[Posibyte]

This seems like a ham-fisted solution does it not? Channels like ChadTronic play on the nostalgia of being a kid back in the '80s and '90s, yet AFAIK has been unable to enable comments on any of his videos. The weird, funny comments are a big part of the experience in those kinds of videos. Some tropes of the show itself have been built around the comment section.

Would it make more sense to instead target the patterns used by predatory commentators rather than shutting down the system completely? This is Google, the company of bringing meaning out of arbitrary data, is it not possible to build social graphs of what people like, scour, and activate these time codes? Couldn't you restrict the features that enforce those patterns?

Lastly, does forcing these comments off negatively impact the rankings of these creators? Comments have traditionally played into the engagement of any said video and had an (understood) impact on how a video ranks on release. Are these channels now just permanently stunted in their future growth?

[pgrote]

>Lastly, does forcing these comments off negatively impact the rankings of these creators? Comments have traditionally played into the engagement of any said video and had an (understood) impact on how a video ranks on release. Are these channels now just permanently stunted in their future growth?

1) Yes. 2) Yes.

Youtube has taken this action without an overall plan. One of the Youtube creators was told as much in a chat with youtube support. (https://youtu.be/oeI0-ijIotk?t=504) They indicated to him that some creators will be negatively impacted until everything is worked out. The program is working just like they planned. lol

[badfrog]

> The program is working just like they planned.

Or like they didn't plan

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

Or ya know they thought the situation was sufficiently urgent that they needed to do something immediately without thinking through every possible eventuality. Have you never dealt with a PR emergency before? Often, the "let's take two months to game this out" approach is not the most effective way to address the problem.

[theon144]

>Would it make more sense to instead target the patterns used by predatory commentators rather than shutting down the system completely?

Terrible, terrible idea.

Transfer this to the "real world", and see how it plays out - let's build a system that will analyze people's behavior and penalize them on whether it classifies them as pedophiles or not! This will surely protect the children.

Moderation is a notoriously tough problem even without the whole trouble of automating it through something as "ephemeral" as content analysis.

[cribbles]

>Transfer this to the "real world", and see how it plays out

This isn't the real world though. This is, tentatively, "pattern match on videos uploaded by non-verified creators with little or no uploaded content, featuring primarily or entirely children, with an unusual level of timestamps in the comments, in an unusual number of playlists that also fit this description."

The main challenge here is more meta: how do you discover these videos before the engagement identifies them as such. I think that's why YouTube went with the overreaching "throw a NN at the problem and just flag anything with kids" solution.

Probably wasn't the best solution from an engineering perspective, as many here have pointed out. But it may have been the smartest thing to do from a PR perspective.