Side note on communication here.
Any time someone uses a phrase like "Please educate yourself on $THING", they lose a lot of credibility, at least in the context of that communication. Why?
1) It comes across as incredibly dismissive of both any knowledge that that individual may have - especially on HN, I'm pretty sure we're all familiar with YouTube's scale - and of the idea that there may be missing information, on either the situation or context for the other persons point of view.
2) It's quite condescending as well - and if someone thinks that you are coming at a conversation from a combative place, they won't want to listen to what you are saying. Why should they listen if they think you don't care?
3) It's often used to paint broad strokes in places broad strokes may not be appropriate, and the phrase being attached to that makes it lose credibility even when it is appropriate.
---
Ok, now a response to the actual content:
I don't know why we've decided to allow things to exist "at scale" willy nilly. If something becomes a net negative "at scale", don't allow it to be "at scale".
No one is entitled to a business model.
Hear! Hear! We shouldn't have to give over society to the fattest, most insatiable stomachs masquerading as technology companies.
I've taken to thinking of this sort of scaling as being the digital equivalent of race to the bottom (i.e. cheap mass-produced garbage products).
Because we allow things to exist by default. Because we're a free society.
If you want an exception, then recognize and carve that out within the democratic process, not by preemptively applying authoritarianism.
You mean like I'm advocating for now? We've let it exist, and I am now advocating for it to be broken up - like I've been for a while.
Edit: I should specify - I am advocating for platforms at the scale of Facebook/Youtube/Twitter to be broken up in general, with an explicit preference towards federated services. We've let them run, and it's time for this generations round of trust busting. I'm am advocating for it to be run through a legal manner though, and discussed and acted upon via democratic means.
I think that all over comments on my gp we've gotten off topic, my email is available in my profile for anyone who wants to discuss this sort of thing further in any manner.
Mastodon seems promising as a social media replacement, and PeerTube has the tech for YouTube replacements. Both of these two are using ActivityPub, which is on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
The problem comes with content. Matrix is in the strongest position at the moment imho - moving chat platform has the least network effect, and it has the most effective (only?) bridges between "standard" centralized services out of the three. Mastodon has a decent presence, especially of tech people, but not so much outside of the tech or "got banned from twitter" bubbles. PeerTube is in the weakest position of the three afaict - it's mostly again the tech bubble and the "got banned from youtube bubble", but with a much worse distribution.
The tech on Matrix and Mastodon at least seems well established though[0], and I think both would succeed if not for the massive network effects of YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/etc.
My honest opinion is that even if a federated solution doesn't exist or isn't far enough along yet for any of the above it would be better to break down the current state of things and force the creation of one.
[0] I've not used Peertube really, so I don't know how far along it is.
Thanks for the info.
Network effects make this a losing battle, and that will not change until it is forced to - this my advocacy for it to be done via law.
I should not that I have and do occasionally watch content on peertube, there's just sadly not much there.
The conference looks quite interesting, I'll have to try to watch some of the talks this year!
>No one is entitled to a business model.
When it's just ordinary American conservatives being censored by social media, somehow nobody says things like that. Ban Trump and allow the Taliban? There's nothing wrong with that, they're private individuals, they can ban whatever they want. What do you mean nobody is entitled to a business model? Go away with your freeze peach.
<us-pov> FWIW, I see much more domestic harm in letting unchecked lies be spouted by US politicians and having that beamed into our minds non-stop then in allowing people to see atrocities committed by people on the other side of the world.
Yes that goes both ways, I'm an independent.
Edited again: Got too deep into politics on that first edit. Suffice it to say one party is worse than the other in my opinion, and that may color my POV. I still expect to see those who are lying or encouraging violence banned/fact-checked/whatever - on both sides equally.
If one side still has it happen more under those circumstances, I guess that says more about the side then the circumstance. </us-pov>
Also, free speech isn't immunity from repercussions. If I say something incredibly dumb, I expect to be mocked. If I say something hateful/dangerous, I expect people to avoid being associated with me - including being banned under certain circumstances.
