[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.

[eropple]

I am seriously suggesting that this is not something that can be algorithmically determined. I'm quite OK with all manner of content not having comments enabled. I'm not okay with unthinkingly stupid false positives all over the place harming creatives' (actual creatives) ability to feed themselves, and those false positives are overwhelmingly caused by bad heuristics and objectively dumb algorithmic decision-making.

Feeding humans into The Machine, having The Machine make context-free, alarmingly inaccurate, and functionally beyond-appeal decisions--because the appeal process doesn't scale either, we are so frequently told, when it isn't just "drop the appeal on the floor--is bad. If Google has no other answer than Feed The Machine, then The Machine should be considered inimical to humans and should be dismantled.

But, of course, The Machine is not necessary; that's a convenient fiction to paint the problem as a dilemma of "no YouTube" and "some unaccountable algorithm runs YouTube and decide what you can see, free to lead kids from Let's Plays to Nazi agitprop and pedophiles to their spank bait." It's just that the Machine is cheaper, you know? And that's really, and literally, all.

[themacguffinman]

I can't take your concern for creatives' ability to feed themselves seriously when you turn around and advocate for fully destroying the platform that is feeding them. Many full-time content creators on YouTube aren't big enough to make it on a smaller platform or on their own.

I also don't think the "Machine" is necessary, but I do think it's better than having no global engine for content creation and community at all. If you think there's a viable third option, I'm interested in hearing how it would work and the cost of achieving it. But of course you're free to continue making dystopian metaphors and pointing at Nazis instead.

[eropple]

The way it works is to have these companies hire, and pay for, and care for (see Facebook terminating counseling services, etc. for leaving content-moderation employees) employees to make the decisions to provide a platform that's safe and sane.

That's it. That's literally it. That's just...it.

You are ultimately correct, in that it will be of relatively higher cost. You are ultimately correct, in the sense that "anything" costs more than "nothing". And I genuinely don't care. It must to happen,. And a large part of why I don't care is that I am not advocating for its destruction; what I am saying is that I am perfectly okay with going to the mat with Google and other ostensibly supra-national corporations because they'll back down. They will back down because they will still do just fine. Google is not going to shutter YouTube, Twitter is not going to fold (well, not because of this), Facebook is not going to hang a CLOSED sign on the door because governments say "no, you have to actually have humans make decisions that impact these other humans and process them sanely instead of having your robots blap stuff to death because it found a peak in their hill-climbing." They will comply, because they will still make plenty of money.

And if they don't? If I'm wrong? Somebody else will do it. They're plenty of gold in that hill, even if you aren't allowed to get at it for completely free.

(It is also worth noting that...uh...on YouTube, those Nazis exist. They're right there. I've watched them radicalize teenage boys who started on Let's Plays. The algorithm happily feeds those boys to them. That's part of this problem, too, and you can't just handwave it away.)

[themacguffinman]

You speak with such confidence that YouTube is printing enough money to sustain such a massive additional cost but that's unlikely. Don't just take my word for it, the WSJ has reported on this matter [1] because Google doesn't release financial details for YouTube on its own.

You've done nothing but rattle off assertions about how YouTube just so profitable and won't shut down, how there's so much money in ad-supported video hosting, how somebody else can do it. These are fantastic claims, by which I mean they are rooted in fantasy.

I have no trouble believing that this represents an existential threat to YouTube. If Google massively shrinks or shuts down YouTube as a free and global content platform, it's not just their loss, it's ours as well.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-fo...

Relevant snippet from the WSJ article:

> The online-video unit posted revenue of about $4 billion in 2014, up from $3 billion a year earlier, according to two people familiar with its financials, as advertiser-friendly moves enticed some big brands to spend more. But while YouTube accounted for about 6% of Google’s overall sales last year, it didn’t contribute to earnings. After paying for content, and the equipment to deliver speedy videos, YouTube’s bottom line is “roughly break-even,” according to a person with knowledge of the figure.

[eropple]

I didn't say YouTube was "just so profitable." Google is so very profitable and Google won't shut YouTube down because Google derives incredible mindshare value and analytics insight from owning YouTube. YouTube and a similarly not-super-profitable-but-very-useful product--Gmail--get people into the Google ecosystem and facilitate greater understanding and deeper analytics into their userbase in ways that make the things that do make money make more money. To reduce it to a P&L for that single division is bonkers.

And from a brand perspective? To younger people, YouTube is the part of Google that they like. It's not going away if it becomes marginally more expensive to run (and we are talking marginally. Facebook pays $28,800 a head for content moderation, and that's American employees), because all doing so does is open the door for a competitor--and while 2009-me thinks this is crazy to say, I find myself eyeing Microsoft in 2019, though Facebook is also of course a likely contestant--to come take all those eyeballs and all that analytics data.

I promise: it's okay to dare even a megacorporation to blink. We live in a society, they operate under our rules.