YouTube's problem is their allergy towards using humans. AI technology isn't advanced enough to replace empathy yet. They simply need to add more humans into their processes.
Copyright claims is a perfect example. That system is abused by large companies who know how to exploit their algorithms and they know it is worth it because there will be no humans in the loop to stop them.
If YouTube wants to remain viable, they just need to bite the bullet and hire a whole bunch of people.
One of my favorite subscribers to watch is some guy (Harald Baldr[0]) who travels around remote areas of the world and vlogs it.
But he's said a number of times how even 10 seconds of background music can cause his video to get demonetized and then all ad revenue for the video goes to the record label who owns the copyright and there's absolutely nothing he can do to combat it.
This happens even if his video is 30 minutes long and has nothing to do with the music at all -- it just so happens he's walking past a store or hotel lobby that has music on.
They make it hard to correct those things too. You have to re-upload the entire thing as a new video instead of being able to edit or replace existing videos to deal with copyright claims. But then their algorithms also seem to demote content creators from deleting or unpublishing videos so correcting those things actually hurts your channel in the long run.
One of my more popular videos could never be monetized because I added a song (via the old YouTube editor interface) that turned out to have a copyright claim but the interface doesn't allow me to remove or change the background music in post. So I'm given the option to delete something with 911k views and annoy my viewers with a duplicate upload or just cut my losses.
YouTube are actually adding some tech to help with this. In future when making a claim you have to add the timestamps in the video where the copyright occurs. Then the creator will get that info as well as a few simple quick-fix options to cut out that portion of the video or replace it.
It's long overdue but they do seem to be making some strides to help creators at last.
I don't understand why they won't put the money in escrow instead of just shunting it to the claimant. Presumably because it would require people to make a determination. Seems irresponsible.
Why blame YouTube? They're doing it at the request of the right holders, who would otherwise have a claim to pull the whole video down. They also provide an automated tool to scrub claimed music from already-uploaded videos (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2902117?hl=en) You might say the music rights holders lack empathy though...
Is it even possible to scale a human operation to this level, even with youtube's checkbook?
It's not that AI needs to replace empathy alone, it needs to replace culturally and legally nuanced judgement about copyrighted works, among other things. That's hard to teach fast to a mechturk type workforce, and staffing a team of people competent enough to understand that nuance at youtube's scale has to be prohibitively expensive if it's even possible.
Humanizing operations buys quality at the expense of putting a upper bound on scale. Few companies are willing to accept that ceiling for fear of losing market share.
No but they should be putting more humans towards their larger creators. Anyone with over 100k subs shouldn’t have to beg on social media just for YouTube to take action. Some creators have direct contacts but even those contacts are limited in what they can do.
>Few companies are willing to accept that ceiling for fear of losing market share.
The question I find interesting is: is this assumption correct? Is service scale the dominant factor in market share, or could you win a significant piece of the pie with a "Smaller YouTube by Humans"?
In theory, a more human touch could attract content creators, who in turn could bring their audience. Whether that would translate to significant market share, though, dunno.
>Is it even possible to scale a human operation to this level, even with youtube's checkbook?
YT probably doesn't make money. We don't know because Alphabet doesn't put it as a separate line item in their earnings reports. Insiders say it about "breaks even".
Until the new EU copyright law with the upload filters, YouTube didn't have to make the copyright takedowns as aggressive as it did. It went way above and beyond what the law was requiring. Why did it do that, you ask? Because if was part of whatever deal Google made with studios in order for them to give it access to songs for its failing music services.
One could also argue that if YouTube's takedown fitler wasn't as "good" (where good doesn't actually mean objectively good, but aggressive) as Google made it be, then EU's upload filter wouldn't have passed either, because then there would have been no example of anyone "doing it right" (read: taking down anything that smells like a cousin of a copyrighted work, including stuff like public works, bird chirps, etc -- just to be sure).
My point is, YouTube wouldn't have needed as many humans to check if people's taken down stuff was needed to be taken down, if its algorithms weren't designed to be so aggressive in the first place.
Google dug its own grave here. Now it's stuck between the creators who increasingly see it as a hostile/too risky service, and the people who keep calling for YouTube to censor stuff that "offends them", and who will never ever be satisfied with whatever censorship regime YouTube puts in place, just like the copyright trolls never will be either.
I've seen videos analyzing the YouTube trending tab and suggesting that human moderation suppresses videos from 'controversial' creators like Joe Rogan and PewDiePie.
It's dangerous to become the arbiter of taste, I can understand Google's aversion to more human involvement beyond just the problems with scale.
I've seen others that allege that the YT related-to algo is being systematically gamed to raise the prominence of such videos, so the removal is a return to norm, rather than a suppression.
What's frustrating is that we don't have many ways to find out what's true.
Youtube's algo is an arbiter of taste whether they're happy about it or not. I'm not sure it's possible to be apolitical here.
PewDiePie is literally the most popular vlogger on the internet by a wide margin, and Joe Rogan is the biggest podcaster on the platform, I find it hard to believe that any "suppression" they are facing is at all significant.
They do apply humans but not where it matters to creators. A lot of creators hate their automated compliance schemes.
Curation is terrible too, when it comes to kids content. I won't let my kids use YouTube kids anymore, it's awful. It used to have mostly appropriate kids content, but now people have gamed it.
I think it's pretty clear that "trending" videos are manipulated. I've seen a video with 10k views and five times more dislikes than likes show up in trending.
While I agree with you, I think you over emphasize the technology and under emphasize the flawed contracts.
Eg, the copyright claim system seems fundamentally designed for abuse. You can't throw humans at it and expect it to work properly, it's working as designed now. You could change it, have humans handle the decision making or w/e - but if you are going to change it you could also "simply" write a better contract. Something not so flawed and easily abusable; of which there have been many ideas, discussions, etc.
YouTube does have human moderators though. YouTube just make a point to pretend they don't exist and the PR tries to make you think all moderation is algorithmic, because the alternative is angry YouTubers trying to retaliate against human moderators.
They can hire more people, but they will (and should) never let you call them up and tell at them after your video is demonetized.
Indeed. A friend of mine used to work for a company that shared an office with them. There's far more human work involved than YouTube wants people to think.
I don't really disagree with you, but I can't even imagine what "hire a whole bunch of people." looks like in this case, the numbers would be enormous I would think.
Lots of sites are driven by volunteer moderation - an admittedly risky prospect, but in most of those cases where it goes really wrong it seems like the site is functionally 100% volunteer driven.
A big corp could take a mixed approach. For every paid admin you can have dozens of volunteers whose authority and actions are supervised by the paid admins, and the admins and moderators would also have access to the AI tools to see flags on the content.
This could be a good model for Youtube Kids - whitelisting channels and individual videos as age-appropriate. If the admin sees a moderator abusing the privilege, let them revoke it and revert their entire history.
And I don't disagree with you but the parent company is ginormous and the monetary sums almost unfathomable. Its revenues may comfortably support an enormous number of well-paying jobs.
AI flags anything that could be suspicious, human moderator reviews the exact circumstances of anything flagged.
Google is one of the largest tech companies on the planet, if anyone can solve "impossible" problems its them.
But not if they are lacking internal impetus to change anything.
The copyright problem isn't just on Google's end - copyright complaints should be required to be human generated as well. Otherwise anyone can be de-platformed/DDOS someone with bogus automated copyright complaints.
> they just need to bite the bullet and hire a whole bunch of people.
This issue is not specific to Youtube but to all platforms where users can post. I don't see how Facebook or Twitter or Reddit can hire enough people to review their communities.
"More Than 500 Hours Of Content Are Now Being Uploaded To YouTube Every Minute".
Do that math. Filing copyright claims can be completely automated. Humans can't keep up with that.
In my opinion, YouTube should enjoy Safe Harbor laws. When someone wants to make a Copyright claim, they should have to post a bounty. If their claim is found to be without merit, they forfeit the bounty to the person who created the video in question. And this should be resolved by a governmental judicial group, who also gets a cut of the bounty.
Your math is flawed. This is about reviewing videos that face copyright strikes. Every single minute of uploaded content does not need to be reviewed. And on top of that there are several technology aids that can be used to shorten review times - while still having some human involvement.
> If their claim is found to be without merit, they forfeit the bounty to the person who created the video in question.
That would mean there needs to be an appeals process and humans who do the reviews, right?
YouTube is already covered by safe harbor, and in theory making a false copyright claim is perjury! It's just that the law isn't going to be enforced in that direction.
I think Facebook proved pretty clearly that humans are not a solution to this problem. It doesn't matter if it's an algorithm or a human, at the end of the day the creators believe YouTube wants to censor their content so they will ascribe that motive to the execs, the engineers writing the algorithms, or the humans manually curating content.
Even as a non-youtuber, I think it's been made quite clear that the "motive" is selling ads, and advertisers don't want to be associated with particular topics or tones. It's no longer "Broadcast yourself", but "Deliver us specific content we can monetize, and don't dare touch major IP holders' content", which is a completely different creator audience.
> That system is abused by large companies who know how to exploit their algorithms
Not even this, but the algorithms are designed in way that is bias towards the person making the copyright claim. It isn't like neutral algorithm and the companies just figured out how to leverage it better than creators, it is literally built in their favor.
