I’m taking the usual precautions right now!
And to kill anyone who comes to help you that doesn’t know what the “D” stands for in DRAB.
3 Likes
My answer, at least partially, would be to break up YouTube’s monopoly. All that content would be easier to handle if it weren’t almost entirely up to a single company, and having competition would provide motivation for YouTube to actually put in an effort at solving those problems, or at least give uploaders the option of taking their content to somewhere with a better policy.
6 Likes
I agree that would be a good part of the solution. I’m not sure what that would look like though. It’s not like breaking up Ma Bell or Standard Oil. How do you force all these videos to other platforms and/or limit YouTube’s ability to dominate by accepting all uploads?
It’s a big dilemma for content creators like myself also. I’d love to support Vimeo or whatever else instead, but I can’t. The eyeballs are on YouTube and I have to be there to survive, so the monopoly is self-reinforcing.
All the Nazis found this out the hard way when YouTube started doing the tiniest microscopic bit of policing of the worst of them. A big wave of them (including non-political channels with quietly hyper-conservative hosts, as is common in the “maker” genre) stormed off in a snit to other platforms. Most chose Rumble. They all came crawling back after a month when they realized nobody is watching fucking Rumble.
7 Likes
I lost all faith in the YouTube algorithm when I learned that it doesn’t differentiate between upvotes and downvotes.
4 Likes
What’s your youtube channel?
2 Likes
Not a flame, but some observations:
Community moderation works (see the BBS as an example!). Build trust levels with users and pay them to help moderate the content.
Alphabet’s revenue per employee is a massive, whopping $1,349,043.98. They can afford to hire more human content moderators.
Hey, maybe hire some of those humanities graduates that right-wingers like to villify for having the audacity to attend a university to study something other than engineering or business?
3 Likes
Do not post suggestions on how to perform this craft “more safely”. If you want to have that discussion, do it elsewhere please.
12 Likes
The problem is that YouTube (like everyone else) is incapable of adequately filtering content at-scale to keep people safe. But unlike everyone else, their platform is hegemonic enough that they’re able to actively prevent people from implementing their own solutions to keep themselves and each other safe.
Sort of like the Uvalde police: they ensure violence by positioning themselves as the sole authority allowed to deal with danger, because no sole authority can actually deliver on that responsibility.
3 Likes
If @VeronicaConnor’s numbers are right, you’d need more than 90,000 people doing nothing but watching videos 8 hours a day to watch it all. In practice, you’d more or less double the headcount of the company to get this done. Also, turnover in these positions would be really high. Youtube kids alone would probably keep California’s mental health system fully occupied.
2 Likes
Not in combination with community moderation. You wouldn’t have to have paid content moderators look at every second of content; just the flagged videos. They could add a feature to not just flag a video but a particular time in a video to make it more efficient.
The vast majority of content uploaded to YT gets very few to no views. That’s probably not going to get flagged much.
The community flagging system acts as the first line of defense. Then you deploy the paid mods to review flagged content and reduce or eliminate the flag weight of bad-faith flaggers.
6 Likes
Well, lucky for us, Texas is already going down that road!
I suggest we use a microwave transformer on YouTube’s servers
2 Likes
YT years ago seemingly got rid of videos of parents allowing their cute sleepy babies cutely dropping to the floor from their high-chairs.
How does YT legal counsel figure that fractal wood burning deaths won’t come back to bite them on the ass as lawsuits?
4 Likes
I think you’re on to something- community moderation could be a good solution (or at least part of a solution)!
Perhaps something along the lines of what Wikipedia does would be at least a good start (although we all know wikipedia has issues, but you get the idea).
Unfortunately that would require YouTube to be transparent in its policies and that is counter to their goals. It’s important to them to be opaque so they can have it both ways- claim to be progressive, but continue to profit from Nazis.
What would be great is an open video platform with policies and goals similar to wikipedia, transparent from the start. However the challenge with that is that video serving is extremely expensive, so it’s probably unlikely that a scrappy non-profit could ever afford to do it.
5 Likes
Yah, that’s a pretty good (if dark) analogy. This is by design, of course. As I just posted above, YouTube wants it both ways. They want to appear progressive and responsible because that’s good for business, but they want to profit from Nazis and their content, which is also good business.
Some of the highest engagement comes from the religion that is the alt-right rabbit hole. They refuse to give that up. I consider this a negative externality, like pollution. No company would ever spend money to prevent pollution if government regulation didn’t force them to. Maybe if we could find a way to treat Nazi content as “pollution”, then we could incentivize companies like YT properly to fix it.
4 Likes
Update.
Ann’s video has been reinstated. She’s now asking people to watch and share it so it rises up the rankings.
12 Likes
I agree with your earlier point that it’s going to take regulation and possibly even large fines to get them to move on this. There’s nothing in it for them to change right now.
3 Likes
It’s almost as if YT stuck their nose in the air, got a whiff of the ‘harmful capitalist-friendly’ wind currently being blown by the SCOTUS, and is going for broke.
YouTube is also removing hidden Subscriber count feature. A lot of things are going on YouTube platform.
