Not sure what a thinly resourced piece like this is doing so high up on HN. There’s really very little evidence that this has anything to do with racial slurs.
From a quick read: last June, the channel was banned for “harmful and dangerous” content. The ban was removed in under 24 hours. YouTube has not confirmed the reason. And yet:
> Experts suspect that it was the usage of words like "black" and "white" that confused the Yutube's AI filters.
Well, if experts said it, it just be true! The experiment they ran is speculative as best and the article just ran with it as absolute fact. If the filter was caused by use of “black” and “white” wouldn’t every chess channel fall victim to it? The filter isn’t new, why was it triggered once last June?
A lot of questions raised and an article that has no interest in answering them. It’s credited to “Buzz Staff”… I think it’s always suspect when no one wants to attach their name to something they wrote. A smell of clickbait running all the way through this one.
This article does contain very little information.
But this channel is one I watch a lot of. It is dedicated to in depth chess commentary with some bits of chess history and I highly recommend it if you play. This it not the first time this has happened to Antonio. He even discussed it a bit the first time, 7 months ago. In that instance it was a single video that was removed. In that video he says “white will always be better” while analyzing a specific position (interesting to note that in the starting position of chess this is also always true). YouTube said it was removed for “harmful and dangerous content”. Without anything else to go on I’d say it’s a fair assessment the it was banned for racial content. I’m not sure what else could be “dangerous” about chess analysis.
Ah, thank you! Some interesting info in that piece: the channel owner didn’t think it had anything to do with race and instead because he mentioned COVID.
There are plenty of other chess channels using the words "black" and "white" to describe each side that have yet to be automatically and mysteriously banned. If it were as simple as usage of the word "black" in the various circumstances that might arise during a discussion about chess, surely some of those would have met the same fate, no?
You would think so. I can construct many sets of sentences that could appear in an excited chess commentary discussion that would probably run afoul of various automated censorship systems.
...and black steals a pawn from white here.
White springs his trap and white is now crushing black on the back row.
.. and we can see black is completely dominating white's position.
White is getting killed by black here...
.. and black now has white in a complete stranglehold.
The real problem, IMO, is that we're all left guessing what the reason is. YouTube has a gargantuan task moderating its content, and I don't expect them to be error-free in this: false positives will happen, and that's okay.
But it's the complete lack of transparency, as well as some YouTubers having difficulty getting their accounts restored that's the real issue.
Maybe he used some specific phrase that triggered something? Or maybe he used some words just a tad too often? Or maybe something else? No one seems to know...
The block was for “harmful and dangerous” content. That’s incredibly vague. Even describing a game using aggressive language could fall foul of such a broad filter.
How many times do non-chess channels get caught in this filter? That’s the first question I’d be asking. I have to assume more than zero times. How many chess channels have not been banned by this filter? Again, presumably more than zero. And yet the article makes conclusions with a dataset of 1.
> Not sure what a thinly resourced piece like this is doing so high up on HN.
Honestly, and anecdotally, I think there's been a large influx of people recently on the right wing spectrum and/or the more outrage driven spectrum. I've noticed a considerable shift in the number of outraged comments and right wing view points in the last few months.
I believe this ties in to the deplatforming of Parler. I can only surmise that it either led to a lot of lurkers becoming more active, or an influx of new members joining to share their outrage and sticking around. Or maybe it did shift existing members over to being more sensitive about what they perceive as internet policing.
Maybe the median person just doesn’t hold extremely intricate positions in these issues but they are being forced to choose a position. You really need to break these claims down a lot to get any sensible discussion. All in or all out are not the options.
I think part of the issue is how a lot of people who may not hold intricate views have a hard time separating well formed, nuanced views from their emotional world view stances. I feel like there's an inherent desire in tech, where knowledge is seen as strength, to always speak up even to show understanding via having an opinion. I know I fall prey to it myself too.
So people in the median often either stay out of discussions they don't have a stake in, or they espouse the most easily digestible view. Unfortunately those happen to usually be more reactionary and simplified views, since nuanced views require greater subject onboarding. Either way, it results in a large skew towards reactionary comments on social media sites.
This original submission being a great example, where many comments are about thought policing, without substance.
The tech world, while seen as largely as being left wing, has had a strong right-wing libertarian streak. This streak seems to have followed the same right-ward march and increase in rhetoric as your standard conservatism.
Oh definitely agreed. Even in silicon valley, which is perceived as a liberal tech Mecca, I'd say I run into a significant number of right wing libertarians.
I read a really good post somewhere that it's because libertarianism is highly based in absolute logical theory. This correlates really well with software engineering. There's a sense that the world can be reduced to an ideal localized function. But it ignores why we need designers to accommodate the human element or architecture that considers error handling.
Furthermore as a result of it being based in logical absolutism, it's really easy to corrupt by introducing polarizing concepts under the guise of "rational thought experiments" and the like.
I think the problem is that you're taking people who disagree with you on a single issue and lumping them into a general "my enemy" group. (It can be inferred that you see yourself as left wing). I hate "deplatforming" with a passion, but wouldn't mind public healthcare and more corporate regulations.
You're not sure why this has so many upvotes on HN? The title is anti-google and most people on the internet only read titles. It makes sense that this community would heavily upvote this post. I did not read the article either, mostly because IDGAF anymore. Big tech companies banning whoever they want is the new normal unfortunately.
Or get someone big enough that they can ask YouTube on Twitter WTF is going on. Like Markiplier in November 2019. He asked his fans to spam emojis in a livestream. So they did and were banned for spam. Their appeals - which YouTube says are reviewed by actual humans - were denied. It wasn’t until he went to Twitter that the problem was fixed.
If I remember correctly, it wasn't just YouTube. Because of that people lost their entire Google accounts, including e-mail, drive and whatever else people trust Google with nowadays
That in particular made me go from just not using Google personally and occasionally bitching about their practices to actively discouraging everyone from using anything related to that company
This is why I like my accounts unbundled. One account per service thanks. Far too many horror stories of Rift users getting their facebook account banned without the option to have it reviewed and then losing access to all the games they had purchased.
I'd most likely guess "Suicide" from the skydiving talk but perhaps "Shooting" from the film talk. I guess you can make stuff up really.
"oh man like you look like you're so high you're just going to jump to your death but uh then then once you actually cross that across that that line you just jumped it's uh just exhilarating i i really enjoy it i do plan on doing it again in the future"
> Not sure what a thinly resourced piece like this is doing so high up on HN.
I recently took some actions to reduce the damage if Google ever ban my account.
I'm now using a custom email domain (although it's just redirecting to my Gmail for now), and doing regular backups of my emails (through Thurderbird) and Google Drive.
With these news being more and more common, you never know when it'll happen to you.
This is a good reminder. Many people don't realise if any one of Google's services ban you it takes down your Google account at the same time (GMail, Drive, Docs etc), it doesn't just block that single service where the alleged violation occurred.
It depends, but generally yes. YouTube DMCA strikes, for example, are known to only nuke your YT channel(s) and the rest of Google still works[0] (although this page does say your entire account is subject to termination[1]). Getting banned from the other services is much harder, of course.
> Getting banned from the other services is much harder, of course.
Is it? All it takes is someone at Google not liking what you're saying for Google to conveniently allow a bug to "accidentally" de-activate your account[1]. Google's slogan may as well be "self-censor or be censored".
I did this when I was using Google Docs for school and one day I went to open my doc to continue working on it and it just presented me with an error page saying my document was blocked due to "ToS violations" I had to restart in a new document and that was the last time I ever trusted my data with google.
The document got randomly unblocked the next week but the damage was already done.
I do that as well, but I'd still be extremely harmed if Google does ever decide to suspend service - I have an Android phone and a lot of things that are tied to that Google account.
Plus, my mail is sometimes caught by spam filters, and people actually find it very odd that I have my own domain (it is a plus for technical stuff though).
What is amazing is how there is no way to recover from all these algorithmic banning. I'm getting banned on Twitter every other day from following anyone because I follow a lot of academics. It's all legitimate but algos detected some pattern and I'm now toast. Twitter provides exactly zero ways to report this or fix this. They simply don't care if some monority users suffer. We see same things when Google disables account and you get locked out from your electronic life.
I used to think working with governments is very hard. Getting support in places like DMVs and passport renewals is super hard. But never thought so futuristic tech world will be so much more arcane and worse than even the governments.
I had a friend call me–practically in tears–because YouTube removed his highest viewed video game montage for violating their hate speech policy. Context: WWII tank game playing as the Germans, usually with some old german language folk song in the background. It's algorithmically removed and most likely algorithmically reviewed upon appeal, and there's basically no recourse for him. Meanwhile, similar videos by other creators have their content left up.
I have to remind him that, unfortunately, YouTube has no shortage of content and absolutely nothing to lose from false flagging a subset of it, compared to the pushback they get for letting something truly horrible slip through the cracks.
inb4 someone will suggest that FIDE should change the color names to be more inclusive + why does white have the first move advantage, why can't black be the first. Perfect breeding soil for just another day of pointless race drama on Twitter
The github change is brought up by a lot by people, but, all github does here is this. On the default set of commands it shows you if you don't have a repo pushed, it shows you the help command with 'main', instead of 'master'. Just a word change on a default help document, that's it. If you knew your commands you wouldn't even notice this.
If you just make a repo and push your existing code to github, it will work with 'master' as it is.. they actually don't have much of a say in how people name the git branches without severely shooting their whole service in the foot..
iirc git was also looking in to changing the default name when you run git init. Yes, it makes no difference at all, its just a name. But the fact is that a lot of people felt it very important to make this nonsensical change. There is no reason why the colors of chess pieces would not fall under the same justifications.
It was GitHub who wanted to make this change. I don't think they can impact how the git command works. GitHub has a separate desktop UI client but afaik the git binary is from a different organization.
I think if you look at arbitrary religious restrictions, those also probably trace their origins to an overactive neurotic mind with too much time on their hands. Those guys then develop nonsensical restrictions.
Nearly all the outrage over word use and six-figure tax bills for rewording city and federal documents is the result of ignorance of etymology, homonyms, and homophones.
I made the mistake of pointing this out on Twitter, and was promptly and aggressively told that, as long as anybody is upset, etymology doesn’t matter.
In fairness the advantage from going first in chess is really significant at high Elos, so a design improvement that resolves that imbalance would be pretty good for the game anyway. It would save playing two games to get one result.
But given that the only patch to chess in the last century was to prevent playing 0-0-0-0-0-0 with a promoted rook, I doubt I'll live to see that happen.
Chess played in matches, not games. Being white is like having serve in tennis. At higher levels, multiple games also allow for metagames and adjustments.
I actually originally typed matches and then corrected it to "games" for that exact reason.
> Being white is like having serve in tennis.
Yep, exactly. But if there was no advantage to having serve in tennis, you wouldn't need to alternate it perfectly. Of course, coming up with a system in which there's no advantage (even one specific to certain playstyles) is nigh-impossible, let alone actually proving that to be true. Very slightly easier in chess, but probably still not achieveable.
> At higher levels, multiple games also allow for metagames and adjustments.
You could still play 30 games if you wanted, it's just that you'd have 30 1–0 or ½–½ results, instead of 15 2–0 or 1½–½ results.
Right now a single game of chess at a high level means basically nothing unless it's a black win or you know the result of the mirror match. This is very similar to the tennis analogy where holding serve is basically a non-event, and doesn't really affect the state of the game much until you see whether or not the other player does so as well. Someone who's 1–0 up after the first game on their own service isn't definitively "ahead", just like someone 1–0 up after playing a game of chess as white. They might be, but we don't know yet.