>YouTube's problem is their allergy towards using humans. AI technology isn't advanced enough to replace empathy yet.
Not really a Youtube problem, but Google Problem. Google and Apple seems to operate at completely opposite end of spectrum. There is nothing Human about Google's Product and Services, even if they did try, it is as if it was designed by Data Mining and Algorithm. But it was fast, efficient, and instantaneous. Apple on the other hand is far too human, literally having a hand on every step of the process, which means it is very slow, and sometimes bureaucratic. But they do seems to care way beyond what a normal persona and other companies would do.
“Abused” in a similar way to how YouTube existed for (something like) 10 years without paying a single iota of money to anyone for copyrighted material? I’d call that abuse of copyright law myself (neglect can be a form of abuse).
Copyright claims is YouTube finally existing within the scope of the law. There are implementation issues - rerouting all money on a first come, first served basis is wrong - but Rome wasn’t built in a day.
And, from what I know of large record labels, they don’t know how to exploit the algorithms themselves. Most of them work in Microsoft Excel. Beating the claims system is beyond them.
They have software that they’ve bought to do that for them!
>If YouTube wants to remain viable, they just need to bite the bullet and hire a whole bunch of people.
I completely agree, but that's against everything Google wishes for, which is a world where everyone is 100% online 100% of the time with their data 100% in the cloud and decisions being made by AI 100% of the time.
Pushing for human intensive operation inside Google might as well be career suicide, this is why they would much rather keeping spending large amount of resource on "improving the algorithm" instead of just hire more humans and make more progress with a fraction of the cost.
"In particular if we are talking copyright claims abuse, could you give a ballpark number of the number of humans you think youtube needs to hire ?"
That's a really rough one. Not only do I not have an algorithm for a computer to determine if something is copyrighted, I don't have an algorithm for a human to determine if something is either.
Since you're probably going to be stuck with an adversarial system based on claims and counterclaims anyhow, I'd submit the problem is probably more related to a lack of symmetry. The content creators put stuff up, then there are thousands of entities that can analyze their stuff automatically and make automated claims with no apparent consequences for being wrong. The individual creator then gets notified of a claim, but they know nothing about the claimant, whether they make routine fraudulent claims, whether they have legit ownership, etc., and have to address them relatively individually, by appealing to an opaque system that tells them very little about why the ruling is what it is, and where all the penalties appear to fall on the content creator rather than the claimant.
Something needs to be a bit more symmetrical there.
This is something where a "YouTube union" might start really being dangerous to YouTube; suppose the union puts up a page where they ask all the members to record exactly what claims are made on what content, with all the (meager as it may be) metadata YouTube gives them on the claims. I betcha some patterns would emerge. (I believe there's already some word-of-mouth about certain claimants but I bet this would make it even worse for YouTube.)
Enough so that a human can review every claim. I don't know how many claims they process in a day so I can't give a hard number.
But I suspect the number of copyright claims would go down significantly once they have a bunch of people reviewing them, because the erroneous claims would become unprofitable, assuming they punish entities that make too many erroneous claims.
If there would be a button for claiming copyright that has a checkbox above saying "I accept liability for falsely claiming copyright." the problem might fix itself after enough lawsuits?
They could improve the AI to figure out when it doesn't know something. As for a cheap way to have humans in the loop, some kind of voting by trusted creators might work.
I think this is absolutely wrong. Youtube algos offer plausible deniability, something that was existentially threatening to any future profitability for youtube in the case of copyright claims.
I'm fairly sure that most of the content watched on youtube was uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder, at least historically. Having an algo people have to actively thwart, can be unaware that the particular content is copyrighted, and/or generates a significant enough number of false positives that google can claim that they're trying hard enough to damage a portion of their legal business is a tool in and of itself.
Not using an algo makes it clear you're doing editorial, and once you're doing editorial, oversight follows. Anyway, even with the algo you can do as much editorial you want through training and dispute resolution. By slow-walking some disputes and fast-tracking others, you can change the shape of your business to hopefully be more independent of legally fragile stolen content.
The Trump/Russia conspiracy was a boon to all of these algorithmically filtering DMCA carriers, now they can actually explicitly filter points of view. I decided that point was inevitable anyway after I heard of the first facebook censoring of an anti-wingsuit post. IMO humans + that degree of editorial = worst case scenario, at least laundering it through the AI means that editorial requires some cost and degree of engineering skill.
> “The post got deleted by Facebook, and I pissed off the entire community,” says Lewis. “My message was followed up by the most fatal month in BASE. I just painfully sat back and watched my friends die one after the other.”
Your point seems to be hiring humans is wrong, because YouTube incorporated more AI to pretend like they're doing something, remain in the good books of copyright folks and make themselves more money. Is that correct? So, what if a person does not sympathize with Google or care about them making more money? Ultimately your perspective is shaped by whose side you're on.
There's Vimeo, but you either keep paying a monthly fee, or they drop your content due to the 5 GB maximum limit for free accounts. So if you want to publish stuff and no longer worry about it, you need to make sure that you have a subscription going with a valid credit card.
Vimeo is only worth it if you're looking to host video content behind a paywall.
Also for website owners Vimeo drops tracking cookies with no way to turn the behavior off, whereas YouTube has a -nocookies mode that doesn't drop any cookies. On the other hand YouTube has started to serve ads on embedded content as well and in the -nocookies mode they can't notice Premium accounts either.
These are technical issues that could be solved by alternatives, but aren't. We aren't even talking about the lockin effect of YouTube having the huge audience that it has. Nowadays it's more lucrative to host videos on YouTube even if they are meant for embedding it on your website.
Also TikTok is cool, but it's very niche and it's in no way competition for YouTube. There's also the issue that if you're worried about privacy and ads, the fact that TikTok is free (and therefore ads or data driven) and owned by a Chinese company ... is a problem.
> So if you want to publish stuff and no longer worry about it, you need to make sure that you have a subscription going with a valid credit card.
Also known as "paying for hosting". Seems pretty reasonable. If creators want to upload and broadcast unlimited hours of HD video onto the internet for free they need to accept the consequences of this arrangement (i.e. they aren't entitled to anything). The rest of us have to invest capital into our projects so that we can ensure a stable digital foundation in-line with our own prerogatives.
Personally I'm pretty stoked about getting free unlimited video hosting.
I understand that some people want to use it to get into show business, but man, Youtube is not the biggest impediment to that, nor the worst predatory company they'll deal with along the way.
I understand the rationale, the problem is that I don't want to pay for video hosting indefinitely, unless it's a service that's included in a package for something else I'm paying for.
So if the solution is Vimeo versus not hosting video at all, I might go for the later. Therefore free to host services like YouTube win.
I think Twitch is probably better off not trying to go after the non-live market because it's tough to surface both live content and recorded content well using the same layout and the tools for deciding what recorded content to show is much different and involved than live.
I do wish they would do better with organizing the VoD section though it's so hard to find particular VoDs even for simple things like Critical Role's once a week show that happens at the same time every week much less a less scheduled streamer.
Linus Media Group has Floatplane, CGP Grey and friends have Nebula... YouTube, like Netflix, doesn't have a special sauce. It has creators, and those creators are happy and eager to leave.
> YouTube, like Netflix, doesn't have a special sauce
But they do have the eyes. If you want your videos to be seen, there's no Youtube alternative. Twitch would be, but they seem to be banning people for political reasons too.
Network effect is real and very strong. It will be very hard to create real YT alternatives.
We have Bitchute and PeerTube, but they severely lack content and the viewers.
YouTube's special sauce is Google's treasury. I'm not convinced that free video hosting is something that is both profitable and scalable running on ad revenue alone, or at least, I believe that any new competitor would run out of runway before achieving a good enough margin to beat out operating costs.
I watch more YouTube than anything else on a daily basis, and I would be perfectly fine watching my favorite creators on another platform. If it actually works and keeps those creators happy, then I'm happy. Competition in the marketplace used to be smiled upon.
Me too. I would happily switch if other websites had good content. But unfortunately, everyone's is on Youtube (I don't watch gameplay videos, so no Twitch for me)
And unfortunately, there's no real alternative to Youtube. Let's say I'm a content creator, where would I upload my videos? Vimeo is not free, other sites similar to Youtube closed, so...
There is https://www.anim8.io for animators and fans of animation. The community is much kinder and more constructive than YouTube and rapidly growing.
This completely. I've never used TikTok, but my understanding is that it is more akin to SnapChat for lipsyncing. I'm sure there are a lot of people who use YouTube for that type of content and have been pulled to TikTok for it, but it does not seem like an alternative to me as someone who almost exclusively goes to YouTube for content that is at least 10 minutes or longer and more like a replacement for television.
I have done no research into this at all, so maybe I'm just an asshole repeating hearsay, but I've heard YouTube is not even remotely profitable for Google. Owning the huge site definitely benefits them in a lot of ways beyond just ad revenue/profit, so I'm assuming from Google's point of view, until some other site can actually challege YouTube's dominance, it's totally worth it to have this stream of publicity gaffes to lose a tiny amount of viewer revenue than to throw even more money down the hole trying to fix the site's issue. It's like a wooden row boat that keeps springing leaks, as long as YouTube has free fingers to plug them, that's what they're gonna do rather than actually fix them.
