[beering]

What's worse for YouTube? That news articles continue to be written about how they're ignoring a pedophilia problem, or some channels getting caught up in the algorithm? It sucks to be negatively affected as a content creator, but YouTube is doing what everyone has been pressuring them to do.

[eropple]

People are pressuring YouTube to hire and train moderators to competently and soberly evaluate context and take intelligent action.

Nobody is pressuring YouTube to blow channels away because one of their ML algorithms hit a probability threshold.

[themacguffinman]

It's simply absurd for YouTube to manually moderate comments at the scale they currently operate. If you force them to do that, it won't be profitable, and you'll end up with YouTube blowing channels away because they can't afford to host them anyway.

[eropple]

Why? Why is it absurd?

You are thinking at human scales, and that is understandable, but Google doesn't think at human scales and it's only "absurd" if you think that Google has the inalienable right to the smallest possible cost of goods sold, even if that means offloading their externalities onto everyone else.

It is probably obvious that I do not. You shouldn't, either.

At Google's scale, trained-but-unskilled workers are not expensive. They are not cheap, but they are not expensive. And Google makes a lot of money. This is a common throughline from large societally-threatening, socialize-our-externalities-but-never-our-profits companies from Facebook to Google: "doing something correctly, or even trying to, would just cost too much money, so we should continue our societal-termite ways!" Until these unwatched monsters--and that is, I stress, the default state of the corporation, it is only the threat of the society that grants them their charter taking it away that adds even a speck of decency to them--prove, prove, that they somehow just can't survive by reducing incomprehensible net revenues to merely gigantic, then I will continue to operate on the understanding that they don't want to. Which I tend to think is a much, much more realistic thing.

I don't care. They fix their product or YouTube delenda est. Either is preferable to the current situation.

[sangnoir]

> And Google makes a lot of money.

They make money by not spending it when they can get the same outcome for free[1]. Also, Search and Adwords make money, YouTube is getting by[2] (relatively). Why should other divisions subsidize a loss-making YouTube? Some channels don't make enough money relative to number of comments to be financially viable (no matter how cheap the moderators are) - Google has simply outsourced this decision to individual channel owners.

1. Google user's do a lot of things for free already, e.g. Map POIs

2. My guess - they don't breakout YT's income/expenses in fincancial reports https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-sec-wants-to-know-why-...

[eropple]

I understand that. I also understand that stuff like YouTube is effectively becoming the public square of the twenty-first century and if a company wants to own that, they can deal with not making all the money off of it that they could possibly, theoretically, make.

People matter more than corporations. Society matters more than corporations. I'm comfortable asserting that it would be better for Google to close YouTube down than to let an organ of growing central importance to society at large become what it's obviously starting to become; something less damaging than that neglectful caretakership can arise in its wake.

[themacguffinman]

Are you seriously suggesting that disabling comments on a certain type of video content is more damaging to society than losing a global engine of content creation and community?

YouTube benefits society immensely by sustaining a very expensive 21st century public square. If we as a society want to have that - and I at least very much do - we can deal with not making comments on all the videos we could theoretically comment upon.

[pferde]

So, quality instead of quantity? How horrible.