If white had no advantage, any individual game of chess is much more meaningful, as a win either way is a swing of momentum. Again, this fits the tennis analogy: any individual game is only interesting if the receiving player looks like they're a chance of winning it. This can be very boring in games with servebots, where the entire match comes down to the one 5-minute period where they weren't serving as well as they could have been, presenting an opening. If every single game was up for contention, the whole match would be much more interesting. It would also be easier to ascertain the better player, because smaller but more consistent differences in skill level would outweigh a single catastrophic mistake.
All that said the entire point of my comment was to make a reference to 0-0-0-0-0-0 because it's a fantastic move that more people should know about.
The mistake a lot of companies are making is they view ML as a replacement for humans. It's not. At least, it's nowhere near that now.
You should view ML as an enhancement for humans.
So the problem here is that no ML system without essentially being an AGI is capable of fully comprehending context, in this case use of "black" and "white" in Chess that has absolutely no racial context.
So the mistake here is (likely) automated action against the channel. That should never happen. At least, not for this particular signal.
What should happen is the channel should be flagged for review by a human. Any human would appreciate the context and take no action.
This is the "enhancement" part. With no automated assistance, a human might be capable of moderating (made up numbers) 100 channels. That doesn't scale at Youtube scale. ML systems might enhance that human's moderating ability to 10,000 channels.
Even better, by flagging for review, you're actually producing training data for your ML. The P-R for your automated disciplinary system needs to be incredibly good before you take humans out of the equation. False positive bans or blocks on channels is bad for the individual channel. It can be devastating in fact. The corporate view is that "one channel doesn't matter". And they're right... to a point. At some point it undermines confidence in the platform and then it does matter.
This was only speculation. It's a pretty weak story:
> Even though the channel was restored within 24 hours, the YouTube did not explain why it had blocked Croatian chess player Antonio Radic, also known as 'Agadmator,' from its platform briefly, the Dailymail reported.
> Experts suspect that it was the usage of words like "black" and "white" that confused the Yutube's AI filters. They found that 80% of chess videos that were flagged for hate speech actually ahd terms like 'black,' 'white,' 'attack' and 'threat.'
YouTube didn't say why, and they simply "suspect."
It's just as likely that is was flagged for other reasons. For example, mass "reporting" of the channel as offensive by people with an axe to grid against this particular chess YouTuber. (It's been my personal experience there's a lot of politics in the chess community.)
Agadmator is a mediocre player (as in no titled) and his analysis are pretty simplistic but he has created a good community of kids around his channel and he is a nice fellow.
For actual analysis of quality you could check out the Chess24 channel where you have guys like Peter Svidler and other GMs analyzing games. The Spanish version is great too, you can find there all the top Spanish speaking players (Dominguez, Vallejo, Anton,Granda, etc)
Agadmator may be "mediocre" (aka still better at chess than anyone I've ever met in person) and his analysis simplistic, but that might actually help him on his mission. Which seems to be to make chess as consumable as a mainstream sport: nearly immediately following a game, he gives you the highlights - just enough so that the game has an exciting narrative, even if the analysis is not extensive.
I'm not sure how to word this... I'm confused that we are still calling people "black" and "white", when their actual color is nowhere near those two. It's no longer cool to call people "yellow" or "redskin", so why are those still accepted?
People I know actually use "dark-brown", "light-brown", and "light-skinned" and other such more accurately descriptive terms when actually describing someone's appearance, and I like that much better.
What happened during start of pandemic is WHO and big tech meeting up to discuss the threat of an "infodemic". Companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, agreed to suppress amateur takes on COVID. Mentioning COVID would vastly decrease your reach if not a verified public health source. It would get you demonitized, to not incentivise low-quality clickbait COVID videos. Of course, these algorithms are way more aggressive and produce more false positives (ads removed for just mentioning COVID without giving false cures, like happened here).
It has nothing to do with white or black and race. Just the nitwits at WHO and big business mismanaging crowd intelligence during a pandemic. WHO said masks do not work. Youtube banned users for mentioning vitamin D defiency and COVID. But they meant it well...
Advertisers, youtubers, users, brands - everyone was happy prior to the era of demonetization. What killed the golden goose was an extremely small set of activists and journalists (specifically Media Matters and Vox) methodically threatening brands with publication of screenshots of their "support" for controversial niche videos. And just enough brand marketing and YouTube employees were cowed, or at least ideologically sympathetic.
It's stupid, because in the era of television, people understood that the advertising commercial breaks in programmes were distinct from the actual content of the programme, and that the advertisers are _not_ endorsing the contents of the programme at all!
How this somehow translated, in the era of online youtube videos, to the exact opposite is still a mystery to me. So what if your ad appeared next to something radical on youtube? So what if your ads appeared next to some weird sex segment of youtube? People who see it aren't going to confuse the ads with the video, just the same as people watching television isn't confusing the ads with the programme.
>It's stupid, because in the era of television, people understood that the advertising commercial breaks in programmes were distinct from the actual content of the programme, and that the advertisers are _not_ endorsing the contents of the programme at all!
This is simply not true. If you go back long enough shows were often sponsored by specific advertisers making the link even stronger than traditional preroll YouTube ads (this practice goes back to radio, so it is even older than TV). It also ended up with bizarre pairings like "'The Flinstones' brought to you by Winston Cigarettes."[1]
Eventually cable TV came along and it didn't have the type of FCC oversight that broadcast TV does. However you generally only see swearing and nudity on premium cable and not basic cable despite no official rules preventing it. The primary reason for this is that basic cable still relies and advertisers while premium cable does not. Basic cable channels still fear advertisers dropping out if their ads are paired with objectionable content. And that is really all that is happening on YouTube. GM doesn't doesn't want their latest car ad to appear in front of a racist manifesto. I don't think that is a particularly unreasonable desire for an advertiser.
So this may look like I am arguing against you, but I actually have a very similar stance.
Look at it like this:
Nowadays, the ads (and the videos) are targeted. Additionally, the algorithms are - no other way to put it - really fucking dumb and are constantly "overcommitting". E.g., I watched a few episodes of a podcast months ago and my YouTube recommendation has been 98% episodes of the same show since then, because the algo registered I spent a disproportionate amount of watch time for those (who knew, podcast episodes are long). Or look at Amazon grouping every single book I read the untranslated English version of in "International Books" because it determined that English ain't my mother tongue. Now I am constantly getting cultural, cosmopolitan and language learning stuff; because I read Ian Banks and software philosophy books.
I am aggressively ad-blocking, but I imagine ads are quite the same and I am sure you can recite similar experiences. Now based on this shitty, bizarro reality I would say that the fear of an ad bubble heavily overlapping with a content bubble (for absurd reasons) is not irrational. It is weird, it is dumb, and we could probably overcome it, but products would be associated with weird/illegal/controversial niches by...association.
This whole situation is a shit cocktail of misguided KPI's, straight up scams, questionable assumptions (we still don't know whether targeted ads do anything), cancel culture, bad software and US censorship (we can show you two passenger planes colliding and 700 people incinerating but we can't show you the pilot going "motherfucker"). But this specific choice, to aggressively ban to avoid bad association, is actually somewhat rational.
>, because in the era of television, people understood that the advertising commercial breaks in programmes were distinct from the actual content of the programme, and that the advertisers are _not_ endorsing the contents of the programme at all!
This isn't true. In the past, some viewers have always followed the money trail of a tv show which inevitably leads to the sponsors/advertisers that help fund it. Example of tv advertisers pulling out of controversial topics:
As I've mentioned many times before, there is no media institution on the planet (whether private corporate or public government funded) -- that is immune from censorship because every piece of the chain (creation, distribution, broadcasting, advertising, etc) all require money and money is the ultimate lever to apply pressure via government decrees, consumer boycotts, advertiser boycotts, employee revolts, journalists shaming, etc.
Nobody has invented an implementation that can withstand any pressure to filter content but also be available to the mainstream masses. Google even with its billions has to tame Youtube to placate advertisers. Apple, even with its billions has to placate China. Niche/obscure "censorship-proof" tech like Freenet/IPFS is not for the masses and the desirable content creators can't monetize their effort there.
On the contrary, television advertisements have (rightly) always been viewed as inextricably linked to the content they appear between. As such, advertiser boycotts have been a favoured tactic of conservative organisations throughout the past few decades. For example, from 1982:
> For the second time within a year, the Coalition for Better Television is threatening a boycott of one or more companies that advertise on prime-time television, but this time without the support of its most prominent member, the Moral Majority.
Maybe it‘s because television boards held up a certain level of acceptable truth and decency in the „good old times“?
When theories about child-eating democrats are freely stated as facts and picked up ans spun further in the recommendations so that a conspiracy theorist ends up in Congress (and a significant minority of the population is fine with that), then yes, I as a consumer want to execute on my free speech to hold advertisers responsible for sponsoring that.
I don't know much about TV, but in newspapers print and online, where to put ads has at least for a long time included considerations beyond of just what space is available.
At the news site I worked, the CMS had an per article option to white/blacklist ads from categories or disable them entirely. E.g. so to not show an car advertisement boasting their reliability under an article of an car accident where a child has died.
Or in print news papers (especially weekly ones) you often see that it is structured in a way that the realities about the harsh world and negative stories in general are in the first parts and the paper becomes more and more fluffy and feel-good as you turn the pages. It is in those later sections where most big brands want their ads to be placed.
Also, a lot of things that are pretty normal these days would have caused outrage and protests against the publishers not too long ago.
In my view, people were always easily offended/outraged. Just what causes it, and which views have significant followings and voice changes over time.
It changed with political correct investments. Some 15 years ago people became aware of companies investing in weapon industry, specifically cluster munition and landmines. A signal was sent by publicly shaming companies that shrugged their shoulders. That set a general trend to avoid negative publications and backfire by explicitly distancing from politically or humanitarian questionable practices. It has now escalated to fear-management and rewriting history.
Not in the early days. The Soap in Soap Operas was because you never knew when the ad for the soap company sponsoring the show would show up. There wasn't a break, it was ", and then I used my XYZ soap to"... until you got to the "and" the audience didn't know the ad was coming.
The ad breaks came later as TV realized that the ad was forever part of the show and so they didn't get more money when the did a rerun.
I am sure that you believe it's true, but advertisers have been used to being able to control what content they were put next to for a long time. I don't know whether it matters, or is valuable, but I do know that they have cared for long enough that it has been one of the largest influences on literally what television programs got made (even if this influence appears oblique, it has been one of the primary motivations of the folks making these decisions).
You can make an argument that the Internet allows things to work differently, but I think it was simply a matter of what was practical - once it became ~ practical to start exercising some control over what you're associating your brand with, of course folks would jump to pull that lever.
Your response isn't true. I'm sure you believe it's true, but prior to YouTube we didn't see demonitization happen - TV series were paid for ahead of time. While organizations like OneMillionMoms would harass advertisers to get content pulled, that's not a very effective strategy - they just usually got the spot price reduced.
Things did actually work differently. YouTube doesn't pay for content before it airs, and large amounts of the income for a show happen as it's left up. When YouTube demonitizes - and it can do this for an entire channel - it's not just a single episode either. Nor can the content be shopped around to other platforms as easily.
Even if the station wanted to take down your content, you at least got a station manager calling your production staff and not just a "We're sorry, but you violated our vague ToS." message with no response mechanism in it. It had some element of human review and wasn't susceptible to brigading.
