But this isn't working as well as it should because the platform / advertising oligopoly is eating up everyone's revenue and using those funds to vertically and horizontally integrate everything under a handful of megacorp brands.

For as long as this consolidation (aka "scale") continues, content moderation will remain "unsolvable".

The thing is, you still have the scale problem even if you break up Youtube into a hundred different video streaming sites.

Say that Google would need to hire a million full-time moderators (in practice it's probably more) to ensure quality moderation for every video uploaded. If it's not sustainable for them to do that, then it won't be sustainable for a hundred companies to hire ten thousand moderators each to do the job.

This is especially bad because bad actors can just post the same content on multiple platforms automatically. Unless platforms start pooling their moderation resources (in which case you're back to square one), having lots of small-scale platforms means that attackers can just upload the same thing on as many platforms as they can and hope it slip through the net in a few cases.

The only way we can stop that, as a society, is if we decide that any platform for content diffusion needs to factor in and charge the price of filtering that content from the get go. That means no more free uploads on Youtube; if you wanna upload something you have to pay a fee for moderators to look over your video and certify it as safe.

I think that would be a viable way for the ecosystem to go, but it would make it harder for small independent creators with no budget to get started.

You can't use made-up numbers to prove your point. Approx 800,000 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every day. Watching all of those in full at normal speed would require only 100,000 full time mods, but that's just about the dumbest way to go about it, so in reality it will be much less.

> it won't be sustainable for a hundred companies

> bad actors can just post the same content on multiple platforms automatically

You'll have to reconcile this fatalism with the myriad of smaller communities managing spam and moderation just fine. Millions (not "hundreds") of topical forums (incl. independent ones, and on platforms like reddit) are doing fine, often without full time or paid moderators.

> if you wanna upload something you have to pay a fee for moderators to look over your video and certify it as safe.

Since no one will opt-in to that willingly while free alternatives exist, you're essentially proposing state-mandated censorship. No thanks. I'd rather Facebook / Youtube just die if their consolidated asses can't keep up with what they created.

No, PeerTube is a decentralized video platform with independent servers, which can work together.

EDIT: A quick search shows that I was asking the wrong question; in practice, there are servers dedicated to exclusively these kinds of videos.

e.g. Imagine the argument was "Disposing of chemicals safely is a no-go at scale"

Businesses don't get to ignore negative externalities just because it's unprofitable

Is it? I'd have imagined there's some ratio of 1 mod per N people for N not too small that would make things work. It might be more like 1:1K instead of the 1:1M (or whatever) that companies prefer, but is that genuinely unaffordable or is it just that companies don't like to pay for moderators?

I think mass media has some fundamental flaws that we havent accepted yet.

Edit: take out advertising in intellectual property and you would get rid of a bunch of bad actors and cobra effects.

However i see this as being a bit like the BBC problem: beleiving there is such a thing as being objective, there just isnt.

You can have a group of likeminded people who mostly agree and need a bit of moderation for when someones external bad day leaks into their interactions on the plaform. However if there is an underlying fundamental difference of opinion or goals then the moderators become just another weapon.

We need leaders not moderators. Moderators in difference of opinion just end up punishing the weak one way or another. Leaders show by example what we can aspire to, which in turn guides moderators in how to apply the rules.

If you have global platforms who are the leaders? What direction should they lead that works for china and the US?

126,000 workers actually seems reasonable to find, the 2 million you'd need at a 1:1k ratio would be hard, I think. The pay is going to be bad, and the garbage you have to watch won't be worth it for most, but you still need a reasonably analytical person to decide if things definitely follow the rules, definitely don't follow the rules, or need to be escalated. And they need to be attentive, because videos can be totally normal and fine and then get abusive later.

[1] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-at-15-my-person...

I think the intent is to have better humans in the loop and to have a human appeal process.

Currently it seems like the human approved removal has no recourse and you’re just hosed.

Not sure the exact process at YouTube though.

And when you consider only flagged videos should *need* to be watched by a human.

What exactly is the problem you're pointing to? Are you saying Facebook couldn't afford to pay that many mods? Note that they don't have to be employees or in Facebook offices...

Yeah, I concede this is a very hard problem (especially when advertisers are involved). And even worse, maybe it's not even worth it to solve. After all, if a minority x% of your creators are expendable to false DMCA takedowns because your market share is so huge, who cares?

Your ISP doesn't moderate for you either.

I regularly hang out in several different communities of thousands of people, including this one. All of them, except the really small ones, have one or a few people who moderate the forums, and ways to report things that are posted. If someone posts a link to disturbing video to HN, it's going to disappear right quick; even if the source lives on. If I try out a community where there's a lot of disturbing videos posted, I'm going to stop going there; but other people might go there specifically because of those video links. If the videos are legal, that's their business and none of mine; I don't want to see it, and by avoiding their community, I won't.

New accounts are easy to create, but new communities are harder because you have to wait for members. Plus most of your moderators are free. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit only pays for people to moderate the default subs since advertisers and new users are more likely to see them.

You could employ a little common sense when designing your product. Is it really wise for platforms like Facebook to allow anyone to start livestreaming unrestricted? I would argue no, at the very least they should be taking measures to minimise the blast radius should someone decide to walk outside and start shooting people.

Exactly, Slashdot works because of its transparency; the user can see, what was moderated down, and thus whether the moderation was done to something he doesn't want to see, or whether it is something that someone else doesn't want him to see.

User moderation via "flag as inappropriate" might work though.