TikTok is a mobile-only vertical video platform consisting of memes and kids dancing to popular music. YouTube is a platform where long-form, high definition, well produced content is becoming increasingly more prevalent. I genuinely don't see how the two are even remotely alike.
I appreciate that TikTok is the "new hotness" but I don't see its relevance to this conversation about YouTube or why the author felt the need to shoehorn it into every paragraph.
A lot of the most popular content is "long-form" for no other reson than Youtube's 10-minute minimum length requirement for monetizing via ads. Video makers have responded to this arbitrary requirement in exactly how you would expect, by padding out the video length with dull filler material.
Think of the amount of writing that goes into a single 20-minute TV sitcom episode. The most popular ones have 24 episodes a year. Youtubers are expected to come up with 10-minute episodes 1x/week if not more frequently. The quality of the videos take a nosedive, the creators burn out, and subscriptions and views fall as a result.
TikTok's shorter videos can arguably be more entertaining as there's no arbitrary length requirement that incentivizes filler.
The 10 minute limit is for having mid-roll ads - short videos are still monetized, but they only have an ad at the start of the video. Creators only go over 10 minutes so they can have multiple ads on their video instead of just one.
>Youtube's 10-minute minimum length requirement for monetizing via ads.
This is inaccurate. It is suspected, but not confirmed, that the YouTube recommendation algorithm favors videos longer than 10 minutes because they increase the amount of time users spend on the platform. Videos need not be 10 minutes long to be monetized.
Neither of those are insurmountable challenges for TikTok should they want to solve for them. The hardest part is becoming the destination people think of when they think video. TikTok looks like it’s getting some traction here.
If TikTok plans to make money from ads it will have the same problems YouTube does. Advertisers will get restrictive on what types of videos they want their products on.
They'll also need their own copyright detection system when lawsuits start coming their way. Then we'll have come full circle.
Some of the creators I follow have taken the drastic step of beginning to upload their SFW content to Pornhub as well to maximize views and take sole control out of YouTube's hands. This way, if their video gets taken down on YouTube for some (often BS) reason they can upload a junk placeholder video that just links to the Pornhub version.
This argument sounds a lot like the ones I heard about why Instagram would never be as big as Flickr. YouTube needs creators and if other platforms keep attracting them, YouTube could have a big problem.
It's obvious youtube is for mainstream media now, with content creators being a leftover wart, minuscule on youtube's radar.
Content creators deal with an opaque algorithm that demonetizes videos based on how the wind is blowing, or it would appear. Weeks or months of work can be wiped out by an arbitrary demonetization preventing content creators from getting paid for their video's views.
JonTron discusses this [1]. It's very easy to violate the "advertiser-friendly" guidelines. They're vague: "violence", "harmful content", "controversial or sensitive issues". Under profanity: "strong profanity used in video even if bleeped for comedy, documentary, news, or educational purposes". ??!
It has been obvious for a long time that daily content uploads are better for the algorithm than longer, quality videos uploaded less frequently. If you look at the LinusTechTips network of channels, they produce at least 5-7 videos per week.
There really needs to be a solid competitor, but the thing is that as far as I know YouTube still isn't profitable on its own, so it's not exactly a space investors are falling over themselves to dump money into.
I have compiled a few videos from youtuber music educators that I follow. The current situation is worse than most of us think. One of them, Paul Davis, even had a copyright strike for playing HIS OWN music. LOL! So ludicrous!
More recently than Adam's October 2017 video, he had another copyright strike for, presumably, showing a repeating clip of the Single Ladies music video without playing even one second of the music itself. He recreated the song with a chintzy MIDI soundfont.
"To learn more about copyright, you may visit..." It must be nice to have such a dominant position that you can patronize your "partners" in such a way.
I'm constantly amazed that this company does not invest more in human copyright legal reviews when their product is pretty much just obtaining rights to share copies of other people's work.
I have a YouTube channel. My first video will be five years old on September 14. I kept putting out content for a number of years, content which I thought was funny and would surely be well-received.
But people never watched my videos! I get 20ish views per video. They never get recommended to anyone because I'm a smaller channel, and then I never become big for that reason. (Or maybe my videos just suck. Some of them definitely do, but I've made some that I'm proud of.)
I joined TikTok, YouTube's 60-second-max competitor. Out of boredom I made a video synced to one of those songs. Fifty views on my first one. Eventually I started making more content. I've clocked around 150K views on my videos combined, 40K likes, and 1200 followers. I made my first video around February and my second around June.
While YouTube discourages small creators, non-celebrities, and those that don't have massive amounts of cash to throw around on sets, TikTok lets whoever's talented become at least relatively popular.
TikTok's algorithm is pretty well-documented by its community: When you post a video, TikTok shows it to a certain amount of people. If enough people who see it "like" it, it moves to a larger amount of people, and so on until everyone on the app sees it. This is easy, straightforward, and transparent (for the most part, there are special cases and such).
YouTube's algorithm is: [redacted]. It's amusing to me that a Chinese company would be more transparent about this. YouTube doesn't understand its community and it's probably too late to save it, it got a monopoly and stagnated. My story is one of many others.
Doesn't this have more to do with the fact that YouTube content is far more diverse with thousands of niches of varying sizes? YouTube's algorithmic recommendations are terrible but TikTok's model if applied to YouTube would just make it completely useless. I don't want to be shown a video that's generally popular, I want to be shown a video that is related to my interests.
Off Topic but from what little I saw, the content on TikTok is pure cancer.
Agreed:for all its faults, I can't see the Tiktok algorithm working for YouTube style content. For instance, I like watching long-form electronics & machining videos. I have no interest in gaming channels, but they are incredibly popular. And by the same token, most average people would be incredibly annoyed to get reccomended a video from 'thesignalpath'.
That is understandable, but the diversity of content makes it so that YouTube can't just reccomend videos to everyone. I just hope that a place remains online for the weird niche stuff that is avaliable there, but Tiktok definitely isn't a place for that. It's fine for memes, but that's about it.
Your opinion of TikTok is most likely due to your personal lens. With a 60 second time limit though the app there's very little time for thoughtful commentary unless you make the video elsewhere and import it. It's closer to a meme generator than a video hosting site, which makes the loss of creators even more problematic. Creators are willing to jump through hoops for less YouTube issues.
I know their contentID and copyright system is hopelessly broken and biased towards stealing from original content creators at the behest if established and larger publishers and this has been a real thorn in the side. Someone literally posted random white noise and it was claimed by multiple people automatically within seconds. That's a failure on YouTube's part that borders on facilitating cooyfraud. I'm surprised they haven't been sure over it yet.
Haven't been on Tik Tok that long either, but I stumbled upon this story where a girl send a poor non-binary kid a box full of cosmetics. I found that pretty heart-warming.
The point is it's a bit too quick to label a new medium pure cancer. Given time, people will find ways to create amazing things using any format.
I'm pretty sure you just described the first phase of every product's lifecycle. Everyone plays on the same field, early adopters start winning, everyone else follows... eventually you monetize it and it becomes clear that winners-win is a better business strategy than everyone wins. I don't know how to get around the business physics of this. Not sure anyone does. Tik-tok will eventually become the stagnant incumbent and it will try to suppress its challengers or it will die on the Vine.
YouTube is trying to curate their content. Any site that stays around for a while and wants to attract top advertising dollars does it. Reddit curates to an extent. Facebook is in all kinds of trouble for not curating.
> I don't know how to get around the business physics of this.
It seems like the best way to get around the business physics is to switch from a business model to a federation model. Something like Mastodon where hosting costs are distributed and the algorithm can be tweaked for exposure rather than dollars earned for the hosting company. Of course there you have a chicken and egg networking problem and an ease of use problem.
Exactly. I was going to make this point myself, but you stated it better than I could. I can imagine a lot of prospective founders wanting to build an alternative platform to mitigate this issue, but then realize that further down the road they will ultimately become the very thing they set out to abolish in the first place.
> I don't know how to get around the business physics of this. Not sure anyone does.
Sometimes I think to myself that if their is less reliance on angel/VC funding from the very beginning, then founders could stay true to their vision. Like how Elon Musk refuses to make SpaceX a publicly traded company as it would squander the ultimate goal of colonizing mars. However, given how resource intensive it must be to process and store petabytes of video every year (exabytes in total), there is just no way around acquiring investment dollars.
Agreed. Same for Facebook. Starting about 3 months ago I suddenly started getting about 1/5 to 1/10 the engagement as I used to on any posts with external links. Which means I cannot share Github repos, interactive websites, or blog posts because nobody will see them.
I'm cool with friends seeing my stuff and not interacting or not liking it because it's not likeable. That's democratic. But I'm NOT cool with Facebook not even showing my content to my own friends.
The external link hating algorithm also extends to important news and events. Recently there was an arson attack in Japan on Kyoto Animation where the arsonist doused gasoline throughout the building and lit it on fire. 33+ people died, 37+ injured. I posted a link for my friends to donate to the official charity event on GoFundMe to help the survivors and victims. After 1 hour, ZERO interactions, ZERO comments, ZERO angry reactions.
I then deleted my post, and re-posted a text-only status with the same message and asking people to Google for the donation link. Within 1 hour, 25+ sad reactions and friends donating. Victims got helped, because I removed the link.