You are missing the point that for years advertisers were accidentally putting commercials in front of garbage (multi-hour long videos that were only used as pacifiers for toddlers, with dozens of ad breaks) or scum (algorithm scammers getting billions of views from children on unlicensed, sexual content like Spider-man groping Elsa or worse).
These videos did very well in both view counts and watch time, driving perceived value (and thus CPM) straight up.
Your complaints about the specifics of the process are valid, and the dogshit content I’m referring to is absolutely YouTube’s fault. Massively popular channels called this content out for years but Wojcicki didn’t make a move until a newspaper called out PewDiePie for some jokes, go figure.
But the scale of what many advertisers would probably call click fraud was enormous. Further, this is probably the result of another YouTube decision to favor outside sales teams (such as Google) bundling views and selling them to advertisers like subprime mortgages.
Facebook is dealing with some fallout over misrepresenting (or maybe outright lying about) ad performance, YouTube has a parallel reckoning that may never come because the average business user on YT has never posted an ad. The other side of the coin is that many of the YouTube channels that get unjustly punished here presumably have a multi-social network audience that they can complain to.
Obviously advertisers also deserve blame for going along with ad spend that did not include a full breakdown of every video they spent money on, too.
Well, I didn't use the word demonetization, because it means something specific - which is what I think you're arguing here.
But what we did see happens is that shows which were likely to provoke a negative response from audiences or advertisers were never produced, in large part for the exact same reasons.
The specific shape of events may look different, but that's the result of democratization, allowing more people to be part of the game where they spend money, make stuff, and get ads run against it.
In the cases where YouTube does pay for stuff before it airs or offers a guarantee on future ads, I am fairly confident the old TV dynamics are at play - they will ensure that the content they are funding will garner viewers and not offend advertisers.
One example springs to mind. The racism controversy on Celebrity Big Brother in 2007 led to the sponsor and several advertisers withdrawing. The show was "rested" the following year.
Depends on the price the advertiser pays. You can buy an ad, or you can buy and ad in a particular place. You don't get to choose what Dear Abby says in her column, but enough advertisers like what she says (that is the people who read her column and see the ad next to it - they don't care what she actually says, just that it gets eyeballs for him).
News papers have long had a policy that the advertising department wasn't in control of what the news said. The advertisers didn't like it, but they went with it because they knew that it is what the eyeballs wanted.
There is a fine line though - some companies didn't advertise in particular outlets (playboy is an obvious example), which might or might not work out for them.
The question is where is the power. YouTube is acting like they don't have power here, but in fact they do: a large portion of video is on YouTube, and so if YouTube says "too bad, either give us your money or not", the advertisers will need to pay up. Of course there is a cost to youtube in doing that which they might not be willing to pay: some advertisers will say no. Others will tell youtube fine, but we are not willing to pay as much as you could get if we got more control who sees us.
The question isn't where the power is, the question is how much money does YouTube need/want?
Our monkey brains are not evolved to deal with the satisfaction barrage, the microdosed dopamine of incremental reputation tallies and continually met expectations. Social media platforms weaponise the limbic system in support of commerce, and once habituated, regrettably few people display a reflexive defiance when the same mechanisms are hijacked by hostile actors & propagandists.
As any student of history knows, this is hardly a new phenomenon, but it was never before so globally industrialised or automated.
> everyone was happy
"Everyone" ... except for all the people whose lives are made materially worse by the subsequent ease of disseminating hate material & misinformation. Also unhappy: anyone possessing the humanity to feel for others in distress.
> cowed or [...] ideologically sympathetic
Intentional or not, this came across dripping with derision, but it falls flat: the only "ideological sympathy" here is that of being a decent human being.
> an extremely small set of activists and journalists
This ratifies the well-known aphorism that a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world. It does not undermine the necessity for showing assholes the door.
>> an extremely small set of activists and journalists
>This ratifies the well-known aphorism that a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world. It does not undermine the necessity for showing assholes the door.
Wonderful. And the "asshole" designation that these Elect ("extremely small set of ..." as was put above) - how do they get to decide who's an asshole and gets shown the door, what are their criteria and what is the procedure for the rest of us to appeal or ratify their decision-making?
Can we at least agree that censors can make mistakes, or have their own biases? And shouldn't censors be policed as well, so they are accountable to the public?
That's your opinion, that I'm sticking up for the rights of assholes. And by the way, I'm not surprised that someone who favors censorship and calls out wankers, would also interpret for someone else what they believe, before they said anything. But I'll say it now: the argument against censorship isn't a defense of assholes and wankers (and people you don't like), it's an appeal for the very historical, empirically shown problem with censorship that it's hard to have an unbiased, fair and accountable body of censors. Thus, you inevitably end up with good ideas that get thrown out with the bad, if you take a generous argument, and if you want to be cynical about it, you get critical ideas thrown out when they don't match mainstream narrative. This latter matters only little now, but during wartime or times of strife, boy does it matter.
Your name-calling should be enough for people to raise their eyebrows at the question: who decides what gets censored.
Since there's no censorship occurring, this foaming-mouthed rant is simply more of the same.
Tip for idiots thrown out of pubs: yelling at the bouncers isn't going to get your name off the landlord's shit-list, and you don't have a right to make everyone listen to your drivel.
> What killed the golden goose was an extremely small set of activists and journalists (specifically Media Matters and Vox) methodically threatening brands with publication of screenshots of their "support" for controversial niche videos.
Wrong. There are multiple points that come in play here, none of which are as simple as "the activists are protesting against Nazi and conspiracy crap":
First of all, linear TV, radio and newspapers had human reviews in the loop at every stage: client, producer, ad broker, station/paper. That meant that the chance of valuable ads appearing next to bullshit was somewhat next to zero - and also, that "fringe content" was restricted to unscrupulous (or from the same niche) advertisers. Essentially, there was a feedback loop: content that was not mainstream-worthy had no chance of being financed.
Internet advertising and especially social networks with monetization and targeted advertising however, turned up all of that. Suddenly, a Nestle ad could run as a front-roll of Alex Jones lunacy. The result was that an awful lot of really awful content creators had both the technical capability to reach out to millions of people (thanks to the Internet, which eliminated the traditional gatekeepers) and the advertising income that was previously reserved to mainstream-able content.
The result of that, in turn, was an explosion in numbers of these "content creators" and their content (simply because many of them could now actually afford to quit regular jobs)... and thus, combined with the explosion of followers of such content, meant minorities had to suffer from a constant barrage of both online hate speech and real world violence - including many acts of terrorism that claimed human lives, and culminating in the events of January 6th 2021.
What the "extremely small set of activists and journalists" is doing is attempting to rein in the hate and the violence that results of it. And yes, making brands and their advertising agencies aware of what is going on and where their money ends up is a good thing.
Is there somewhere in the middle because you resent these activists and crave even more reasons to be mad at them?
Because these extremely small set of activists include the UK’s government and the newspaper The Guardian who pulled their ads due to YouTube placing them next to “extremist content”. Not to mention the numerous US government watchdogs who have been sniffing out a way to thwart google and Facebook for years now.
I was more referring to the people mentioned elsewhere in the thread, people who declare a new benign thing 'offensive' every month or two and then go on a scolding crusade.
As far as actual extreme reactionary content.. I don't know what the solution is. I'd put "the middle" as stop promoting them because they hit your engagement metrics, but be much more cautious about banning them, giving them martyrdom points and an incentive to organize better.
Ultimately the villain here is engagement-optimizing recommendation algos. The current situation is a small reactionary channel will be promoted for engagement, until it's big and people notice, and THEN it's banned, with a maximum of negative impact. Worst of all worlds.
An Israeli had build a tool to detect anti-semitism in videos and comments. Not being able to sell to YouTube, they pivoted to targeting advertisers ("make sure your advertisements do not appear next to racist content"). Part of this was a PR campaign, where they would mail journalists "scoops" with videos with lots of views, anti-semetic content, and no moderation of YouTube.
With every such news article, YouTube stepped up its game. It culminated with PewdiePie making an "anti-semetic" joke, and this resulted in the Adpocalypse.
So I'd say it was more commercial interests than activism interests, but at times these align.
What a bizarre made-up story you presented here! Of course, one always finds conspiracy theories blaming the Jews. (And it's seeming OK with the management, even though they've professed to the New Yorker that they take an active role keeping the community in-line.)
Everytime this is coming up, I wonder why people were always okay with banning nudity but now that hate speech (that undeniably agitates people and leads to hate crime) gets banned, they oppose content blocking.
Nudity is banned on television, youtube, facebook, twitch, and any public place in the US. None of those had significant outcry when it was banned, and people bat an eye so little at that status quo that I apparently had to write this comment to remind you.
Please feel free to point us to the evidence of HN howling with outrage about the chilling consequences of our digital overlords succumbing to activist and advertiser presssure to ban porn (and presumed porn) on their platforms. When Tumblr banned porn, the general reaction was "lol, they're not going to have any audience left" and the one person that raised it as a speech violation (as opposed to a bit of a shame for kinky people) was downvoted to nothingness.[1]
Compare and contrast with how this thread, instead of focusing on "lol, algorithms and context!" has turned into questioning whether the real problem is advertisers signalling they don't want to attach their brand to racist videos (and let's not get started on how angry much of HN was when companies decided to manually enforce policies against hate speech). It's difficult to conclude that most US "free speech" advocates don't believe that banning [perceived] racial hatred is somehow more dangerous to humanity than banning [perceived] adult content (which parallels Supreme Court rulings on what speech does and doesn't deserve protection). Given the respective consequences of racial hatred and pornography, I see this simultaneous presumption in favour of the former and against the latter as very hard to justify.
IME few creators on youtube are willing to risk their channels by taking any risks in that regard.
For example, I'm told the character creator in 'Cyberpunk 2077' offers adjustable penis size - but many streamers and reviewers won't risk showing it. Even comedy channels that love creating zany characters.
After all, would you trust Youtube to detect whether nudity is pornographic context, when they can't even tell if 'white threatens black' is in a chess context?
And even that isn't universal, depending on what type (e.g. many will be fine with self made 17 year old nudes, far less with forcible rape of a six year old).
The main purpose of free speech is to ensure the ability to criticize the government. It never meant pornography, free speech and obscenity laws always coexisted together in Europe and US. It's easy to construe the criticism of politicians as hate speech, while construing it as nudity would require some higher level of mental gymnastics.
The problem is that the other guy is saying the same thing you are. The radical left and the radical right both think each other's points are dangerous. And the moderates are pointing at both sides and claiming the same thing. From their respective viewpoints, they're in the "right", just as you think you are.
There's a slippery slope here, and I feel it's one so large that we can't even tell we're already sliding on it.
The obvious answer is a well-informed populace that isn't easily swayed by emotion and fear, and has the time and inclination to do their own fact checking. Trouble is, that's obviously a pipe dream. Other ideas, such as Facebook's new governing body are interesting, but I fear will be troublesome in other ways. Still, it's an experiment in the right direction I believe.
>The obvious answer is a well-informed populace that isn't easily swayed by emotion and fear, and has the time and inclination to do their own fact checking. Trouble is, that's obviously a pipe dream.
The other trouble is that one side is actively opposed to a "well informed populace" and unironically calls secondary education "liberal brainwashing camps".
If you want a well informed populace, you have to privilege the side attempting to get there.
Well... the "other side" would oppose informing the populace that the equality dogma is false (or at least unproven), so it isn't just the far right that likes their myths.
