If the oversight you provide as part of your service is unreasonably expensive then you probably shouldn't be in business - if you can't sanely moderate your platform then you also shouldn't be in business. I can rationally accept that argument as quite logical but I can also accept the fact that news papers ran classified ads for years and years without assisting terrorists by giving them a platform to coordinate attacks in plain text on - facebook comes along and suddenly the bar for obfuscated text is "r u rdy 4 the b0mb?"
Companies that are providing such an amazingly affordable service because they're just skipping out on doing moderation don't get to use "Well, doing it the right way would be too expensive" as a defense - that's how you end up with Uber. Uber broke laws, Uber shouldn't exist at this point, something like Uber should exist, but Travis Kalanick should have been fined into near non-existence and not currently be sitting happy on 2.8 billion. We, as a society, need to have standards.
>If the oversight you provide as part of your service is unreasonably expensive then you probably shouldn't be in business - if you can't sanely moderate your platform then you also shouldn't be in business.
So you'd rather have the status quo of a few decades ago (ie. large media organizations acting as gatekeepers), rather than the democratized ecosystem we have now?
I mean, both have their glaring issues... but I think our modern system is worse. Independent news outlets didn't get a large readership but they did exist and people did express non-mainstream views in them - and while the main companies were definitely status quo aligned they attracted (and focused on attracting) actual journalists that occasionally broke stories that gave the editors headaches. In the absence of them being required to be the source of news (and due to competition from blogs running on a completely non-existent budget) they've focused more and more on advertiser revenue acquisition which really just only cares about the number of clicks you're getting.
I'd prefer neither system, and I don't think it's a binary choice - but if forced to choose between the two I'd probably go with the monolithic status-quo machine (even though I'm extremely progressive and they hated us).
The question is would it be so costly that YouTube's profitability would look significantly different, and at that point would Google want to keep running YouTube?
I'm not sure, but I don't think the answer is that it obviously won't materially change YouTube's profitability.
Well, it's better if they don't keep it running them.
They have a monopoly on search, that they use to censor any competing video hosting. If they go and start censoring their own service too, this is a very serious problem.
Youtube's value isn't as a profit center, but a way of keeping people inside Google's ad ecosystem. Its value is to dominate the video hosting market so that viable competitors can't rise up in its place. If Google can squeeze profit out, that's icing on the cake, but not the core reason why Google wants to hold on to Youtube.
If the profitability of Youtube is on the table, then so should be antitrust, and Google should not be allowed to own it.
> Youtube's value isn't as a profit center, but a way of keeping people inside Google's ad ecosystem.
Even more important from Google's point of view is it was the way to push Chrome to dominance. And a way to keep it there ahead of any potential competitors.
Which is valuable because of the data and ability to block ad blockers. That is, Google's ad ecosystem.
In 2009/2010 YouTube advertised Chrome as a better way to view YouTube videos pretty extensively. YouTube also is a moving target that other browsers have to hit (see also GoogleDocs.)
It's similar to how "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run", only with YouTube and other browsers.
Microsoft abandoned their "not Chrome-based" Edge code base, despite the fact that it was significantly faster than Chrome on almost every other site, because of the way that YouTube does some layers. This "way" has no functional effect, but it does block certain optimizations, optimizations that Edge was using and Chrome still isn't.
Google optimizes YT for Chromium-based renderers. Or rather, Google pessimizes YT for other renderers.
Youtube gets roughly 30,000 hours of content uploaded to it every hour. They'd need an army the size of all of Google, Apple and Facebook put together just to review it all.
How much of that remains if you don't review immediately, but when view count exceeds -- for example -- 100 views? I'd expect a dramatic drop from 30 000 hours.
If you want to be so successful as to become one of the premier public forums in society, don't start crying when you're held up to the standards and expectations of other public institutions. Google, go get ye that army of moderators.
Employing that many people would likely cost in the region of Google's entire earnings. It would make Youtube, or any service like it, financially impossible for anyone to run. So sure, I'm not saying we need Youtube, but what you're saying is we can't have it or anything like it.
I really appreciate YouTube's existence, but chances are a communal video streaming site that the entire world can trivially upload videos to should probably be a government run service if it exists at all.
There are a plethora of much more conservatively sized video uploading sites that vet and have specific contracts with their content producers.
> Youtube gets roughly 30,000 hours of content uploaded to it every hour. They
Clearly you wouldn't need to review all of it. You could use AI to identify things for review (as opposed to remove them), limit it to people with a number of downvotes or views. Hell, you could just pay people to handle the reviews/escalations/appeals.
Although, Google totally could afford it. It would cost less than 2.5% of their profits to pay US minimum wage to review every video.
> It would cost less than 2.5% of their profits to pay US minimum wage to review every video
So you think employing those hundreds of thousands of workers would incur no office space costs, no IT system costs, no management, no service staff, no HR, no payroll, no recruitment, no training. Wow. And your talking about Google profits, but YouTube is a business itself that needs to make money. Why does the rest of Google need to subsidise it?
> employing those hundreds of thousands of workers would incur no...
Well, my numbers do allow for a $50MM/year in the various IT/management/training. I would think you could have people working from home, so office/etc. costs would be minimal. But I also made them US based and reviewing every random cat video's full length that is only seen by 1 person. Some savings could be achieved.
> your talking about Google profits, but YouTube is a business itself that needs to make money. Why does the rest of Google need to subsidise it?
Okay, fine. YouTube could internally have added the costs of reviewing every video's full length with US based people in 2021 it would have only cut in half their increase in profit over 2020.
That’s hilarious. The $50m was a rounding error you forgot to account for. Given a work force of several hundred thousand, that would just about pay for an office chair each, let alone any other equipment or infrastructure, or office space to put the chair in.
They managed to pretty well identify when you are quietly singing some song and claim all revenue from your videos, I am sure they can handle basic bots.
If your business is impossible to operate at its current scale pro-socially and without negative externalities, it doesn't get to operate at that scale.
Share-holders don't have a natural right to profit off of societally destructive behavior.
I’ve work on similar sized systems that utilized a very large human workforce to verify models before release and to monitor/measure production models on a daily basis after release. There are ways to make it efficient.
Companies that are providing such an amazingly affordable service because they're just skipping out on doing moderation don't get to use "Well, doing it the right way would be too expensive" as a defense - that's how you end up with Uber. Uber broke laws, Uber shouldn't exist at this point, something like Uber should exist, but Travis Kalanick should have been fined into near non-existence and not currently be sitting happy on 2.8 billion. We, as a society, need to have standards.