I wish we wouldn't equate "free speech" with the first amendment. IMO "free speech" is a much broader concept than the specific legal protections outlined in 1A.
Mocking people for saying things you disagree with ("dumb things") doesn't violate 1A, but that doesn't mean it's aligned with the general ethos of free speech.
I feel I failed to communicate all aspects of my POV above - I definitely agree with this. Also yeah, this did get off topic and I apologize for pushing that even further just now.
In general, I try to advocate more for polite conversation and actual exchange/malleability of ideas - I just also expect for not everyone to agree with that, and to get mocked if I say something stupid.
The bigger thing is association - If I say something that someone else finds reprehensible, I bear them no ill will for trying to stop themselves from being associated with me, regardless of if that's through banning/mocking/public press conference[0]/a music video[0]/anything else.
[0] I'm glad I don't have a big enough platform to worry about these though.
Well, people are facing repercussions for viewing pro-Ukraine material. There's no immunity from repercussions, right?
(Or more precisely, people are facing repercussions for violating the algorithms that Google chose. But they're still repercussions.)
The point is that there's a double standard. If social media censors someone you hate, it's "there's no freedom from repercussions" or "they're a private group so they can ban anyone they want" or "their system, their rules". If they censor someone you like, this suddenly changes to "nobody is entitled to a business model" and "Youtube has no right to operate like that".
The issue is when automated banning leads to there not being a human in the loop, or when "well it's just the algorithm" becomes the go to excuse.
Please be less smug.
YouTube has no right or requirement to operate at that scale. They've consciously decided to scale past what they're able to manage well. This is no different than a developer who produces terrible non-functional code but defends it to their boss by pointing out the line count is really high.
I'd be impressed by their scale only if they managed to maintain some level of quality also.
so only you can be smug, eh ?
> They've consciously decided to scale past what they're able to manage well.
That is not true. They are doing quite well considering the overall scale.
> I'd be impressed by their scale only if they managed to maintain some level of quality also.
So you assess quality by random one-off/anecdotal articles always highlighting the negative ? How do you know what their quality is when you can never know the number of abusive videos correctly blocked ?
You're being very condescending when it's totally unwarranted. I assure you people are aware of the scale of YouTube.
But why should we give YouTube a free pass? You're talking about the service as if it's a force of nature rather than something human created and managed. Why are they entitled to operate at a scale beyond their own control, all while extracting huge profits?
Some people just want to throw their hands up: "Dealing with infinite uploads is hard!" "It doesn't scale!" without realizing the youtube is responsible for the very problem they created. They designed it this way!
If anything, YouTube's scale gives it a better chance of being able to address this issue, since there are likely fixed costs here that YouTube can better fund (obviously investing in better automated screening, but also setting up the workflows for human moderation, etc.) I think the only benefit a smaller scale competitor has is that they're less visible and unlikely to be "caught" for hosting content they "shouldn't". But if the rules applied equally to everyone, I think YouTube is strictly at an advantage in being able to implement better human moderation.
If I were designing from scratch, I would probably use a Peertube/Mastodon type federated system.
Each host would responsible for the videos they host - meaning they would have incentive to limit videos uploaded to any given host to an amount they could handle, or only allow trusted uploaders to their host.
Then you would have the federation so that you could allow hosts that you didn't have issues with, while blocking those you did. Eventually, there would evolve safe/block lists - like with email and adblockers - so it wouldn't even require that much effort on the parts of those running the hosts.
Secondly, for the folks saying why should we allow youtube to scale beyond what it can handle, or why should we accept the 99.99% precision ?
It is because I do not see a futuristic society in which humans are doing work like "manual reviews" - to progress humanity we need to automate such manual labour so I support the fact that companies are testing the limits of automatic content moderation - and working to improve it - I see it as a win overall. Adding human reviewers would be a step in the backward direction IMO.
Why are you assuming that HN readers don't understand YT scale?
You do know that HN has readers who have built things at YouTube scale, including YouTube itself, right?
even classifiers with 99.99% precision means hundreds of thousands of videos and channels will be incorrectly marked as abusive every year - we just need to accept that and hope that the automated systems are improved over time.