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by notreallyserio 1652 days ago
I don't really understand this. It seems like anyone working as an engineer for YouTube could find a position anywhere else. Why put up with this sort of unethical corporate behavior -- that is, banning without providing details?

You're right that it can't be solved with code, but can't it be solved by leveraging power as a scarce resource? Hiring is incredibly expensive so at some point they have to give. And if they don't, well, at least you're not contributing to the problem.
2 comments
thrashh 1651 days ago
I see a lot of posts on the Internet where it seems a lot of people get into software engineering not to solve problems but to… just write code. They hate meetings. They hate anything that takes time away from writing code.

And Google is a company with primarily software engineers…

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rixed 1651 days ago
I do not believe this would address the root issue, which is not "how to put pressure on Google to do less evil".

The challenge is to moderate a popular service where any user can upload content that many actors will try to abuse.

Even putting aside that YouTube is partly supported by ads, there is no known solution as far as I know, short of turning YouTube into an old fashioned TV channel with only a few vetted content creators allowed to upload.

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notreallyserio 1651 days ago
It would be sufficient to notify banned uploaders what rule(s) they broke and add a human-powered appeal process. With the former, the latter will be relatively cheap as reviewers and uploaders could address the specific issue.
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rixed 1650 days ago
With sufficiently complex systems to detect fraud, such as AI or that involve constraint optimisers, it is not always doable to isolate a single, clear parameter that is responsible for the data to be flagged. This is an issue also for them (source: been working on several complex rule based systems that exhibited this very problem).

As for the human powered appeal process, how to design it so that it is not spammed/abused as easily as the upload?

It's easy to explain everything away because of evil corporation, but those are also actual technical issues.

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