I see the same of friends' accounts as well. Links to blog posts about sexual assault encounters and racism get a fraction of the exposure they used to unless they are already viral, so they often never get seen. While on the other hand someone who posts a photo to Facebook directly about their amazing boba while #livingTheCaliforniaLife gets 100 likes.
Zuckerberg talked about changing the algorithm to "bring people closer together" and promote "meaningful interactions", but the algorithm really just promotes content uploaded to Facebook and down-ranks external content. It's not bringing people together at all.
And it's hurting independent creators even more, who increasingly depend on social media to spread their word.
> I then deleted my post, and re-posted a text-only status with the same message and asking people to Google for the donation link. Within 1 hour, 25+ sad reactions and friends donating. Victims got helped, because I removed the link.
That's funny, in my LinkedIn circle people have been doing this for more than a year, even marketing people recommend putting the link in a reply... apparently Facebook caught up with that.
Nowadays it seems common to make a post without a link but with "link in a comment" note, post link as a comment under that post and like it (to increase change of it being on top). At least many fanpages I keep track of do that.
But I guess it's a matter of time before FB starts fighting that too.
This is also why I quit Instagram, as I discussed further in another recent post. After implementing their "algorithm" the app was completely ruined. It clearly just caters the same repetitive mindless content to the lowest common demoninator
> If enough people who see it "like" it, it moves to a larger amount of people, and so on until everyone on the app sees it. This is easy, straightforward, and transparent (for the most part, there are special cases and such).
This is the problem of any platform.
What happens when the platform gets so big that you have thousands of videos competing for the same feed position because they are all getting likes?
I see the same thing happening with the dev.to platform. I used to syndicate my blog posts there. I got something like 7,000 followers in a few months while posting a few articles I picked from my site. They got thousands (10k+ on some of them) of views and every article I posted got tweeted from their main account which then got RT'd sometimes hundreds of times, etc..
But for the last few months not 1 of my articles have gotten tweeted and the posts have like 100 views (but have thousands of views on my own site).
So it's the same pattern. It's just a platform getting large enough where unless you get special treatment it's nearly impossible to be visible. In my case I'm probably not going to re-post on dev.to anymore because it's not worth the hassle to manually port those articles to their platform (which takes time).
>"TikTok's algorithm is pretty well-documented by its community: When you post a video, TikTok shows it to a certain amount of people. If enough people who see it "like" it, it moves to a larger amount of people, and so on until everyone on the app sees it. This is easy, straightforward, and transparent (for the most part, there are special cases and such)."
It sounds like your reason for preferring TikTok's approach is tied to an underlying aspect of their business that currently does well for you, but which could very easily (dare I say very likely?) change as their business grows and needs evolve.
What if this is simply what they've determined is the best approach for acquiring content creator market share, and once they feel secure enough, they shift it towards a more monetization-focused blackbox approach? Would you still create content for it? Or are you platform agnostic and you'll go where the views and subscribers are?
That's definitely a possibility and I agree that it will be the likely outcome but I don't think that this should be the take away from the OP.
I think the take away from the OP should be that there are other possibilities. We shouldn't think that the current state of YouTube is somehow optimal or the peak of video sharing simply because it is owned by a behemoth like Alphabet. Too often people assume that because Alphabet employs a lot of highly educated people who often happen to be very intelligent that the products they produce must be the pinnacle of creation but they're not. Their products are often just good enough or designed in such a way to make switching difficult.
You've correctly identified the underlying issue here -- misaligned incentives. As the dominant player in this field YouTube can no longer increase user count so they instead want to maximize per user revenue and the ways to go about are that produce a sub-optimal user and content creator experience.
Tik-Tok and Youtube before it are guilty of a common thing today which is basically business model bait and switch. Cool, Hip tech companies offer one thing to entice new users and once they get established they switch to a model that locks you in.
The solution isn't to just tweak content selection algorithms it's to move to a decentralized content distribution system so that we can't be lured into these kinds of bait and switch traps again.
Does anyone feel like this whole thing, including this top post, is just a carefully crafted advert to TikTok? It's no a YouBoob competitor at all! Maybe a Vine or Snap competitor.
You can't host the same type of content on there. Honestly people should just use PeerTube; either set up an instance or pay for a hosted one.
>TikTok lets whoever's talented become at least relatively popular
Enjoy it while it lasts.
No user generated content meritocracy ever lasts. Not steam greenlight, not the app store, not new grounds, not YouTube etc.
The problem with your "transparent algorithm" is when the supply of content starts to outpace the supply of 50 users to test it on. Then content will inevitably get unfairly unviewed and the only thing left to do is implement some dodgy [redacted] process.
Don't believe me? Consider this. Your one clip takes 30*50=1500 seconds of user time to categorize (according to your algorithm). If a user spends 1 hr on tiktok per day, they effectively volunteered 3600 seconds of work towards categorizing clips as good or not. Meaning if you post a moderate amount (2, sometimes 3 times per day), you've just cancelled out that entire user and you only spent 90 seconds of your own time to do it. If more than half the people on the platform are moderate posters and 1 hr a day consumers, the system breaks.
Most people on any platform are consumers, and that doesn't seem to decrease as the platform grows. Steam, the app stores, and YouTube are not exceptions.
If it did become a problem, TikTok could change rules so that you must review X clips for every one you post. It wouldn't put off most creators.
The reason user-generated recommendation systems don't last is not because they break down under a flood of content. The reason is that the platform finds it more profitable to promote content based on a different algorithm (whether that is pay to play, sponsored posts, optimise for user engagement/clickbait...).
YouTube's pathology is the logical end result of any recommender based system.
I briefly worked on the recommenders for a fare sized fashion site. TLDR: the entire effort was a waste of money.
About the time I left, they were trying to pivot to a personalization based system. Think StitchFix. (With $1.5b/yr sales, they're doing much better than I thought possible.)
Long neglected is search and discovery. Somehow supporting casual foraging behavior online. We internally had long discussions about how to improve. I know exactly what I want and I worked for the company. Yet, I still couldn't find a likable shirt that fits. Pathetic and unforgivable. (I half considered moving to the search team, but stopped caring first.)
YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc. are all the same in this way. While I love YouTube content, it's terrible for finding new stuff.
PS- There's a phrase or term for preferential attachment leading into a (search space) local min (or max) sinkhole or dead end. Not recalling it right now is killing me. Any one know it?
That solution for sampling could work for tiktok/vine/... any service that wants to provide you the latest meme. It won't work for YouTube.
How many people will be ever interested in a random topic in a random language? If I was provided with a sample of new uploaded content, I'd be interested in approximately 0% of it. Even if I'm subscribed to 30 or so varied channels right now.
I can understand your feeling, but I'm not sure I share it. I did a series of extremely bad Dwarf Fortress videos on YT. I've gotten hundreds of views for some of them (and only a few for the latest ones: a testament to their lack of quality ;-) ). Mostly I think my views come from DF being a small community and it's easy to advertise to those people. If you are making a general comedy channel, I don't think it is surprising that you will get lost in the shuffle. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Even if it comes up on my suggestions, I'm not going to watch it unless I've heard of it.
I think you are correct that YT caters to the big names, but I can hardly blame them. It makes money for them. The platform is not about being fair: it's about making money for Google. I have no problem with that, really. They host my content for free, make it available to almost anyone, retain it for who knows how long... The fact that you have to do advertising and marketing for your content yourself is not really something that bothers me.
YouTube is no longer for funny short clips, it's not really set up for that.
I think YouTube could do more to expose people to more small channels (especially when you run out of videos from subscriptions if you are lucky enough that they will even deliver them to you).
Some of us are working together to build a YouTube video curation site, following a discussion a few days ago on HN. (although we're thinking mostly kids contents, but it doesn't have to be only that) See the discussion from then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20528913
I'm hoping to get a bunch of YouTubers involved, since they want to get their stuff out there, and I think we can do better than YouTube at that. Notice that we won't be serving the videos, but we will embed them in a site.
The goal is to have something to put up on HN within two months.
If you want to join, let me know: rjbrown at gmail
What if YouTube just does the same, but the goal of the algorithm is not to maximize like/dislike ratios, but actual click-through rate and watch time? [1]
It's an ad company after all.
Also, the domain of TikTok videos seems very limited in comparison to YouTube videos, so your like-based algorithm might result in bad user retention with this broad strategy of showing random videos.
So the question really is: If YouTube's algorithm is more sophisticated than TikTok's and TikTok is trying to do the same, would they still be as transparent about it?
In the current media climate, the risks of recommending small channels probably aren't worth it. The moment something dodgy gets recommended and journalists get ahold of it, the loss of advertiser income site-wide costs both YouTube and other creators far more than they could ever get from better recommendations. The incentives are intentionally stacked against you.
Had never heard of them. Now I have and will be giving them a try. I definitely could see this word of mouth threatening YouTube if not outright killing them. Competition is always good.
(Runs off to check TikTok)
....
(After checking out some videos)
That was actually refreshing. Many of the videos were fun to watch and put a smile on my face. Not bad TikTok!
Have you ever asked yourself why you put so much effort into making these videos and what your goal is? Why you seek validation from views and likes from strangers?
your pride or your viewpoint doesn't = views. Sounds very entailed, but I would agree with you. It's hard to become something on Youtube, but that's the same for everything.
