Quote Originally Posted by zimmerwald1915 View Post
Which is really a problem with Youtube being undercapitalized. You see this everywhere you look in the "sharing economy."
Yeah, that combined with some ridiculous diseconomies of scale. They have this insane number of videos that aren't making that much money on a per-video basis, which would probably make serious moderation efforts impossible without pushing them into the red. It gets even worse when you consider the even insaner number of videos that aren't making any money for them at all because of low view counts. Are they supposed to pull together legions of moderators to eliminate even things that have a view count under 100? Or 1,000? Realistically, the only way to handle this thing at all economically is through some variety of crowd sourcing, pulling in the masses for no money at all. The problem is that they don't seem to be doing it all that well.

What I think you really want is some sort of hierarchy. A real one, not one managed artificially. You get some paid human administrators at the top few levels of the hierarchy, a high number but orders of magnitude less than is required to patrol the entire site, and then you give them deputization power, where they closely manage their unpaid internet underlings. The best of those people gain some measure of administrator power themselves, still unpaid, and get the ability to act with a lot of discretion, as well as the ability to pull on even lower people. And on it goes. Even a relatively small number of layers would get a massive scope, and Youtube could probably manage a lot of layers. A bit of internal policing would even allow a relative hands off role from the hired administrators. And, of course, sufficient and visible good work could mean getting hired on as an administrator, which is neat. You get a self-perpetuating system that's controlled by people who have proved that they have the right course of action in mind.

All this sounds somewhat like what they're attempting here, with the Heroes system. Levels, power, connections between users and both each other and staff, and so on. But the problem seems to be that they're trying to do it bottom up. Youtube is starting from the faceless mass of users, and telling them to work their way up. But that sort of system means no visibility into anything but maybe the top couple of levels, and even that may not happen if they're fully automating. Which means that you're giving people power with virtually no insight into who they are or how they're using that power. Even if the power were being angled in approximately the right way, towards comments rather than content, we'd still be talking about turning the frequently insane internet into an undirected cudgel of some sort. Working a system like this bottom up is super dangerous.

And, worst of all, it feels like they're doing it this way for the wrong reasons. The system I proposed, after all, would cost money. You'd need to hire and train employees, a lot of them, and you'd need to pay them continuously. It's a variable cost, one that scales up a lot with the size of the thing being policed, and while you may eventually be able to tone down the direct role of hired administrators, how long that'd take is a mystery. A fully automated bottom up system, meanwhile, is pretty cheap. You pay the fixed cost of setting up the automation, and wait for internet crazies to roll in. The fixed cost is non-trivial, but they're massively better when you have scale on your side. It's cheap, it's easy, and it takes less time, both to get the moderation and to set up the system. Only problem is that it'll probably suck. Which, y'know, is a big problem.