Attemps to ban things that are false runs into the difficulty that you need to first determine what is false, which is hard to do if one of the answers might contradict an important value.
I should stop replying to political posts with more politics. :/
More or less the belief that we are all equal with equal potential (it's more or less a consequence of egalitarianism). That if little Timmy just tries hard enough and is given enough support he'll be able to master differential equations.
Do you have an example of where this belief is expressed? Because the common trope afaik is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
What would be the difference in public policy anyways if after-the-fact results differ?
Well, some public policy differences would be continuing to invest ever increasing amounts of money on the worst performers in schools in an attempt to get them up nearer the average.
Another might be seeing the lack of women plumbers (or whatever) and deciding that this is both bad and fixable and investing a bunch of money into advertising how awesome plumbing is to girls in school.
> Well, some public policy differences would be continuing to invest ever increasing amounts of money on the worst performers in schools in an attempt to get them up nearer the average.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you suggesting that we, as a society, should not invest in worst performers? How would we even know beforehand? And how would withdrawing such funding from "bad" schools not affect the opportunity of all of the children of that school?
What's your point about the gender ratios of certain occupations? That it's a waste of money to try to alter?
I'm not actually advocating for this here. Just pointing out potential policy differences that come from a non-equality worldview.
I don't have the time to give an in depth discussion on education etc the attention it would need.
Though to elaborate on the education policy difference, you can invest variable amounts into the bottom performers, even eventually giving up on them. As I understand it, schools currently have various legal obligations towards students that lead to them spending disproportionate resources on the least performant.
Even with accepting that rather cynical view, I don't understand how you could even accurately determine who is a "hopeless bottom performer" without at the same time removing peoples equal opportunity.
Well, yes, everyone feels that way, but whose feelings are well-founded and whose aren't?
This is the difference between "we are banning substance X because we did a controlled experiment and found it to be carcinogenic", and "we are banning X because we are afraid of ghosts".
> whose feelings are well-founded and whose aren't?
This is the gist of it and is really hard to tell, even though some people claim it’s easy.
I would measure what side makes sense based on their recommended interventions. For example, if one side is so certain they want to ban speech that contradicts them then they are probably wrong.
It takes pretty clear evidence for what is right and wrong and lots of effort to determine. So it’s usually hard to dedicate those resources to topics.
Of course there are lots of sides and not just two so it becomes harder and harder.
> This is the gist of it and is really hard to tell, even though some people claim it’s easy.
It seems to me that people are nearly universally assuming that this is easy, and that obviously their side is always absolutely correct, and questioning that is basically heretic. This is how we end up always blaming the evil other side, and with "you're either with us or against us".
I used to think this was easy until I had to implement even really simple versions for small populations. They devolve quickly and aren’t very valuable compared to other activities.
That and as much as people complain, there’s a magical thinking that technology can do anything they see in sci-fi or an AI consultant has told them is possible.
So I would like to hear back from people after they’ve tried for a while.
> The problem is that the other guy is saying the same thing you are.
The other guy is also claiming that Trump won the election, global heating is a hoax, COVID-19 is a hoax, Obama is a Muslim from Kenya, and his wife Michelle is a man.
> And the moderates are pointing at both sides and claiming the same thing.
Sorry, this just isn't so.
Your answer boils down to this: "There is no truth. If one person says Michelle Obama is a transsexual man, and the other says she isn't, then both truths are equally good."
Have you personally seen Michelle Obama's sexual organs that you can 100% be certain with your claims?
Every since the ban on free speech, I really haven't followed what the conspiracies are. What I do hear is 3rd party reports on what those conspiracies are and what 'they believe'.
You listed off a bunch of nonsense - do you really think people actually believe that crap or are you the one fooled into thinking someone actually believes that? The more outlandish they sound, the better case for censoring, right? These cases just sound like a reporter went on 4chan, decided they dont like this so they must be the 'other side'. And it was enough to convince the majority that censorship is the way.
Better phrased, let's stop giving attention to a desperate media who's only function in this past decade is cancelling culture they don't approve. (culture censorship)
Both sides are extremely polarized, only one side seems to be able to share their opinion online. One side believes this is proper because they answer to the 'science'. What does the science say about censorship? We've seen it before.
> You listed off a bunch of nonsense - do you really think people actually believe that crap or are you the one fooled into thinking someone actually believes that? The more outlandish they sound, the better case for censoring, right? These cases just sound like a reporter went on 4chan, decided they dont like this so they must be the 'other side'. And it was enough to convince the majority that censorship is the way.
I personally know someone who believes about half of that. It sure doesn't feel unusual.
GP identified 3 groups of people, each defined by a belief. You have announced that you subscribe to one of those beliefs. You haven't disagreed with the argument.
Many of those things have pretty neat analogues in the extreme left - the extremists didn't accept that 2016 was legitimate, they've been fighting the science on nuclear power for 50 years and they wasted a lot of everyone's time trying to argue that Trump was a Russian asset.
Neither wing of politics is a shining example of sane ideas.
The problem is that the other guy is saying the same thing you are.
Then I hope I win. Cause the other guy really likes firearms and believes Bill Gates is some sort of satanic reptilian timelord.
Facebook's new governing body are interesting, but I fear will be troublesome in other ways.
I don't see that model making anyone happy because I believe true impartiality is impossible. The honest and less bureaucratic approach for FB to take is to admit the process is subjective.
You seem to be conflating racists with believing Bill Gates is a lizardman. While there may be some overlap I don't think that's an accurate look at the world.
We don't disagree there. I wanted to echo the 'other guy' phrase in the comment to which I was replying, but 'other guys' would be less ambiguous. On social media today, there are several different potentially violent movements that concern me.
I'm not on either side. I don't even live in the United States.
But one side, the Republican side, is batshitinsane and believes things that are provably untrue - Obama is a Muslim, climate change is a Chinese hoax, COVID-19 is the flu, that sort of thing.
The Democrats are just run-of-the-mill, low-energy centrist politicians.
I have a hard time lumping in swathes of people into these tiny slivers of beliefs. How is it not obvious that one side did a better job of demonizing the other? I'm pretty sure I can comment 'And would like to be able to eat babies' and I will be seeing it on similar posts as yours by tomorrow.
The media did one hell of a job this past election cycle, I wonder what batshitinsane things we will be allowed to talk about on the next one. I doubt much.
Now that we haved moved censorship officially online as well, I can only hope some wonderful people are busy building the next workaround medium.
I'm sympathetic to that, but by 'Then I hope I win' I certainly wasn't thinking in those terms. The 'side' I was thinking of is reasonable people, not all of whom are left-wingers, let alone Democrats.
Yes, as a general thing saying the other side is wrong and my side is right is just silly, because the other side is saying they're right and your side is wrong, but in the specific case where one side is demonstrably wrong then it isn't silly anymore.
But the other side believes they are demonstrably right too, just as strongly as you do. The way to "win" is to argue against the opponent's viewpoint and persuade the general population of the strength of your argument. To do that you need a platform for open speech. This is Democracy 101.
What you are arguing for is not democracy but "safetyism". You seek a shortcut whereby you can persuade a powerful gatekeeper to silence your oppositon and make you feel better.
The point I had in mind is that ideology is well and good, but sometimes pragmatism is better.
If a desire for free speech, to pick a contemporary example, leads to defending the 'right' of the Myanmar military to use Facebook for their coup to oppress the Burmese, pragmatism is probably better.
Consider Qanon people, or NeoNazis, or Boogaloo Boys, etc. It is impossible to prove beyond any doubt that are more dangerous or more wrong than 'normal' people. But if we're being pragmatic, there isn't a reasonable doubt.
There isn't enough substance in that comment for me to rebut. People often spout platitudes about liberty and democracy without understanding either. With apologies, I will assume that is the case here.
How is that accurate? More, like, exaggerated to make a point but missing it by a mile.
Soviets did not give airtime to pro-party ideologues to validate their position. There was no competition between ideologues to get more airtime. The program was _dictated_ by the powers that be.
It's still a bad analogy, but it puts fewer words in my mouth. If there is a line from 'Youtube deleted my video' to 'the government rounded me up and threw me in a sanitarium' it's not a direct one.
Yes but that won't stop you from drawing/rationalizing _any_ conclusions from a set of facts. Not all of them will be right and fewer even will make any sense.
Which is indeed your prerogative until you mess with the laws of physics and start believing that because you move your arms very quickly you can fly, and that will stop you from falling off of a cliff.
There is a five-whys strategy to go to some bottom of an issue but even this strategy will fail you when you cherry-pick the answers to your convenience.
I think there's a misunderstanding? The comment 'Soviets put their dissidents into mental hospitals' was a reply to a comment by me. I provided an example (with which I, naturally enough, disagree) of a criticism of my original comment that would be, at least, somewhat fair.
I think I replied to assimilation of the idea of totalitarian regime institutionalizing otherwise mentally healthy people for dissidence to merely not letting them vent on radio.
Indirect lines explaining seemingly unrelated concepts are everywhere. They even made some shows about that.
However, linking these two particular concepts together is strange.
This started long before. Remember when outlets like Bloomberg made a big deal because ads were running on random 5-view YouTube videos with objectionable content? It’s about money, not your culture war.
Setting this case aside because it's sloppy reporting based on what another classifier found, this is a hard problem. Youtube gets too many videos and comments for humans to manually review them. Flagging helps, and Google likely uses ML more complex than just text and classifier (who is commenting, is the post trending, patterns in comments, etc.) When things do reach manual review, remember that humans make mistakes, possibly more often than ML, this could be human error.
You actually want the algorithm to be a black box so that people don't know that you can trick it by only commenting between 5pm and 8pm on an IP in the Netherlands from Chrome, and avoid using words like "cactus."
The important part here is a transparent appeal process, not that ML is only pretty good at these problems.
People forget that they get these free services for free, and a big portion of that is because ML tools are able to cheaply do a really hard job of moderating. You hear about things like this because they're so unusual, which is a testament to the amount of time they work correctly without being noticed.
Granted, there have been some issues with people getting banned from Google services for what appear to be wrong reasons and then not being able to get any kind of a human response. Those aren't great, but if you ask people whether they want to pay $10/month for YouTube so human moderators can stop this from happening or get it for free and have the .0001% chance that they get banned purely by accident, they'll take the latter. And that's putting aside the fact that there will still be errors with humans doing it, and there will still need to be the same appeal process to resolve those.
Not entirely true. First the platform is free, but also is the content that people provide and without it Youtube wouldn't make sense - so it's not a free service, it's a partnership. Second, for many people YouTube is the primary source of income, and I'm sure there would be plenty of content authors who'd be glad to pay a service with human moderators rather than bots - GIVEN THAT they get to keep access to the same traffic that YouTube provides. That's the key thing, you can't just go somewhere else when all the users are on a few popular platforms. If it's not for that, many high-profile authors who get their videos demonetized on stupidities would have left YouTube long time ago - but they can't, big players keep them in a checkmate position due to the form of monopoly on viewers that they have.
And that means you can't just say "If you don't like it, leave, it's a free service", because it's not that simple, as leaving in reality means "give up on your business", and most of people just can't afford that. Youtube has them cornered and thus needs to be careful, since it's not a game, it affects people's lives. For many accidental blocking of channel can mean they'll be living in their cars until the Gods of Google show mercy and fix the error.... and if they do it, since sometimes you don't even get a meaningful reply on what happened, just a template message.