I stopped reading. YouTube is a completely free platform. It will even pay you to host your content there if it's popular enough. You're free to go else where.
TiKTok does not pay you. Your subscribers are just a number, and you have no evidence that most of them are even real and you offer no evidence in your post that any of it matters.
This defense of "free" platforms is reminiscent to feudalism. In feudalism you of course did not pay rent. You simply took care of the land and in exchange your lord would provide you a small share of the produced food, a place to live, protection from attacks, and a [heavily biased] conflict resolution system. All for "free." But of course it wasn't free. The lords were utilizing the labors of the peasant to generate mass surpluses which were in turn used to greatly empower themselves.
In today's times human attention is arguably the most valuable 'commodity' there is. And YouTube is using their peasants to produce it in unprecedented quantities. In exchange they return a small share of the returns produced, a free place to host, protection from attacks, and a [heavily biased] conflict resolution system.
It's of course technically correct that it's free, but the connotation is entirely wrong. Few would idealize for the "free housing" of feudalism, and I think in the future we'll have few that would idealize the "free hosting" of today. In the present? People are simply greatly undervaluing their own worth, much as the peasants did. It took the black death emphasizing their relevance for them to finally understand they were the ones running the show all along.
Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days, and put out a video and go to bed. You wake up the next morning and find that after the first 3,000 views, the video was de-monetized and the remaining 500,000 views went generated no revenue. You complain to YouTube, they manually review it, and your video is re-monetized. Your views for that video barely increase for the rest of eternity. That bug just cost you X revenue. Multiply for the entire month.
At the very least, YouTube can offer a service your video can go into limbo before it's sent out to your subscribers, where all of these "mistakes" can be ironed out.
Perhaps the platform is de-monetizing video based on mass reporting - leaving the system open to be gamed by anyone who is okay with the ethics of brigading/report bombing. This is a VERY common thing these days.
The other possibility is that the AI is generating false positives and de-monetizing as a result of it.
Whichever the case may be, it ought to be possible for content creators to publish a video that is not mistakenly de-monetized for the vast majority of their viewers.
> video based on mass reporting - leaving the system open to be gamed by anyone who is okay with the ethics of brigading/report bombing. This is a VERY common thing these days.
I would say the “angry mob” is one of the biggest threats to free speech in our generation. If you can’t get the government to silence those you don’t like, try and get them deplatformed everywhere.
> Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days. That bug just cost you X revenue. Multiply for the entire month.
Counterpoint - it didn't cost you anything, it's just lost opportunity. Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days and literally no ones watches the videos you produce. You have no cost, but also no revenue.
I understand why people want to criticize YT, but if you are using a service that will gladly pay the costs for your distribution with no upfront obligation and no on-going payment, then what do you expect?
I mean this is why unions exist. Not suggesting that unions are the right answer here. In fact, I really don't know what the solution is, but I don't think either side of the table has a solution that will solve everyone's problems unilaterally.
> Counterpoint - it didn't cost you anything, it's just lost opportunity. Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days and literally no ones watches the videos you produce. You have no cost, but also no revenue.
Sorry I guess I should have provided the context - the context was you are a YouTube user with a subscriber base of regular viewers. I figured that came across when I quoted the viewership numbers. Monetization is only offered to users who meet some thresholds.
Those 500,000 views wouldn't have had ads shown on them. Some solutions might be:
1. Being able to automatically unpublish the video if it's de-monitized.
2. Have a monitoring service available that can fight copyright claims in real-time.
3. Don't upload at night and then go to sleep. :)
> At the very least, YouTube can offer a service your video can go into limbo before it's sent out to your subscribers, where all of these "mistakes" can be ironed out.
This has existed for some time. You can upload your video as "unlisted" and then later make it "public."
This is a little too cynical for my taste. Google isn't exactly a monument of ethical business, but I seriously doubt that Google would intentionally demonetize videos for the purpose of stealing from content creators.
De-monetized videos do not show ads or earn revenue, so that actually hurts Google as well (of course it has indirect effects that are beneficial for Google overall).
I think one of the problems that YouTube has is their three-strikes policy and how they interact with said offending user.
When a video gets flagged, it supposedly is queued up for manual review. Upon manual review, if the YouTube employee deems that the video has broken one of its rules, it will take the video down and it will notify the uploader that they have received a strike.
That's all fine, but the problem is really in how they handle this interaction. They tell the user which "set of rules" they've broken (e.g. "Hate speech, discrimination or other forms of bigotry based on race, gender or religion"), but they get no more specific than that. They do not offer a timestamp for the exact moment in which you violated their rules. The result is as you'd expect. I'm sure many terrible videos are rightly taken down this way, but there are plenty of people who don't believe their video violated any rules and are seeking clarification on what they did wrong.
It would also be beneficial for the relationship between YouTube and its creators if there was an opportunity for restitution. For example, maybe YouTube informs the user that their video has violated a rule and if they don't take it down within some period of time, they will receive a strike and it will be taken down automatically (of course, with the knowledge that some types of videos should be taken down immediately). Maybe when YouTube takes a video down, they could timestamp it and tell the user that they can re-upload the video without that specific part.
As it is now, there are people who make their livings on YouTube, and these somewhat vague rules and the nebulous enforcement of them does not instill creators (I'm talking about creators who post about divisive or controversial things - could be something as simple as viewpoints on modern political news) with a feeling of security and the end-result may be that they simply move to a different platform.
If YouTube listens to the complaints of this 'FairTube' group and engages them, I think that'd be best for everyone.
I wonder what the percentage difference is of people getting copyright strikes vs. copyright ID claims. I do hear far less about strikes themselves, i would assume (big assumption on my part so i might be wrong) if a video had a lot of views one would want to make a copyright ID claim and monetize on the popularity, that would also give the creator a chance to dispute it.
Also if you make all your living just being on youtube and no other platforms, in my opinion you are setting yourself up for failure. Youtube is a business with shareholders. They do have a responcibility for creators bringing in the money, but just like facebook, when you are a creator on youtube your ARE the product. One does not have to like someone calling them a product, but it is still the truth.
Not to mention the stories of creators losing money to false claims. YouTube should should the money is escrow until copyright strikes are resolved one way or another because, as it stands, creators don't have the resources to fight the rampant safe harbor fraud.
It's even worse than that. Sure, a chunk of the video's initial ad revenue will be lost over illegitimate claims but if the video is restricted, the video is basically dead. Most videos get the lion share of their views in the time immediately after they're uploaded (i.e. the first day or week). If the video gets stuck in limbo, not only isn't the creator making any money but also the video will underperform and any cost of producing that video will have virtually no return on investment.
So in other words, smaller channels can easily get stuck producing worse content because the risk of investing significant amounts of time into a single video is too great. And even when channels don't rely on monetisation, lost exposure can limit their reach and harm their growth.
Readit News
Copyright claims is a perfect example. That system is abused by large companies who know how to exploit their algorithms and they know it is worth it because there will be no humans in the loop to stop them.
If YouTube wants to remain viable, they just need to bite the bullet and hire a whole bunch of people.
Yep.
One of my favorite subscribers to watch is some guy (Harald Baldr[0]) who travels around remote areas of the world and vlogs it.
But he's said a number of times how even 10 seconds of background music can cause his video to get demonetized and then all ad revenue for the video goes to the record label who owns the copyright and there's absolutely nothing he can do to combat it.
This happens even if his video is 30 minutes long and has nothing to do with the music at all -- it just so happens he's walking past a store or hotel lobby that has music on.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKr68ZJ4vv6VloNdnS2hjhA/vid...
One of my more popular videos could never be monetized because I added a song (via the old YouTube editor interface) that turned out to have a copyright claim but the interface doesn't allow me to remove or change the background music in post. So I'm given the option to delete something with 911k views and annoy my viewers with a duplicate upload or just cut my losses.
It's long overdue but they do seem to be making some strides to help creators at last.
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It's not that AI needs to replace empathy alone, it needs to replace culturally and legally nuanced judgement about copyrighted works, among other things. That's hard to teach fast to a mechturk type workforce, and staffing a team of people competent enough to understand that nuance at youtube's scale has to be prohibitively expensive if it's even possible.
Humanizing operations buys quality at the expense of putting a upper bound on scale. Few companies are willing to accept that ceiling for fear of losing market share.
The question I find interesting is: is this assumption correct? Is service scale the dominant factor in market share, or could you win a significant piece of the pie with a "Smaller YouTube by Humans"?
In theory, a more human touch could attract content creators, who in turn could bring their audience. Whether that would translate to significant market share, though, dunno.
Here is one stat I found from 2019:
- 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
So if videos were reviewed at 1x speed, they would need 24000 humans working 24x7. (Not sure how to scale that to actual jobs, but seems manageable)
Related: "Facebook had more than 30,000 employees working on safety and security — about half of whom were content moderators." Not a fun job:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
YT probably doesn't make money. We don't know because Alphabet doesn't put it as a separate line item in their earnings reports. Insiders say it about "breaks even".
granted, this is not exactly apples/apples, but it's not far off
One could also argue that if YouTube's takedown fitler wasn't as "good" (where good doesn't actually mean objectively good, but aggressive) as Google made it be, then EU's upload filter wouldn't have passed either, because then there would have been no example of anyone "doing it right" (read: taking down anything that smells like a cousin of a copyrighted work, including stuff like public works, bird chirps, etc -- just to be sure).
