Originally published at: YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning instructions, but leaves up the lethal tips | Boing Boing
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YouTube moderation:
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I wish I could express more surprise; but all of the youtube entities I watch who ever move into a self-reflective/talking shop about what they do voice at times speak of “the algorithm” in tones normally adopted by people who see their belief in malevolent gods that demand sacrifice as simply a part of life.
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We serve The Algorithm as it serves us, all hail The Algorithm.
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YouTube, the internet equivalent of the school principal who expels students for defending themselves against bullies, ignoring all attempts at logic and reasoning while the bullies laugh and carry on as before.
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Also, at the moment, SCOTUS.
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If there has to be a single video-sharing site for the whole world, then it’s either an unmoderated cesspit or it has some form of “the algorithm”. And that algorithm is going to have complex, dynamic, adversarial problems, so you probably don’t want it to be fixed and transparent.
What you want is for the referees to be transparent about what they’re aiming to achieve, and accountable for how well they’re doing. Does youtube actually care about content quality, or is it only about volume? In other words, when they fuck over creators like Ann Reardon in favor of creepy content farms, do they regard that as a bug or a feature? Because if it’s the latter, then we should all be looking for an alternative.
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Oh, but it’s even worse. YouTube seems to be doing a terrible job removing creepshot videos and other such material, but on the other hand they’re easily tricked by some asshole with bots to target the chats of streamers to falsely claim said streamers is naked or doing lewd acts… even if said streamer is using a avatar that’s not capable of such things haha
Or how easy an vindictive asshole can fake DMCA reports
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It’s hard to think of a more wholesome channel than Ann Reardon’s and now she has branched into actual lifesaving she must be considered a genuine Ozzie hero.
This is clearly a dumb decision and I’m glad she’s appealed the decision. So I hope that is read by a human who then looks at the horror show of wood burning videos they are promoting and bans them instead. But it would be good if for once YouTube actually explained their decision-making process and admit they get things wrong.
And if there is anyone out there that hasn’t watched Ann’s excellent videos about content farms and their gaming of YouTube to the detriment of actual creators - well here you go:
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I can only assume the reason for YouTube’s “guilty until proven innocent” policy is that it costs less to blindly accept all claims, take down videos and simply ignore all appeals than to actively evaluate the claims before taking anything down. Thus, instead of having an entire customer service department, YouTube is able to get by with one person in a broom closet (and that “person” may in fact just be an upside-down mop propped up against a chair).
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There is Craft and there is Deep Craft
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“One easy trick to kill yourself dead.”
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And the bass in Deep Craft will rock you, guaranteed.
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Ok so when I posted this, in response to this post, I had not considered just how fuckwittedly YT would treat this matter:
I hope nobody else dies from following one of these dumb fractal burning instructional videos, but if they do I really hope their relatives find a lawyer with the balls to take YT on and sue the fuckers from here to kingdom come.
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To be clear, I am not defending YouTube’s incredibly shitty policies and practices here. Having said that and donned my fire suit…
Most people don’t realize how much content is uploaded to YouTube. It would be literally physically impossible for a group of humans to evaluate all claims on this amount of content. The scale of this is so much larger than people realize. As of this writing, roughly 720,000 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube per day. Some percentage of those all get content flags on them. There is no team of humans big enough to handle that.
As a society, we are now grappling with this problem. Is it better, then, to limit access to this resource to a smaller scale so we can prevent harm? This was basically what older models like broadcast TV did. The reason for the limiting was not harm reduction of course, but rather because broadcast TV is expensive and technically limited in scope. However the net result was it was really difficult to get on broadcast TV because it was a tiny, tightly controlled resource. That also meant we didn’t get harassment and Nazis, which was really nice. However I literally make my living by uploading (nice) videos to YouTube, which I never could have done in the old extreme-gatekeeping model.
I don’t have the answers, I just came to say that when people demand YouTube put humans in all the loops, they usually don’t appreciate the scale of the problem.
To be clear, I also do not think terrible “banning algorithms” are the answer either. Those algorithms are supposed to be “imperfect, but at least prevents Nazis”, however they are clearly failing miserably at that low bar, so they should find something better.
A big part of the problem here is the incentives in the market are wrong. YouTube’s only motivation to fix this problem is to prevent the occasional scathing writeup on Jezebel or VICE. Beyond that, if the money is green, they’ll take it. If (perhaps) some sort of content standard was imposed on them by governments, holy cow would they suddenly get good at solving this “unsolvable” problem.
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Don’t worry Marie, they’re only electons…
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You just described the Democratic party’s leadership.
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All in the name of arts and crafts!
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10 Way Bad Crafts Can Kill You Dead!
#6 Will Blow Your Mind!
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