Youtube Heroes - Hate Backlash Warranted?

[Olinser]

I don't know who you're talking to but the main problem is the MASS FLAGGING OF VIDEOS. Not comments. It's the ability for people who aren't employed by Youtube to at any time shut a channel down they don't like. Take a listen to any content creator whose opinion is worth a damn.

You don't understand the problem. No one gives a crap about youtube comments. No one serious about Youtube Heroes at any rate. Policing comments is nothing compared to the actual problems this program begins. I don't even know why I'm arguing this with someone so woefully off base.

Easy there, big chief, you seem stressed. If you don't want to talk about it then don't talk about it.

I have listened to several people on this subject. And the almost universal 2 key points that they have made are 1) the system is even more open to abuse than the current one - where currently it is mostly copyright trolls trying to screw with videos, whereas now it will allow people with an agenda to attempt to take down videos/creators, and 2) it does nothing meaningful to address the problems with the comments.

People are angry about this with respect to comments because it doesn't even really attempt to do anything meaningful about the comments. It kind of waves off with 'oh yeah Heroes can regulate comments' and then says nothing more.

Which is also why it is hilarious that comments are disabled for the Heroes video.

[factotum]

Which is also why it is hilarious that comments are disabled for the Heroes video.

Pretty sure they weren't disabled when the video first went up, but later on after they'd already got a metric crap-ton of negative comments. In any case, I agree with Razade--I don't think the major issue with this is that it doesn't relate to fixing comments, it's the stuff it *does* do that's got people up in arms.

[Hunter Noventa]

It's a pretty terrible idea for all the reasons mentioned. It's not going to do any good, and might very well make things worse.

The 'ad-friendly' stuff is BS as well. YouTube just doesn't want to pony up the effort to categorize things enough to make it so advertisers can chose what kind of channel their ads appear on. When it comes to TV, you don't see ads for My Little Pony toys during Game of Thrones, and vice verse.

[AvatarVecna]

Even without touching on how this could relate to the relatively recent issues regarding copyright, I don't like this for two very simple reasons:

1) Youtube is where it is because a complete lack of moderation allowed anybody to post any video, or any comment, and providing the public with that level of freedom of speech and expression has allowed Youtube to grow into a juggernaut of online media. This "Heroes" moderation system is them attempting to take some control over what people are allowed to say on Youtube; even if they're only restricting swear word posts and nothing else, it's still Youtube placing a large limitation where before there was none, when no limits is what made Youtube successful.

2) Because the complete lack of moderation made Youtube so huge and vast that Youtube can't afford the employees necessary to moderate it anymore, they're trying to build in a system that "rewards" "helpful" commenters by giving them access to privileges they possessed before the system was implemented.

Essentially, this move shows that Youtube is both trying to restrict what made it popular while still reaping the benefits of that popularity, but is unable to actually afford to moderate, so they're trying to get the Youtube community to moderate itself for free. They're trying to restrict freedom of expression/speech, but they're too cheap to do it right so their best Plan B is giving everybody moderator privileges and assuming nothing goes wrong. For comparison, think about the Playground: this is a great forum, with a wonderful community of helpful people, but I still would not want everybody on this site to be a moderator, because all it would take is one sentient anus to fart onto the keyboard enough that they ban half the regulars in a drunken fit of nerd rage. And this place would be far better than Youtube: if everybody on Youtube was given limited moderator privileges, the entire site would burn to the ground in less than 24 hours.

[Hamste]

I didn't see it mentioned so I will mention it. With out saying anything youtube slightly changed the wording in the video to make it slightly less worrying.

[Blackhawk748]

I didn't see it mentioned so I will mention it. With out saying anything youtube slightly changed the wording in the video to make it slightly less worrying.

The fact that they did that is almost more worrying, mostly cuz it still changes nothing, but i t means that they know that.

[zimmerwald1915]

2) Because the complete lack of moderation made Youtube so huge and vast that Youtube can't afford the employees necessary to moderate it anymore, they're trying to build in a system that "rewards" "helpful" commenters by giving them access to privileges they possessed before the system was implemented.

Which is really a problem with Youtube being undercapitalized. You see this everywhere you look in the "sharing economy."

[eggynack]

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.