My point is, YouTube wouldn't have needed as many humans to check if people's taken down stuff was needed to be taken down, if its algorithms weren't designed to be so aggressive in the first place.
Google dug its own grave here. Now it's stuck between the creators who increasingly see it as a hostile/too risky service, and the people who keep calling for YouTube to censor stuff that "offends them", and who will never ever be satisfied with whatever censorship regime YouTube puts in place, just like the copyright trolls never will be either.
It's dangerous to become the arbiter of taste, I can understand Google's aversion to more human involvement beyond just the problems with scale.
What's frustrating is that we don't have many ways to find out what's true.
Youtube's algo is an arbiter of taste whether they're happy about it or not. I'm not sure it's possible to be apolitical here.
Curation is terrible too, when it comes to kids content. I won't let my kids use YouTube kids anymore, it's awful. It used to have mostly appropriate kids content, but now people have gamed it.
Not sure if anyone has refuted this person's points but they are pretty alarming no matter what side of isle you sit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqBeXJ8Zx8 (What 40,000 Videos Tell Us About The Trending Tab)
Eg, the copyright claim system seems fundamentally designed for abuse. You can't throw humans at it and expect it to work properly, it's working as designed now. You could change it, have humans handle the decision making or w/e - but if you are going to change it you could also "simply" write a better contract. Something not so flawed and easily abusable; of which there have been many ideas, discussions, etc.
They can hire more people, but they will (and should) never let you call them up and tell at them after your video is demonetized.
Facebook has 30000 moderators.
A big corp could take a mixed approach. For every paid admin you can have dozens of volunteers whose authority and actions are supervised by the paid admins, and the admins and moderators would also have access to the AI tools to see flags on the content.
This could be a good model for Youtube Kids - whitelisting channels and individual videos as age-appropriate. If the admin sees a moderator abusing the privilege, let them revoke it and revert their entire history.
> they just need to bite the bullet and hire a whole bunch of people.
This issue is not specific to Youtube but to all platforms where users can post. I don't see how Facebook or Twitter or Reddit can hire enough people to review their communities.
"More Than 500 Hours Of Content Are Now Being Uploaded To YouTube Every Minute".
Do that math. Filing copyright claims can be completely automated. Humans can't keep up with that.
In my opinion, YouTube should enjoy Safe Harbor laws. When someone wants to make a Copyright claim, they should have to post a bounty. If their claim is found to be without merit, they forfeit the bounty to the person who created the video in question. And this should be resolved by a governmental judicial group, who also gets a cut of the bounty.
> If their claim is found to be without merit, they forfeit the bounty to the person who created the video in question.
That would mean there needs to be an appeals process and humans who do the reviews, right?
I think that was utterly fascinating. A long hard look at the dark side of the psyche.
Not even this, but the algorithms are designed in way that is bias towards the person making the copyright claim. It isn't like neutral algorithm and the companies just figured out how to leverage it better than creators, it is literally built in their favor.
Not really a Youtube problem, but Google Problem. Google and Apple seems to operate at completely opposite end of spectrum. There is nothing Human about Google's Product and Services, even if they did try, it is as if it was designed by Data Mining and Algorithm. But it was fast, efficient, and instantaneous. Apple on the other hand is far too human, literally having a hand on every step of the process, which means it is very slow, and sometimes bureaucratic. But they do seems to care way beyond what a normal persona and other companies would do.
“Abused” in a similar way to how YouTube existed for (something like) 10 years without paying a single iota of money to anyone for copyrighted material? I’d call that abuse of copyright law myself (neglect can be a form of abuse).
Copyright claims is YouTube finally existing within the scope of the law. There are implementation issues - rerouting all money on a first come, first served basis is wrong - but Rome wasn’t built in a day.
And, from what I know of large record labels, they don’t know how to exploit the algorithms themselves. Most of them work in Microsoft Excel. Beating the claims system is beyond them.
They have software that they’ve bought to do that for them!
I completely agree, but that's against everything Google wishes for, which is a world where everyone is 100% online 100% of the time with their data 100% in the cloud and decisions being made by AI 100% of the time.
Pushing for human intensive operation inside Google might as well be career suicide, this is why they would much rather keeping spending large amount of resource on "improving the algorithm" instead of just hire more humans and make more progress with a fraction of the cost.
As usual, how many ?
In particular if we are talking copyright claims abuse, could you give a ballpark number of the number of humans you think youtube needs to hire ?
That's a really rough one. Not only do I not have an algorithm for a computer to determine if something is copyrighted, I don't have an algorithm for a human to determine if something is either.
Since you're probably going to be stuck with an adversarial system based on claims and counterclaims anyhow, I'd submit the problem is probably more related to a lack of symmetry. The content creators put stuff up, then there are thousands of entities that can analyze their stuff automatically and make automated claims with no apparent consequences for being wrong. The individual creator then gets notified of a claim, but they know nothing about the claimant, whether they make routine fraudulent claims, whether they have legit ownership, etc., and have to address them relatively individually, by appealing to an opaque system that tells them very little about why the ruling is what it is, and where all the penalties appear to fall on the content creator rather than the claimant.
Something needs to be a bit more symmetrical there.
This is something where a "YouTube union" might start really being dangerous to YouTube; suppose the union puts up a page where they ask all the members to record exactly what claims are made on what content, with all the (meager as it may be) metadata YouTube gives them on the claims. I betcha some patterns would emerge. (I believe there's already some word-of-mouth about certain claimants but I bet this would make it even worse for YouTube.)
But I suspect the number of copyright claims would go down significantly once they have a bunch of people reviewing them, because the erroneous claims would become unprofitable, assuming they punish entities that make too many erroneous claims.
Imagine making a mistake that favors a pirate, lawsuits. Make a mistake that favors a copyright troll, endless hate?
I'm fairly sure that most of the content watched on youtube was uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder, at least historically. Having an algo people have to actively thwart, can be unaware that the particular content is copyrighted, and/or generates a significant enough number of false positives that google can claim that they're trying hard enough to damage a portion of their legal business is a tool in and of itself.
Not using an algo makes it clear you're doing editorial, and once you're doing editorial, oversight follows. Anyway, even with the algo you can do as much editorial you want through training and dispute resolution. By slow-walking some disputes and fast-tracking others, you can change the shape of your business to hopefully be more independent of legally fragile stolen content.
The Trump/Russia conspiracy was a boon to all of these algorithmically filtering DMCA carriers, now they can actually explicitly filter points of view. I decided that point was inevitable anyway after I heard of the first facebook censoring of an anti-wingsuit post. IMO humans + that degree of editorial = worst case scenario, at least laundering it through the AI means that editorial requires some cost and degree of engineering skill.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/features/why-ar...
> “The post got deleted by Facebook, and I pissed off the entire community,” says Lewis. “My message was followed up by the most fatal month in BASE. I just painfully sat back and watched my friends die one after the other.”
There's Vimeo, but you either keep paying a monthly fee, or they drop your content due to the 5 GB maximum limit for free accounts. So if you want to publish stuff and no longer worry about it, you need to make sure that you have a subscription going with a valid credit card.
Vimeo is only worth it if you're looking to host video content behind a paywall.
Also for website owners Vimeo drops tracking cookies with no way to turn the behavior off, whereas YouTube has a -nocookies mode that doesn't drop any cookies. On the other hand YouTube has started to serve ads on embedded content as well and in the -nocookies mode they can't notice Premium accounts either.
These are technical issues that could be solved by alternatives, but aren't. We aren't even talking about the lockin effect of YouTube having the huge audience that it has. Nowadays it's more lucrative to host videos on YouTube even if they are meant for embedding it on your website.
Also TikTok is cool, but it's very niche and it's in no way competition for YouTube. There's also the issue that if you're worried about privacy and ads, the fact that TikTok is free (and therefore ads or data driven) and owned by a Chinese company ... is a problem.
Also known as "paying for hosting". Seems pretty reasonable. If creators want to upload and broadcast unlimited hours of HD video onto the internet for free they need to accept the consequences of this arrangement (i.e. they aren't entitled to anything). The rest of us have to invest capital into our projects so that we can ensure a stable digital foundation in-line with our own prerogatives.
I understand that some people want to use it to get into show business, but man, Youtube is not the biggest impediment to that, nor the worst predatory company they'll deal with along the way.
So if the solution is Vimeo versus not hosting video at all, I might go for the later. Therefore free to host services like YouTube win.
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Twitch could have been a competitor, but they surprisingly don't seem to care about that market ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I do wish they would do better with organizing the VoD section though it's so hard to find particular VoDs even for simple things like Critical Role's once a week show that happens at the same time every week much less a less scheduled streamer.
Linus Media Group has Floatplane, CGP Grey and friends have Nebula... YouTube, like Netflix, doesn't have a special sauce. It has creators, and those creators are happy and eager to leave.
But they do have the eyes. If you want your videos to be seen, there's no Youtube alternative. Twitch would be, but they seem to be banning people for political reasons too.
Network effect is real and very strong. It will be very hard to create real YT alternatives.
