[simias]

That seems like a reasonable idea to me but I think part of the answer is that a mind boggling amount of videos are uploaded to Youtube every second. Tracking categorization abuse seems straightforward in theory but good luck automating that reliably over millions of videos especially when you know that some very dedicated people will try their best to game the algorithm in their favor.

People will start using the "blood and violence" category exclusively if it means they're less likely to be demonetized, rendering it useless. Or the other way around: if this category means they get fewer views they'll try their best to be always nearly avoid it, except of course it can get very subjective and some people are going to be flagged "blood and violence" even though they argue it's not that violent and channel XYZ did worse and didn't get tagged etc...

When it come to moderating Youtube, and given the ridiculous amount of content hosted there, you shouldn't think "how would I do it" but rather "how would I design an algorithm that would do that". And suddenly it becomes a lot less obvious. You can't teach algorithms common sense (yet).

[adekok]

> Tracking categorization abuse seems straightforward in theory but good luck automating that reliably over millions of videos

Is Youtube (a) automating video categorization now, or (b) not automating video categorization?

> People will start using the "blood and violence" category exclusively if it means they're less likely to be demonetized, rendering it useless

No... it means that the advertisers can determine whether or not they want to monetize ads in that category.

So there would be no "demonetize EVERYTHING", just categories that advertisers can choose to place ads on, or not.

I think you're assuming that a different system would work exactly the same as the system works today. That isn't the point...