The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch. Think of it in terms of paying users: how much would you have to pay someone to switch from Youtube to your site? Multiply the average by the number of users, and that's the advantage Youtube has over competitors.
Ooh, this is something I've often wondered (and has become more interesting since Alphabet recently started revealing revenue numbers for YouTube) - can YouTube be profitable as a standalone entity?
The reason I ask is because, despite all its flaws, YouTube is one of the treasures of the internet. And I wonder if we'd lose it by breaking up Alphabet.
I am not pro-Alphabet and 100% believe Alphabet needs more regulation, and quite frankly does need some trust busting, but I'd be really sad to lose YouTube. Yeah, there's vimeo but it's clearly not a direct competitor. I also fondly remember stage6 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage6).
I would bet it could. YouTube definitely benefits from Google infrastructure. Especially since a lot of their cost is video transcoding and batch pipelines which can easily be slotted into unused CPU around the world. YouTube almost certainly also gets very cheap storage not only because Google has optimized storage cost for them but also because of the similar flexibility that they have on where videos are stored. Furthermore they use Google's CDN which is likely the best in the world hand has many relationships with ISPs to get caches close to eyeballs.
However as I understand it the product itself isn't tied to the Google infrastructure. YouTube's main value is the user base, both of viewers and of publishers. It would be a technical marvel to move it off of Google's infrastructure however I don't think that there is any feature that they wouldn't be able to provide anymore. It would certainly be more expensive, but at YouTube's size you could probably work out similar deals with other providers (or with GCP) so I'm not sure that the prices would rise that much. (IDK, maybe 15% increase in cost between provider cut and raw cost increase?)
YouTube doesn't really fit the definition of a natural monopoly, particularly because there's nothing fundamentally stopping other services from popping up. YouTube's status as an effective monopoly doesn't come from some sort of scarcity of the means of production.
> The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch.
Only if we're assuming that users and uploaders will only ever use exactly one service at any given time. No reason why that needs to be the case; nothing stopping people from uploading to YouTube and Vimeo and Twitch and DailyMotion and PornHub and LBRY and PeerTube and whatever other platforms, and nothing stopping people from viewing from those platforms, either.
Thing is that the free market approach just doesn't work in markets where there's only a few players and the cost of entering the market is extremely high. Simply there's no enough competition to make things actually competitive. That's why google provides no support and shuts down peoples accounts without warnings... they can, they just don't give a shit. They know they will not loose any clients over that, and in the end that attitude detriments the quality of services for both viewers and content producers (and especially them).
> and the cost of entering the market is extremely high.
The cost to enter the video sharing market is extremely low, especially in this day and age where you can rent computing and storage capacity on the cheap around the world.
Then where is the YouTube competitor? The closest seems to be odysee (https://odysee.com/) where you're lucky to break a few hundred views.
Suppose YouTube disappeared tomorrow. Where would everyone go? Probably odysee. So why don't they go there now? That's why Youtube is a natural monopoly.
Yeah the fact that said service is the very first result on a major search engine, who's conveniently the owner of said service, has nothing to do with it. Organic congregation and all.
> ...that is because ML tools are able to cheaply do a really hard job of moderating
I mean , YouTube is huge, but we had moderation-at-scale before ML was a popular phrase to bandy around.
'ML' and 'Algorithms' are just convenient non-human bogeyman that any corporation can pin all their woes on without batting an eye right now -- a convenient explanation tool for when things go wrong.
I am going to take a bold stance with this next statement:
An algorithm cannot be at fault -- it is always the fault of those that implement such algorithms.
YouTube and their community is huge -- YouTube has revenue fifteen times greater than Yahoo. 'Too big to X' should not be a tolerable excuse from any industry -- especially so since YouTube/Google has been pushing the idea for years that being a YTer is an actual profession.
Imagine for a moment coming into work and being told that you're fired because an internal corporate policy checker decided that something you did in your past work history was worth of termination; and then 24 hours later being told to continue coming into work because a mistake had been made, but with no further explanation.
This kind of 'workplace' would be intolerable in any real 'work environment'. Just more evidence that YTers are not really treated like any other partner or employee anywhere else in the world -- and that they should probably curtail that language if they want expectations to match the reality that their 'employees' experience.
>People forget that they get these free services for free,
YouTube is not a free service. This fallacy needs to go.
Okay, fine, so an algorithm can't be at fault. Ultimately it doesn't matter whether it's an algorithm. The point is that at this scale, moderation mistakes will be made. Doesn't matter if it's humans or ML or what have you. People rush to condemn the service and the people who make it as a result of these very, very seldomly occurring mistakes, but there is no system that exists that would allow perfect moderation at this scale.
Your work comparison just isn't valid because there is no employer with a number of employees within several orders of magnitude of the number of videos on YouTube.
> You hear about things like this because they're so unusual
I feel like it's the exact opposite: we're hearing about them because these are the ones that slipped into public awareness. The inadequacy of automated moderation without any real semblance of human oversight has been rampant and frequent for about as long as the concept has existed.
Just because the user doesn't need to pay up-front doesn't mean the service operates at a loss (YouTube pulled in $15 billion in 2019, according to a quick search). Furthermore, YouTube Premium is a paid offering. IMO Alphabet just uses YouTube as a playground for its ML experiments because it can moreso than because it needs to for viability.
Youtube brought in 15 billion dollars in revenue last year. It is probably most important to the customers of youtube (the ad buyers) that their ads aren't shown on controversial videos.
Also, I'd be really interested to know how much the Youtube team payed to build this classifier and how that compares to paying human moderators.
> Those aren't great, but if you ask people whether they want to pay $10/month for YouTube so human moderators can stop this from happening or get it for free and have the .0001% chance that they get banned purely by accident, they'll take the latter.
At this point, I view YouTube like I viewed bars that allowed smoking--it was sufficiently popular that nobody could compete against it even though it was harmful. So, we needed legislation to move us to a different local minimum.
And, I find this very painful because I firmly believe that smoking bans have killed live music. But I also understand that nobody was ever going to do the right thing while doing the bad one was so profitable.
Is an astoundingly extreme claim. First we have to accept the premise that live music is “dead”. Second it’s due to some orthogonal factor like a smoking ban as opposed to recorded music becoming way more accessible through technology.
Intermediate size venues got wiped out because smokers are extremely profitable--smoking and drinking go together.
You can have a small venue (<100) and it will trundle along. You can have a big venue (>1000) because it probably reached self-supporting.
However, we lost a LOT of 100-1000 size venues from about 1990 to about 2005. And those are the ones that working musicians can make a living off of. But those need the stupidly profitable contingent that goes along with smoking and drinking. The single craft beer drinker isn't going to generate enough money to support such a place.
You could see this even before the smoking bans in areas which had sophisticated dancing (swing, ballroom, etc.) groups. If your venue somehow attracted the young dancing contingent, the venue was going to vaporize within 6 months. Everybody loved them--they tended to be polite, didn't harass the waitstaff, looked good, prevented highly skewed M/F ratios, etc. -- except that they spent next to no money compared to the general public so the owners HATED them. This was in stark contrast to the elder dancing contingent who smoked and drank like fish and could keep clubs alive long beyond their expiration date.
There must be other factors at play, because pre-pandemic I attended several live music events every month, a lot of them small <250 people venues. A friend of mine has a goal of seeing 1000 artists in a year, and he got within spitting distance of it in 2019.
Of course, all venues make sure to have outside areas for smoking, because that's the sensible thing to do.
Okay, I'm going to ask "Where?" because my musician friends probably want to move there once Covid is done.
Although, if you say Nashville or New York, you're not helping--those are mega anomalies and all the musicians are already there which makes the situation untenable.
Denmark, but it goes for most of Europe in general, at least the places I've been. Any city over a certain size will have a bunch of small venues, and the laws against smoking indoors are EU-wide.
However, I am concerned that a lot of these smaller venues and promoters will struggle to survive the pandemic lockdowns, unless our governments pull themselves together and support cultural venues, instead of focusing so hard on sports. Culture isn't just something you play with a ball :-)
As for the downvotes, probably general disagreement or spillover from other discussions where someone has taken offense to what I wrote.
Intermediate size venues got wiped out because smokers are extremely profitable--smoking and drinking go together.
Same in pubs. The smoking-and-drinking crowd got edged out by parents who for some reason want to bring their kids to the pub. They will have brought their own drinks and snacks for the kids too. The mother will have a small glass of wine and the father will drink half a pint of "craft beer", stretched out over a couple of hours while their kids run around screaming and annoying the few remaining paying drinkers.
I loved pubs in the old days but even before COVID they were dying out because they just don't want their loyal paying customers any more.
I’ve yet to see a case of the hoi poloi get a manual review - you either are a well enough known YouTuber where they have humans dedicated to you, you know someone who works at YouTube and can intercede on your behalf, or you have to whip up a Twitter mob big enough that it hurts YouTube's image or stirs up people with contacts at YouTube.
Even then, sometimes that doesn’t work - look at the Terraria dev.
YouTube effectively has no manual review for 99.9% of people which is why its automated systems accuracy is so important.
Be careful not to confuse manual review with an appeal. When I say "manual review," I mean the classifier isn't sure, so a human double checked, or it was sent to a human to validate the classifier. You're right--appeals are hard to get--but we have no idea how much Youtube manually reviews content.
It's a genuinely hard problem, but they do have appeal systems that creators can use that go to human reviewer queues for things like video removals and demonetization even though the first pass is done via automation, but don't think humans aren't immune from mistakes either.
As of 2018 youtube had 10,000 manual reviewers (and I imagine it's significantly more than that today), but at their scale, that realistically won't go that far.
Actually watching every YouTube video uploaded would take ~100,000 people which is possible, but quite expensive. Actually watching every video that’s flagged for banning might take ~100 people and seem like a reasonable effort.
As such arguments about using automated systems are meaningless, they can pre-filter without having final decision making authority.
> 100,000 people might not be enough to just deal With flags...
You’re off by orders of magnitude.
500 * 60 * 24 * 365 = 262800000 hours per year / 1.3x playback speed / 2,000 hours of work per person per year = ~101,077 people to watch every uploaded video.
Less if people are watching at higher playback speeds or working significantly more than a 40h week. I would personally be surprised if even 1 in 1,000 videos where flagged by ML at which point you’re talking ~100 people. Though that would be a truly terrible job.
> 500 * 60 * 24 * 365 = 262800000 hours per year / 1.3x playback speed / 2,000 hours of work per person per year = ~101,077 people to watch every uploaded video.
When you have people watch the video at that fast speed and instantly make a decision, you might as well keep the algorithm - the failure rate won't be too different.
Additionally, these people need holidays, managers, infrastructure and an actual flag will probably not instantly be clear - you'll need to point out the specific offence and make a case. You might even need to look things up. Then you'll have to handle appeals and discussions, because changing the AI blackbox to an appeal-less human black box wouldn't improve the situation much[0]. Next, you need people who can understand the specific language of that video - most will be english, but what happens when a Nigerian video is flagged? So you need people from that country or at least familiar with it. Plus infrastructure.
Overall, you're probably looking at something approaching 400 or 500 people, with this very low flag rate. Assuming conservative 30k$/year [1], this is 15 million USD alone. Doable, yes, but its not the no-brainer you make it out to be.
Reading the article, "human error" really isn't a reasonable description of what happened:
> The Facebook furor began when the social network deleted the famous photo from Norwegian author Tom Egeland’s Facebook page, where it was part of a series of memorable wartime imagery.
This could be a human error, sure.