We have Bitchute and PeerTube, but they severely lack content and the viewers.
If not, what deep-pocketed company would be able to keep a competitor afloat?
I will not be downloading TikTok
And unfortunately, there's no real alternative to Youtube. Let's say I'm a content creator, where would I upload my videos? Vimeo is not free, other sites similar to Youtube closed, so...
This completely. I've never used TikTok, but my understanding is that it is more akin to SnapChat for lipsyncing. I'm sure there are a lot of people who use YouTube for that type of content and have been pulled to TikTok for it, but it does not seem like an alternative to me as someone who almost exclusively goes to YouTube for content that is at least 10 minutes or longer and more like a replacement for television.
I have done no research into this at all, so maybe I'm just an asshole repeating hearsay, but I've heard YouTube is not even remotely profitable for Google. Owning the huge site definitely benefits them in a lot of ways beyond just ad revenue/profit, so I'm assuming from Google's point of view, until some other site can actually challege YouTube's dominance, it's totally worth it to have this stream of publicity gaffes to lose a tiny amount of viewer revenue than to throw even more money down the hole trying to fix the site's issue. It's like a wooden row boat that keeps springing leaks, as long as YouTube has free fingers to plug them, that's what they're gonna do rather than actually fix them.
they've pivoted to aiding businesses create video ads
I appreciate that TikTok is the "new hotness" but I don't see its relevance to this conversation about YouTube or why the author felt the need to shoehorn it into every paragraph.
Think of the amount of writing that goes into a single 20-minute TV sitcom episode. The most popular ones have 24 episodes a year. Youtubers are expected to come up with 10-minute episodes 1x/week if not more frequently. The quality of the videos take a nosedive, the creators burn out, and subscriptions and views fall as a result.
TikTok's shorter videos can arguably be more entertaining as there's no arbitrary length requirement that incentivizes filler.
This is inaccurate. It is suspected, but not confirmed, that the YouTube recommendation algorithm favors videos longer than 10 minutes because they increase the amount of time users spend on the platform. Videos need not be 10 minutes long to be monetized.
They'll also need their own copyright detection system when lawsuits start coming their way. Then we'll have come full circle.
While this is true, what's the gain of that? YouTube has it, are they making money? If not, will they in the future?
Content creators deal with an opaque algorithm that demonetizes videos based on how the wind is blowing, or it would appear. Weeks or months of work can be wiped out by an arbitrary demonetization preventing content creators from getting paid for their video's views.
JonTron discusses this [1]. It's very easy to violate the "advertiser-friendly" guidelines. They're vague: "violence", "harmful content", "controversial or sensitive issues". Under profanity: "strong profanity used in video even if bleeped for comedy, documentary, news, or educational purposes". ??!
It has been obvious for a long time that daily content uploads are better for the algorithm than longer, quality videos uploaded less frequently. If you look at the LinusTechTips network of channels, they produce at least 5-7 videos per week.
[0]: An analysis of 7 months worth of trending tab videos, or roughly ~40k videos that reached the trending tab. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqBeXJ8Zx8
[1]: https://youtu.be/TZ31u3vI934?t=364
Wow, the whole Youtube system is a mess. I had no idea it was that bad
- Craziest COPYRIGHT STRIKE from YouTube ever?! (Paul Davis) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvH77m_3MVU
- What I want to teach, but can't, thanks to Universal Music Group. (Adam Neely) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nryFmUjtwEY
- Why Record Labels STILL Suck! (Rick Beato) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoTl9V8cjH0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rRKBXQotnA
His comments:
https://twitter.com/adamneelybass/status/1124722129495306240
https://twitter.com/adamneelybass/status/1124840588543713285
I'm constantly amazed that this company does not invest more in human copyright legal reviews when their product is pretty much just obtaining rights to share copies of other people's work.
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I have a YouTube channel. My first video will be five years old on September 14. I kept putting out content for a number of years, content which I thought was funny and would surely be well-received.
But people never watched my videos! I get 20ish views per video. They never get recommended to anyone because I'm a smaller channel, and then I never become big for that reason. (Or maybe my videos just suck. Some of them definitely do, but I've made some that I'm proud of.)
I joined TikTok, YouTube's 60-second-max competitor. Out of boredom I made a video synced to one of those songs. Fifty views on my first one. Eventually I started making more content. I've clocked around 150K views on my videos combined, 40K likes, and 1200 followers. I made my first video around February and my second around June.
While YouTube discourages small creators, non-celebrities, and those that don't have massive amounts of cash to throw around on sets, TikTok lets whoever's talented become at least relatively popular.
TikTok's algorithm is pretty well-documented by its community: When you post a video, TikTok shows it to a certain amount of people. If enough people who see it "like" it, it moves to a larger amount of people, and so on until everyone on the app sees it. This is easy, straightforward, and transparent (for the most part, there are special cases and such).
YouTube's algorithm is: [redacted]. It's amusing to me that a Chinese company would be more transparent about this. YouTube doesn't understand its community and it's probably too late to save it, it got a monopoly and stagnated. My story is one of many others.
Off Topic but from what little I saw, the content on TikTok is pure cancer.
That is understandable, but the diversity of content makes it so that YouTube can't just reccomend videos to everyone. I just hope that a place remains online for the weird niche stuff that is avaliable there, but Tiktok definitely isn't a place for that. It's fine for memes, but that's about it.
I know their contentID and copyright system is hopelessly broken and biased towards stealing from original content creators at the behest if established and larger publishers and this has been a real thorn in the side. Someone literally posted random white noise and it was claimed by multiple people automatically within seconds. That's a failure on YouTube's part that borders on facilitating cooyfraud. I'm surprised they haven't been sure over it yet.
Here's a primer on tiktok for those unfamiliar: https://slate.com/technology/2018/09/tiktok-app-musically-gu...
If by cancer you mean people having fun in ways you don't approve, then yes.
The point is it's a bit too quick to label a new medium pure cancer. Given time, people will find ways to create amazing things using any format.
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Clever. Also, I think you nailed it.
YouTube is trying to curate their content. Any site that stays around for a while and wants to attract top advertising dollars does it. Reddit curates to an extent. Facebook is in all kinds of trouble for not curating.
It seems like the best way to get around the business physics is to switch from a business model to a federation model. Something like Mastodon where hosting costs are distributed and the algorithm can be tweaked for exposure rather than dollars earned for the hosting company. Of course there you have a chicken and egg networking problem and an ease of use problem.
> I don't know how to get around the business physics of this. Not sure anyone does.
Sometimes I think to myself that if their is less reliance on angel/VC funding from the very beginning, then founders could stay true to their vision. Like how Elon Musk refuses to make SpaceX a publicly traded company as it would squander the ultimate goal of colonizing mars. However, given how resource intensive it must be to process and store petabytes of video every year (exabytes in total), there is just no way around acquiring investment dollars.
I'm cool with friends seeing my stuff and not interacting or not liking it because it's not likeable. That's democratic. But I'm NOT cool with Facebook not even showing my content to my own friends.
The external link hating algorithm also extends to important news and events. Recently there was an arson attack in Japan on Kyoto Animation where the arsonist doused gasoline throughout the building and lit it on fire. 33+ people died, 37+ injured. I posted a link for my friends to donate to the official charity event on GoFundMe to help the survivors and victims. After 1 hour, ZERO interactions, ZERO comments, ZERO angry reactions.
I then deleted my post, and re-posted a text-only status with the same message and asking people to Google for the donation link. Within 1 hour, 25+ sad reactions and friends donating. Victims got helped, because I removed the link.
I see the same of friends' accounts as well. Links to blog posts about sexual assault encounters and racism get a fraction of the exposure they used to unless they are already viral, so they often never get seen. While on the other hand someone who posts a photo to Facebook directly about their amazing boba while #livingTheCaliforniaLife gets 100 likes.
Zuckerberg talked about changing the algorithm to "bring people closer together" and promote "meaningful interactions", but the algorithm really just promotes content uploaded to Facebook and down-ranks external content. It's not bringing people together at all.
And it's hurting independent creators even more, who increasingly depend on social media to spread their word.
That's funny, in my LinkedIn circle people have been doing this for more than a year, even marketing people recommend putting the link in a reply... apparently Facebook caught up with that.
But I guess it's a matter of time before FB starts fighting that too.
This is the problem of any platform.
What happens when the platform gets so big that you have thousands of videos competing for the same feed position because they are all getting likes?
I see the same thing happening with the dev.to platform. I used to syndicate my blog posts there. I got something like 7,000 followers in a few months while posting a few articles I picked from my site. They got thousands (10k+ on some of them) of views and every article I posted got tweeted from their main account which then got RT'd sometimes hundreds of times, etc..
But for the last few months not 1 of my articles have gotten tweeted and the posts have like 100 views (but have thousands of views on my own site).
So it's the same pattern. It's just a platform getting large enough where unless you get special treatment it's nearly impossible to be visible. In my case I'm probably not going to re-post on dev.to anymore because it's not worth the hassle to manually port those articles to their platform (which takes time).
It sounds like your reason for preferring TikTok's approach is tied to an underlying aspect of their business that currently does well for you, but which could very easily (dare I say very likely?) change as their business grows and needs evolve.
