a "Free add-on" to an Ad Empire?

Youtube may finally be profitable in the past few years but the first 90% of its existence, the entire rise to power, it was unprofitable and run at a loss. There aren't other major providers because no one else wants to lose that much money

> What if... the average viewer was willing to pay for video content

That would solve all of our problems, wouldn't it? Too bad there's likely always going to be someone willing to offer the same service for free + ads and/or selling users data. Unless people start valuing their privacy/data much more than they do at the moment (or regulation comes in), it's just wishful thinking.

It would solve a couple problems. I don't see how it would solve this problem.

Have you forgotten abour Netflix and the innumerable streaming services out there as every studio and their dog's mother wants to claim 100% of the pie? The money isn't an issue - it is a freudian slip that either you want it to be like cable or are blindly repeating the words of someone who does.

If you don't like youtube's free service you can get your money back.

That will end up just like paywalls on news sites. It’s the best way forward (with tweaks), but ultimately will fail unless everyone participates.

Services like Brilliant and others are attempting what you’re suggesting, though.

That may have worked in the pre-iPhone Internet, where it took effort to become a part of communities, and everyone implicitly understood that. Now, it's a rock vs. a hard place: the masses want centralized platforms, but those centralized platforms are proving cancerous to society.

The masses don’t want centralized platforms or decentralized platforms. The masses don’t care how things work. What the masses want is an easy to use, fast platform. Centralized systems have been the best at providing that because they are easier to engineer and because there is an economic model via ads and surveillance.