> When Egeland subsequently posted his shocked reaction to the removal of the “napalm girl” photo, he found his account suspended.
But not this.
> Norway’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten, published Egeland’s story on the censorship, only to find that its own Facebook posts were also quickly deleted.
Definitely not this.
> Espen Egil Hansen, Aftenposten’s editor, then took to the front page of his paper to slam Facebook in an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg
> Prime Minister Solberg joined the debate on Friday, only to find that her comments and posts about the suppressed photo were also deleted by Facebook.
This is a (ridiculously severe) problem in several of Facebook's policies, not a classification error.
> Reading the article, "human error" really isn't a reasonable description of what happened:
I'm pretty sure to have read that the initial blocking was done by a contractor - I can find a better source, if you want.
> This is a (ridiculously severe) problem in several of Facebook's policies, not a classification error.
Yes, and that is exactly the point I tried to make:
>> changing the AI blackbox to an appeal-less human black box wouldn't improve the situation much
Said another way, having underpaid contractors with no time for consideration (and possibly strange policies) is exactly as bad. This is a pretty clear case: That photo should not have been blocked and the idea behind having a human do the evaluation is that he recognizes the historical relevance and, if not outright allowing it, at least consults the relevant authorities whether this is exempt. This could've been done by an AI all the way without a different outcome.
People often watch YouTube videos at 2x speeds, it’s part of their app to select 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2x because you can generally listen to most speakers at that speed just fine. Let alone 11 hours of ocean waves etc.
Only averaging 1.3x assumed significant overhead and going back to re listen to segments, have an escalation queue for flagged videos, and randomly assigning multiple people to the same videos to ensure people are paying attention not just playing solitaire while the video is on. Plus other random crap, in other words ~30% overhead.
[disclaimer] I work at Google, all opinions are my own. I don't deal with Youtube but have had exposure to moderation operations. It is not an easy task.
You are incorrect about your assumptions in many respects. Let me list out a few:
1) There is a big difference between watching a 15 min video at 2X for fun vs watching 8 hours of videos a day while having to follow laid down policy with complexity. Videos are not taken down only for one reason and there is a lot of complexity involved with edge cases. Humans are not robots and this is not a task we are inherently good at. Give it a shot yourself for a day and see how easy it is.
2) Your overhead does not consider any additional complexity in terms of languages, specialty, regional expertise etc. This is not a simple problem either. Sure maybe you can hire 1000 reviewers in lets say Indonesia but you cannot find a native Kswahili speaker there. Its not cheap to setup an office for 2 people in Kenya. Scale this to the world which has 193 countries and 6,500 languages.
3) People dont work without any management overhead. You need frontline reviewers. Then you need a layer of experts above them. The you need managers to take care of the operations. The managers to manage those managers. Then recruiters to hire those people. Then HR to deal with their issues.
4) Turnover is a big deal. Very few people in the world can watch beheadings 40 hours a week. An even smaller proportion can handle child safety material. What happens when those people need to take time off? You need additional people. If you want a humane operation then you might have to get them to work only 2 hours a day.
It continues to amaze me how some of the smartest and technically savvy people on HN either do not recognize or refuse to admit how complicated a problem planet scale moderation is.
> It continues to amaze me how some of the smartest and technically savvy people on HN either do not recognize or refuse to admit how complicated a problem planet scale moderation is.
It's probably a variation of the trivial-core-problem [0]. When looked at roughly, it seems very easy; only when you start implementing it, you'll see all the edge cases appear. I made pretty similar points above to the ones you made - but on a quick napkin calculation, Retric's math checked out, to be fair. And when you're not in the business, missing the inherent complexity is easy.
Building systems is clearly a major effort which was specifically excluded from that estimate. However, while you’re right it’s complicated, I would point out my overall estimate was close to Google’s own.
“Since we started using machine learning to flag violent and extremist content in June, the technology has reviewed and flagged content that would have taken 180,000 people working 40 hours a week to assess.”
That said, I am surprised Google isn’t using machine translation for obscure languages. Props to them that’s going above and beyond in my personal opinion.
I'm not saying it's not complicated, but complaints about expense and overheads for a company that makes something like $40 billion a year in profit ring a little hollow. That's roughly the size of the UK's defence budget.
They could just manually review the videos the algo flagged as potentially ban worthy. It might even given YT an incentive to hone their algorithm to be more accurate since it would reduce their bottom-line.
Right. The algorithm should just identify videos that need to be reviewed, not ban them. It should also be a sliding scale. If a video has 5 total views, it shouldn't need a ban or a review because no one is watching it. Places like this chess channel with a million subscribers and hundreds of thousands of views per video should all easily get a manually review. Automating bans for channels with that level of a following is just lack of respect for their content producers.
So why bother screening any of it? So what if some nefarious content makes it through. Don’t like it, don’t watch it. Not sure why everything has to be sanitized.
Their actual customers, aka advertisers, want to avoid being associated with some things. It’s the same reason you don’t see Pepsi etc advertised on porn websites.
I think it's hard to be perfect but easy to be much better:
1) warn content providers before blocking whenever possible. It's rare something is so bad it requires immediate takedown. Allow people to reply to the warnings.
2) next step is to show a warning to content viewers and allow followers and searchers to find, but not autosuggest.
3) have a transparent appeals process at each step.
I'm not saying that Google's ML isn't doing some very fancy things but:
- Ultimately, any supervised technique will depend on some system that can provide ground truth, which in these applications must be from humans. You can't avoid some humans in the loop and still learn a fuzzy human concept like "is hate speech". But if your aren't gathering that ground truth info in a very deliberate way, you can end up with a range of gaps or artifacts.
- There's a broad swath of technical approaches which would consider multiple kinds of information, but ensemble them together such that a very strong signal from one can have a determinative impact. It would be easy to have a situation where if the video itself talks about white/black and attack/threat/defend many times, the score from some language model into a top level ensemble model is very high and the other components may not matter.
- But a lot of those other components may often be in agreement because of natural structure. A video says black/white a lot, several other videos on the channel do the same, and a bunch of interested users also look at other channels that have very similar feature vectors, suddenly a content level, channel level and community level signal are all in agreement, and your model can believe it found a subcommunity of hate speech.
Incorporating many kinds of info into an ML model isn't that hard ... But doing so in a way which is tightly integrated (eg I'm likely to use a specific meaning of a term in my video which matches a use in a video of a related channel linked in my video description, and that use of that word is also related to what's visible in the video at around that time) is pretty hard. Doing so in a way which distinguishes predictions from confidences is harder.
All of which is just to say that it's hard to build a really good black box for a complex problem, especially one based around subjective human concepts, and maybe both we and the black boxes would do better by attaching more uncertainty to their predictions.
If it's worth the channel owner spending many hours making videos, and viewers spending many many more watching them, I think it's not crazy to ask that if the model predicts that it's likely disallowed content, that a manual reviewer can take a quick look.
Is it more complex than a text classifier though? If it truly took into account who is commenting, and context, etc., it would have noticed very few chess videos were being flagged for what seemed like racist language.
It seems more than likely somebody put in a very crude black box to process text without context. (Or should I say, opaque box, so the horde doesn't flag me?)
Youtube actually could manually review literally every video. [1] In 2019, users only uploaded on average 500 hours of video per minute. This is ~30,000 hours per hour. If you had people manually watching every video at 1x speed for their entire duration, you would need 30,000 reviewers for each 8 hour shift. Even if we assume that a fully-burdened reviewer costs Youtube an astronomical $80,000/yr, that only amounts to $7.2B/yr on manual review if we assume that they have people literally watching every second of every video. In the same year, 2019, Youtube made a revenue of at least $15.15B in ad revenue alone, so the cost of such a form of manual review only amounts to ~50% of Youtube's yearly revenue which is absolutely within the realm of possibility. Now, I am not saying they could do so cost-competitively or profitably, but it is not directly ludicrous on its face to suggest that they could so if they wanted to.
Obviously, just watching every video in real-time a single time is not an adequate review process. Things can be missed, misunderstood, or just take more time to process, so it is likely that more review would be necessary for non-obvious cases. But, on the other hand, it is not necessary to review literally every second of every video. If they only reviewed reported videos and reports were required to specify the timestamp, they would probably instantly reduce this total burden by a factor of 10x-100x (assuming they filter out obvious spam reports). This would allow them to allocate more independent reviewers to the actual non-obvious cases resulting in reasonable accuracy with a human appeals process while reducing their overall cost burden significantly lower than the previously stated ~50%. They could then tier their review process based on the amount of views to allowing them to limit how many resources they spend on unpopular and irrelevant videos to focus on more visible and profitable videos while still providing a base level of review. And, all of this is assuming that they do not have any automated mechanism to directly decide on cases that are trivially obvious, thus reducing their burden even lower to only the contentious cases where the automated systems can not create a clear-cut answer. Frankly, I could go on about various other potential mechanisms they could do to reduce costs while increasing efficiency and avoiding bad actors, but what I have already said should already be sufficient to handle the basic problem.
All in all, they could probably institute a reasonable human review process that could handle all reasonable cases for <5% of yearly revenue and frankly I would be shocked if it were anywhere near the high end of that estimate. Even without any automated systems I would put my median cost prediction at 1% of yearly revenue and with even basic automated systems probably close to 0.2%.
Youtubes revenue is not its profit. It has significant expenses in terms of paying creators, hosting and bandwidth costs and the cost of all the engineers it takes to run the systems.
In addition you do not factor in significant complexities like the ones below:
You are incorrect about your assumptions in many respects. Let me list out a few:
1) There is a big difference between watching a 15 min video at 2X for fun vs watching 8 hours of videos a day while having to follow laid down policy with complexity. Videos are not taken down only for one reason and there is a lot of complexity involved with edge cases. Humans are not robots and this is not a task we are inherently good at. Give it a shot yourself for a day and see how easy it is.
2) Your overhead does not consider any additional complexity in terms of languages, specialty, regional expertise etc. This is not a simple problem either. Sure maybe you can hire 1000 reviewers in lets say Indonesia but you cannot find a native Kswahili speaker there. Its not cheap to setup an office for 2 people in Kenya. Scale this to the world which has 193 countries and 6,500 languages.
3) People dont work without any management overhead. You need frontline reviewers. Then you need a layer of experts above them. The you need managers to take care of the operations. The managers to manage those managers. Then recruiters to hire those people. Then HR to deal with their issues.
4) Turnover is a big deal. Very few people in the world can watch beheadings 40 hours a week. An even smaller proportion can handle child safety material. What happens when those people need to take time off? You need additional people. If you want a humane operation then you might have to get them to work only 2 hours a day.
It continues to amaze me how some of the smartest and technically savvy people on HN either do not recognize or refuse to admit how complicated a problem planet scale moderation is. If it was a problem that could be solved by spending a few tens of million dollars a year, it would have been solved.
Bear in mind what we have here is an example of the cutting edge of AI in its real world use. It doesn't exactly inspire faith in AI if some of the best is this thick when it comes to making decisions that would be incredibly basic for a human of even below average intelligence.
Frankly the whole thing stinks. On the whim of an unaccountable AI basically anything can happen. We need laws around this sooner rather than later. AIs are getting more powerful but less responsible.
Why do we need laws around this? We need to hold the people accountable that put this into production and/or produced it. People should be able to build bad AI, but if that causes poor real world outcomes, then the people that okay'd its use need to take responsibility.
"An AI erroneously banned the channel," shouldn't get any more leeway than "A support staff member banned the channel."