What if this is simply what they've determined is the best approach for acquiring content creator market share, and once they feel secure enough, they shift it towards a more monetization-focused blackbox approach? Would you still create content for it? Or are you platform agnostic and you'll go where the views and subscribers are?
I think the take away from the OP should be that there are other possibilities. We shouldn't think that the current state of YouTube is somehow optimal or the peak of video sharing simply because it is owned by a behemoth like Alphabet. Too often people assume that because Alphabet employs a lot of highly educated people who often happen to be very intelligent that the products they produce must be the pinnacle of creation but they're not. Their products are often just good enough or designed in such a way to make switching difficult.
You've correctly identified the underlying issue here -- misaligned incentives. As the dominant player in this field YouTube can no longer increase user count so they instead want to maximize per user revenue and the ways to go about are that produce a sub-optimal user and content creator experience.
Tik-Tok and Youtube before it are guilty of a common thing today which is basically business model bait and switch. Cool, Hip tech companies offer one thing to entice new users and once they get established they switch to a model that locks you in.
The solution isn't to just tweak content selection algorithms it's to move to a decentralized content distribution system so that we can't be lured into these kinds of bait and switch traps again.
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You can't host the same type of content on there. Honestly people should just use PeerTube; either set up an instance or pay for a hosted one.
Youtube could be built on an old paradigm where a video is on average 1 hour long.
A carefully crafted minute will beat most longer videos. Applying frugality to the use of our very limited time seems like logical evolution.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
No user generated content meritocracy ever lasts. Not steam greenlight, not the app store, not new grounds, not YouTube etc.
The problem with your "transparent algorithm" is when the supply of content starts to outpace the supply of 50 users to test it on. Then content will inevitably get unfairly unviewed and the only thing left to do is implement some dodgy [redacted] process.
Don't believe me? Consider this. Your one clip takes 30*50=1500 seconds of user time to categorize (according to your algorithm). If a user spends 1 hr on tiktok per day, they effectively volunteered 3600 seconds of work towards categorizing clips as good or not. Meaning if you post a moderate amount (2, sometimes 3 times per day), you've just cancelled out that entire user and you only spent 90 seconds of your own time to do it. If more than half the people on the platform are moderate posters and 1 hr a day consumers, the system breaks.
If it did become a problem, TikTok could change rules so that you must review X clips for every one you post. It wouldn't put off most creators.
The reason user-generated recommendation systems don't last is not because they break down under a flood of content. The reason is that the platform finds it more profitable to promote content based on a different algorithm (whether that is pay to play, sponsored posts, optimise for user engagement/clickbait...).
No mention of actively promoting their content, not even in the comment itself.
Not relying on the whims of the platforms own algorithms seems like the first step.
I briefly worked on the recommenders for a fare sized fashion site. TLDR: the entire effort was a waste of money.
About the time I left, they were trying to pivot to a personalization based system. Think StitchFix. (With $1.5b/yr sales, they're doing much better than I thought possible.)
Long neglected is search and discovery. Somehow supporting casual foraging behavior online. We internally had long discussions about how to improve. I know exactly what I want and I worked for the company. Yet, I still couldn't find a likable shirt that fits. Pathetic and unforgivable. (I half considered moving to the search team, but stopped caring first.)
YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc. are all the same in this way. While I love YouTube content, it's terrible for finding new stuff.
PS- There's a phrase or term for preferential attachment leading into a (search space) local min (or max) sinkhole or dead end. Not recalling it right now is killing me. Any one know it?
I would guess it's mostly human-based selection, supported by algorithms.
This was super obvious when PewDiePie's videos were snubbed from recommended list for months at a time.
There was also this one instance where CEO promised to boost one rapper's channel (even though supposedly it's all done algorithmically).
How many people will be ever interested in a random topic in a random language? If I was provided with a sample of new uploaded content, I'd be interested in approximately 0% of it. Even if I'm subscribed to 30 or so varied channels right now.
I think you are correct that YT caters to the big names, but I can hardly blame them. It makes money for them. The platform is not about being fair: it's about making money for Google. I have no problem with that, really. They host my content for free, make it available to almost anyone, retain it for who knows how long... The fact that you have to do advertising and marketing for your content yourself is not really something that bothers me.
I think YouTube could do more to expose people to more small channels (especially when you run out of videos from subscriptions if you are lucky enough that they will even deliver them to you).
I'm hoping to get a bunch of YouTubers involved, since they want to get their stuff out there, and I think we can do better than YouTube at that. Notice that we won't be serving the videos, but we will embed them in a site.
The goal is to have something to put up on HN within two months.
If you want to join, let me know: rjbrown at gmail
So the question really is: If YouTube's algorithm is more sophisticated than TikTok's and TikTok is trying to do the same, would they still be as transparent about it?
[1] https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=838
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(Runs off to check TikTok)
....
(After checking out some videos)
That was actually refreshing. Many of the videos were fun to watch and put a smile on my face. Not bad TikTok!
Works great for me.
Never even heard of tiktok and if it’s better for creators, great, but as a YT consumer I’m good
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I stopped reading. YouTube is a completely free platform. It will even pay you to host your content there if it's popular enough. You're free to go else where.
TiKTok does not pay you. Your subscribers are just a number, and you have no evidence that most of them are even real and you offer no evidence in your post that any of it matters.
In today's times human attention is arguably the most valuable 'commodity' there is. And YouTube is using their peasants to produce it in unprecedented quantities. In exchange they return a small share of the returns produced, a free place to host, protection from attacks, and a [heavily biased] conflict resolution system.
It's of course technically correct that it's free, but the connotation is entirely wrong. Few would idealize for the "free housing" of feudalism, and I think in the future we'll have few that would idealize the "free hosting" of today. In the present? People are simply greatly undervaluing their own worth, much as the peasants did. It took the black death emphasizing their relevance for them to finally understand they were the ones running the show all along.
At the very least, YouTube can offer a service your video can go into limbo before it's sent out to your subscribers, where all of these "mistakes" can be ironed out.
Perhaps the platform is de-monetizing video based on mass reporting - leaving the system open to be gamed by anyone who is okay with the ethics of brigading/report bombing. This is a VERY common thing these days.
The other possibility is that the AI is generating false positives and de-monetizing as a result of it.
Whichever the case may be, it ought to be possible for content creators to publish a video that is not mistakenly de-monetized for the vast majority of their viewers.
I would say the “angry mob” is one of the biggest threats to free speech in our generation. If you can’t get the government to silence those you don’t like, try and get them deplatformed everywhere.
Counterpoint - it didn't cost you anything, it's just lost opportunity. Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days and literally no ones watches the videos you produce. You have no cost, but also no revenue.
I understand why people want to criticize YT, but if you are using a service that will gladly pay the costs for your distribution with no upfront obligation and no on-going payment, then what do you expect?
I mean this is why unions exist. Not suggesting that unions are the right answer here. In fact, I really don't know what the solution is, but I don't think either side of the table has a solution that will solve everyone's problems unilaterally.
Sorry I guess I should have provided the context - the context was you are a YouTube user with a subscriber base of regular viewers. I figured that came across when I quoted the viewership numbers. Monetization is only offered to users who meet some thresholds.
This has existed for some time. You can upload your video as "unlisted" and then later make it "public."
(N.B. "unlisted" != "private")
De-monetized videos do not show ads or earn revenue, so that actually hurts Google as well (of course it has indirect effects that are beneficial for Google overall).
When a video gets flagged, it supposedly is queued up for manual review. Upon manual review, if the YouTube employee deems that the video has broken one of its rules, it will take the video down and it will notify the uploader that they have received a strike.
That's all fine, but the problem is really in how they handle this interaction. They tell the user which "set of rules" they've broken (e.g. "Hate speech, discrimination or other forms of bigotry based on race, gender or religion"), but they get no more specific than that. They do not offer a timestamp for the exact moment in which you violated their rules. The result is as you'd expect. I'm sure many terrible videos are rightly taken down this way, but there are plenty of people who don't believe their video violated any rules and are seeking clarification on what they did wrong.
It would also be beneficial for the relationship between YouTube and its creators if there was an opportunity for restitution. For example, maybe YouTube informs the user that their video has violated a rule and if they don't take it down within some period of time, they will receive a strike and it will be taken down automatically (of course, with the knowledge that some types of videos should be taken down immediately). Maybe when YouTube takes a video down, they could timestamp it and tell the user that they can re-upload the video without that specific part.
As it is now, there are people who make their livings on YouTube, and these somewhat vague rules and the nebulous enforcement of them does not instill creators (I'm talking about creators who post about divisive or controversial things - could be something as simple as viewpoints on modern political news) with a feeling of security and the end-result may be that they simply move to a different platform.
If YouTube listens to the complaints of this 'FairTube' group and engages them, I think that'd be best for everyone.
Also if you make all your living just being on youtube and no other platforms, in my opinion you are setting yourself up for failure. Youtube is a business with shareholders. They do have a responcibility for creators bringing in the money, but just like facebook, when you are a creator on youtube your ARE the product. One does not have to like someone calling them a product, but it is still the truth.
So in other words, smaller channels can easily get stuck producing worse content because the risk of investing significant amounts of time into a single video is too great. And even when channels don't rely on monetisation, lost exposure can limit their reach and harm their growth.