> Why do we need laws around this? We need to hold the people accountable [...] [T]he people that okay'd its use need to take responsibility.
Genuinely asking: what do you think profitable companies would do to their ML engineers over a product issue like this if there was no law under which they would be sued?
I think accountability without an enforcement mechanism is just a wishful suggestion.
>what do you think profitable companies would do to their ML engineers over a product issue like this if there was no law under which they would be sued?
Nothing. Maybe a reprimand at best, because the consequences of this are fairly minor. If a store erroneously bans you and them unbans you and says that there was a mixup with their policy, then what do you think should be the consequences to the store? If it's effectively a monopoly then I can see there being problems, but if it's just a random store then that doesn't really matter.
Because the inner bias that humans have that might lead to similar exclusion is implicitly hidden and somehow excused and the machines are held to a higher standard, for some reason.
Youtube is in between a rock and a hard place as well as all user generated content sites.
Either they automate removing content and end up removing some of the good with the mountains of bad, or they do it manually which costs a fortune and is too slow.
The local news is still ridiculing Facebook because they left the stream up for the NZ shooting for hours and their stated reason "No one watching the video had reported it". Well what do we want facebook to do? Hire thousands of people to watch every single livestream live?
IMO we should all move to some kind of self hosting where there is no central mega corp that takes responsibility for the content. You host your own content and you stand behind it legally. As long as its legal content, you have no risk of being shut down.
> Either they automate removing content and end up removing some of the good with the mountains of bad, or they do it manually which costs a fortune and is too slow.
I think this is a false dichotomy; they could automate flagging for human review instead. This would address the cost though not the speed.
Content awaiting review could be disabled, or it could be disabled only if it is deemed sufficiently egregious.
>they could automate flagging for human review instead.
I'm not sure this would save them in many cases. Most of the abusive content on facebook is not easily identifiable. I don't think the current AI systems are up to the task. They may be able to identify a human and a dog are in the video but not tell the difference between petting the dog or punching it.
Similarly they likely can not tell the difference between someone at a shooting range or committing a mass shooting.
Just like it is too much to expect police to stop all crime before it happens, I think it is too much to expect platforms to remove violating content before it is reported.
Are you sure a human, never mind one of below average intelligence, gets this? We have people right now in Silicon Valley calling for renaming CS words because they sound racist to them.
of course a human might screw up but OPs general point is right. The AI doesn't even know what 'racism' is. It doesn't know what 'chess' is. It can't do context and it doesn't understand meaning, it just correlates audio signal.
That this often looks like intelligence doesn't change the fact that it's incredibly far away from the real thing.
You kid but i've received 2 pull-requests on my open-source project, which only goal was to replace "Blacklist" with "Blocklist" in the app preferences.
In the last couple years especially I feel like I am walking on eggshells when talking to people. Especially when talking to people I don't know as well. It feels so easy to offend someone these days and I'm getting sick of it.
I've been having to unfollow a ton of podcasts recently because no matter how far from being related to politics some podcasts are, they just love to make sure a chunk of the episode is devoted to calling white people privileged and talking about different groups burdens. I was listening to a podcast episode talking about Skyways in a city and somehow half the podcast ended up being about how the skyways affected certain racial groups. It's a podcast that is supposed to be focused on the cool architectural features and infrastructure of cities. Somehow it ends up being a political podcast about racial inequality.
Sometimes I just want to be able to relax, but I feel like wherever I go whether it be TV, Movies, Podcasts, or even the news, I feel like I am being attacked wherever I go and that I have to be afraid of offending someone with what I say.
Even just making this comment I'm afraid it's going to be downvoted because of mentioning races in a somewhat negative sounding way.
These people (the genuine ones) lack context-awareness, so they could always find something racist, sexist, ableist, whateverist in anything you say.
I just named something "blacklist" a couple of days ago. It has nothing to do with races, nor slavery. The only thing they have is a person in-between who connects the two because s/he is a troll, or because lacks context-awareness or whatever.
Yeah I personally try and avoid the word police. If I am using a grammatically and contextually correct word I am not going to let someone tell me I can't use the word.
What's hilarious to me is that I think the people who find there to be a problem with these words are the racist ones themselves. They are taking a word out of context and being offended by it out of context. They are the ones looking at a word and thinking negative racist thoughts.
When I use the word "master" or "blacklist" it has nothing to do with any old historical context or usage of the word. I am quite clearly using the word in a technical context as per the dictionary definition of the word. Anyone who thinks that is offensive is the true problem in my opinion.
> What's hilarious to me is that I think the people who find there to be a problem with these words are the racist ones themselves.
That is what I believe as well. I am not that preoccupied with races to make such associations. In all fairness, I still have no clue what "blacklist" has to do with races or slavery, even after having been "shown" this association, because it makes no sense given the context.
There might be people out there who genuinely do not know what the term means in the context of CS/IT, but then instead of assuming that everyone using the term is racist, they should try to figure out the actual meaning.
Killing a child or a parent in the context of computer science is something completely different than... actually killing a child or a parent. :) I can imagine "just kill the child" being misinterpreted, but that can only be the case if someone takes it out of context. Once the context is known, there should be no confusion or mystery.
> These people (the genuine ones) lack context-awareness
No, they are very much aware of the context. Most of these people are just bullies, who have found a new way to mask their toxic behavior in the name of a good cause.
I added "genuine ones" for a reason. There are lots of trolls, that is for sure. I cannot tell if there are more trolls than genuine ones though.
I have seen bots, too. I remember there was a bot that sent pull requests to over 1000 projects if I remember correctly. All the pull requests involved changing words only, such as "blacklist" to "blocklist" or whatever. You know what is funny? Many of them were merged.
I understand that reckoning with racism is uncomfortable, but I don't understand how that 99 percent invisible episode is a personal attack on you. If anything, it's a reminder that well intensioned design (saving downtown) can have consequences (increased policing of Black men).
I have seen and listened to a lot of race-conscious content over the last few years. As a white man, I can't say I've taken any of it as a personal attack. I'd be happy to talk more about this out of thread.
It's not that it is a personal attack, it's more that I expect more talk about the actual architecture and infrastructure behind the topic versus making it a political topic.
I didn't notice them providing any statistics in regards to the racial issues. All I noticed was anecdotal evidence and an incredibly biased account of a single police encounter that happened back in 2014. They are using one guys story and a single incident involving police in order to talk about the negatives it had on other races. These are bold claims with little backing given.
This is why I don't like when podcasts like this try and tackle these issues. Because they end up being incredibly biased and one-sided. They didn't provide the whole story on the police incident, nor did they provide any other points of views or statistic on the racial issues they mentioned.
I like hearing well-researched and articulated pieces about racial inequality. What I don't like is hearing a biased opinion/anecdote filled podcast episode about it.
It seems every Podcast I listen to now always has some weird need to make it political. This never used to be the case even just a couple years ago. Now we even see sporting programs taking sides in politics and it just seems so unnecessary.
I often spend too much time deep into the weeds on these kinds of topics much like I am now. Sometimes I just want to consume some media without politics being involved. However it rarely seems like I am able to anymore. Even TV shows I watch now are starting to feel ruined and lack the good script writing they used to in favour of shoehorning whatever current PC thing is trending.
> I expect more talk about the actual architecture and infrastructure behind the topic versus making it a political topic.
The problem with this line of thinking is that everything is political. If they had chosen not to address the possible racial implications, other people who felt strongly about those may have felt that the negative social impact that they perceive was being deliberately ignored, and they would have been right to the same extent that you are.
It is similar to the choice of making or not making global warming a game mechanic in the Civilization series of games: either option will be seen as "political" by some people and "apolitical" by others. It's a distinction without a difference.
Not saying something is not inherently less political than talking about it.
Note: I have no idea or even opinion about the actual political implications of skyways. Perhaps they are a real problem, perhaps they are a fringe idea like opposition to the word "blacklist" (a word which existed in the English language since Prince John).
This is the most standard of social justice talking points. I don’t like it at all. But putting that aside, how would I go about determining whether it’s true? Take all y’all’s word for it? Listen and believe? Read exclusively intersectional literature until it takes over my thought processes?
What is the truth value of this stance? If I say viewing everything as political is a motivated choice, you say it could only be so for the privileged. And so I’m stuck in my little fishbowl, and you’re over there in whatever your situation is, and never the twain shall meet.
If only you knew. Literally all I do in my old age is listen to everybody and try to work out where they’re coming from. I thought long and hard about my rebuttal, and I might have almost had a pretty good one. But instead I’ll just say thanks for giving me occasion to think a lot.
So here I am talking about someone dismissing what someone says by calling them privileged and boom, one of them shows up!
What did this contribute to the conversation? Good job you got your jab in calling me privileged in a conversation where I am talking about how stupid of a response that is that people will say.
You didn't correct me on anything. You called me privileged based on a weird assumption you somehow drew from what I've said.
Regardless of what my current status may be or what you think it may be it's not very relevant. Because that would ignore the rest of my life which you also have zero idea about. You're again making assumption. You don't know if I've had an easy life or a really hard life. You don't know anything but act like you know something about me and are using that to try and belittle me.
Anyway this is clearly going nowhere as all you have done is repeat the same insult twice and provide zero constructive conversation or rebuttals to what I've said. You can throw around buzzwords and the big ol P word (privilege) but until you actually respond to what I said I'm wasting my time here.
Please do not reply to me anymore. I'm not interested in hearing insults anymore. Do keep in mind it violates the rules here.
Do not assume what my life has been life. Do not assume what my privilege is. And do not reply to me anymore. You are incredibly rude and unproductive. You are a perfect example of what I am talking about. You throw around buzzwords, provide zero facts/evidence/research and then throw down an insult.
FYI:calling someone privileged, making assumptions, and being a jerk doesn't fix systematic racism.
Jesus Christ, stop downvoting and flagging these comments. As much as I disagree with the comment, it correctly explains what the disagreement is, which is that we have different definitions of racism.
According to this brave new definition of racism, KKK is not inherently racist, because it's a systemic issue, not an individual issue.
The KKK were part of the system, and the system in many states supported them, either tacitly or even openly in some cases. Members of the KKK rose to the highest positions in local and federal politics and influenced police and lawmaking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_members_in_United...
The rise of the different incarnations of the Klan can be directly tied to politics of segregation, Jim Crow laws and other factors that in some form continue to hobble black Americans in particular, to this day.
It is a systemic problem, perpetuated by a system that needs an underclass of disposable labor to oppress.
But are not now. There are groups with similar messages that never had any power.
BLM also have supporters in the highest positions and also influenced police and lawmaking, some places actually did defunded their police force.
My point still stands. According to that definition, in the alternate universe KKK or NSDAP would not be considered racist, if they didn't have the majority of support.
Saying that racism in the US is a systemic issue does not imply that individual racism does not exist. One is the basis of the other, as people with racist views implement racist laws and systems, which in turn embolden more people.
The KKK didn't come out of nowhere, they came out of a deeply racist society and system. Similarly the NSDAP didn't come out of nowhere, they came out of a racist (deeply anti-semitic) society and system, which they leveraged along with severely wounded German national pride and massive international sanctions after WWI, in order to rise to power.
Systemic and individual racism go hand in hand, but you cannot fight racism one individual at a time, there simply aren't enough hours in a day. You have to attack the underlying structures and systems that perpetuate racism.
Fighting against the thin blue line, and defunding the police in the US is one way to fight that fight, because of how selective policing is based on race and social standing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HehnDHNoItk
You know, you say things about having a privilege of being ignorant, but you seem to be unaware that this is exactly what you're doing. You all have the privilege of basically downplaying racism to be a just systemic issue of black people not earning or being employed as much, or cops shooting slightly more black people than white people. You have no clue just how much things can go south to the point where there isn't even any system in place and all you have left are the actual horrors of war, that the Hollywood movies won't ever show you.
You're blaming Trump for calling for violence, not because he did, but because his audience interprets what he says as such, and at the same time you say things like "all white people are racist" and expect everyone to understand the intricacies of the white privilege theory. In Europe we had those things called "pogroms" that were massacres organized by the usual day-to-day folks, with zero influence over the system. So it wasn't racism according to you, I guess. It's within the realm of possibility that you soon might have the benefit of your white privilege of finding yourself at the receiving end of one of such massacres.
Don't worry they will let you know you're privileged again to explain why you don't get the mental gymnastics required to make sense of this crap.
So much of the stuff I hear groups like BLM say is very far from being true and isn't based on any stats. They often operate very similar to a terror group and do cause a lot of actual terror. Businesses get destroyed, burned down, they attack federal buildings, they attack police, they attack white people who disagree with their ideology, they attack politicians who disagree, they riot outside of politics houses or people who disagree with them, etc. I'm sick of this being deemed somehow "ok" when if a different group did it they would get labeled as a terrorist group. It baffles me how a small group like "Proud Boys" can be labeled as a terror group despite being leagues less dangerous than BLM. The BLM roots caused over $1 Billion in insurance costs alone. If that isn't a terror group I don't know what is.
All such cases of pogroms, ethnic cleansing and so on in recorded human history, happened because of systems that openly, tacitly or implicitly accepted or promoted racist views, laws and sentiments. In some cases the inaction of the system allowed them to happen, in other cases the system directly inflamed them to happen. In others yet, the system (by extension the military and others directly under command of the system) directly perpetrated these acts.
I say the root cause is systemic, you say the root cause is individual. One cannot exist without the other, but I say it all boils down to a systemic issue causing the individual issues.
If you think the current relatively mild upset of the status quo in any way constitutes an "anti-white sentiment", you've been living an extremely sheltered and privileged life.
White men still hold the overwhelming power in the western world, in politics, business and culture.
The fact that minorities are making their voices heard and demanding their rights be respected does not discriminate against white people. Various minorities have been politely asking for their rights to be respected for decades, even centuries at this point. Now they're demanding to be heard, which shouldn't really surprise anyone.
Yes, I was lucky enough to be born after the fall of communism, so I had the privilege that my parents and grandparents didn't have of not struggling through starvation, not being subjected to attempts of erasing my identity and genocides. See, we white people just don't know what real oppression is, which is low black employment and trigger happy cops.
Because of how policed the online world feels with what you say it often feels like it applies in public. However I have yet to work/interact with anyone who seems as far gone as the permanently offended Twitter users seem to be. I swear not a day goes by anymore where I don't here about Twitter going after another person trying to cancel them.
We see people losing their jobs simply for sharing a more conservative view on Twitter. I've seen cases of actors losing jobs for sharing an edgy conservative meme, but than someone sharing almost the identical meme but liberal sided being completely fine.
Nowadays it seems like even things like jobs can simply be determined by how outraged a group of random people feel. Actors lose jobs because people who probably don't even watch the show get upset by a single tweet they made.
The world is starting to not make sense to me and just seems so illogical lately. No matter how factual and objective something is that you say, if it doesn't align with the current politically correct fad people will try to cancel you. People who make perfectly valid and factual claims get shut down by people who just simply call them a "racist" and say "you just don't get it". Instead of trying to help them understand and trying to use facts to logically debate someone they react with emotion and outrage. And then they get dogpilled into submission.
I see why it's hard to find people opposing the current PC culture. As soon as anyone does they get called some "ism" and get cancelled.
You also can’t defend anyone from getting canceled, as that makes you the “ism” as well. You must be anti-whatever“ism” or they will come after you as well.
When I was a little kid I went to a fundamentalist baptist church that worked exactly like this. If a deacon learned that someone wore a skirt above the knee, or listened to a pop song, that person was excommunicated. If anyone then contacted the apostate outside of church, they were excommunicated too. And so on.
Yes exactly. Either you're "with" the mob or you're getting mobbed. The word police and thought police are in full force on sites like Twitter and reddit now.
I pretty much avoid platforms like TikTok and Twitter because of these kinds of things.
I've even seen sections of TikToks with people pretty clearly faking mental disorders for attention. It's honestly kinda sad. I guess I am kinda glad I just missed the explosion of social media in school. I'm sure social media just creates so many more issues in young adults. And the weird things you do when you're young will forever be stored somewhere online.
Christ, I'm going to vent, so I'm sorry but, I'm so sick of this bullsh!t argument.
Eggshells?
If you're with someone you know or you don't know and you make a perceived or actual faux pas in their eyes.
Say ..... "sorry" .... "I didn't know that. Tell me more".
How hard is that?
I try to be pretty inclusive, but I'm nowhere near perfect and you know what, when I might have got it wrong this is what I do. And I'm not special for doing so. It's called interacting like a normal human being with another human being.
And you know what, it opens the space for understanding and debate and the chance to reject if you really believe it is wrong.
And as for you unfollowing podcasts because of mentions of priviedge and so forth ... well ... I wonder why that would be recently. Do you unfollow all topics which make you uncomfortable? Do you complain about cancel culture and then cancel podcasts you don't like?
I'm going to be harsh here because your post is very representative of many I see so maybe it needs to be said.
You feeling like you're being attacked everywhere you go is your problem, not those you think who are doing the attacking.
Unfortunately you did raise some fair points but I'm on HackerNews looking for constructive conversations without sly jabs and insults.
> This is true in most of the world, but the US particularly has an especially racially-charged environment, primarily because due to denial for centuries by people exactly like you to have the conversations about how race plays into society and culture and architecture.
I never denied a racial issue and now you're comparing me to people from centuries ago that committed atrocities on other races.
Flame wars are expressly disallowed on HackerNews and I will be ending this conversation now. I warned you of this rule and asked for a mature conversation. It's unfortunate it couldn't be possible.
One must be able to discuss one another's point of view while being able to point out problematic perspectives of the participants in the discussion.
Ideas aren't abstract. They are molded and adapted by the people that hold them.
I know people on hackernews feel triggered by terms like "implicit bias" and "privilege" and will downvote anything that references these concepts, but it doesn't make them nonexistent, and it's unfortunately a problem in a large percentage of the comment group here.
Listening to a podcast about racial privilege shouldn't make you feel "attacked". And my comment should not have made you feel insulted. Comparing you to people who pretend that racism doesn't exist was a valid summary of your point that you'd prefer to listen to informative content about architecture, science and technology without references to any racial connotations associated with it.
It does NOT mean that I associated you with slave owners, eugenicists, lynchers, or genociders. I didn't even imply that you were racist. (If I had that ALSO wouldn't have placed you in the same category as those people because every belief has a wide spectrum). I mean that. I have no evidence or reason to believe that you are racist and have no interest in insulting you.
But if putting a mirror to your ideology makes you feel attacked because you don't like who it's associated with, the problem isn't the mirror.
HackerNews is becoming an echo chamber of "free speech is being suppressed. Diversity and inclusion is a scam. The world is getting too political. And white people are constantly under attack".
There is only a few of us on here that speak up against this narrative, and we get downvoted for making people feel bad about their beliefs under the guise of "not being curious" or "immature". It's incredibly disappointing that I've been in this industry for >20 years, and the exact same problems exist today as then - technologists who fail to take an interest in the human side of the society they provide technology for.
Foucault and the Postmodern philosophers of the 70s started this, with a new epistemology that ties language use to our perceptions of reality, and also the idea of how marginalized people remain marginalized. You see, the power matrix operates daily and we are all involved. We perpetuate real world problems with problematic language, we are told.
Change the language, change the outcome, came the activists of the 90s and 2000's. This stuff somehow spilled out of literary theory in academia and started becoming a political force for understanding power dynamics. You can get a taste below, where the commenter is comparing black and white concepts, and how we view one as good and another as bad.
Do these folks (like the commenter below) have a point? Yes, sure. But submit your point to the marketplace of ideas instead of trying to force people's hands through censorship. Not everyone has to buy social constructivism. We're allowed to believe that racism has material and economic causes, and changing it has minimally to do with language. So no, don't make me change my git default branch or the way I talk.
I don't claim to be a Foucault scholar but I've heard that claim. The postmodernists were, and to some extent I can sympathize, hostile to grand narratives. Especially given the end of religion and in the middle of the Cold War, who can blame them. Even the attack on Western Enlightenment ideals is at least interesting to discuss
But as you say the whole thing is a giant metanarrative times ten, and these language police types are running over everyone who gets in their way. It's making so many people nervous, I think it has a shelf life. What scares me more is the open embrace of postmodern social theory by corporate America. That will lead to a backlash that makes me even more nervous.
I'm disagreeing with this thread. So I guess prepping for the down votes.
> it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association
I think addressing one issue does not 'trivialise' everything else. It can be horribly overstated but changing small fry can help provide momentum to change something more significant.
> It's complete bullshit,
It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that? Given changing a metaphor 'black' into a meaning 'block' doesn't seem to me a generally bad idea.
I understand the logic of 'that's just what languages is.' But language changes when people use it differently. It seems to me very reasonable to say let's use this language a little bit less unfortunately.
I'm not suggesting this is 100% the same but re: language change. I remember that time not too many years ago when people would argue that referring to a 'man' or 'him' at work was non-gendered. And those women complaining that we only talked about business men were just being unreasonable. I'm sure there are still places like that but I'm very glad that my co's & clients changed.
> It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that?
Honestly, lately I feel like the opposite is the case. Everywhere I go anywhere online all I see is white people being shit on. I see incredibly racist things being said about white people everywhere online and there are zero consequences for it. In fact they often get praised for it. So no, I think what you're saying is far from being true.
The people who are looking at a word like "blacklist" and thinking it in a negative racial way are the ones that are the problem. They are the ones grasping at straws trying to find things to be offended by. It's a choice people make and it's only offensive because someone chooses to be offended by the word. You have to remember when being offended by words like this it means ignoring the context.
It's just silly is what it is. Language policing is absolutely insane.
> Honestly, lately I feel like the opposite is the case. Everywhere I go anywhere online all I see is white people being shit on. I see incredibly racist things being said about white people everywhere online and there are zero consequences for it. In fact they often get praised for it. So no, I think what you're saying is far from being true.
It's not just whites but east asians, jews as well. The whole idea derives from the notion that its okay to be racist if its upwards. People associate those groups as being affluent and automatically people think its okay to "punch up".
There are certain groups that we are not supposed to "punch down". There is a rise in anti-semitism, anti-asian, anti-white imho because wealth gap is increasing and people who are on the bottom tend to be not of those groups so they feel its justified and its okay to be racist not even being conscious of their actions and thoughts.
Like many Koreans during the LA riots knew exactly who were looting their stores but its forbidden and "racist" just like the victims of a subset of BLM rioters who decided to loot businesses that can't mention the demographic despite video footage evidence, anecdotes and that overwhelming group behind the protests.
It's getting ridiculous like when I was playing Battlefield and was permanently banned for saying "niggardly use of ammo packs" as the person was not cooperating and refusing to drop ammos.
The whole thing about master branch, master bedroom also has turned North America into a laughing stock. I can't wait to leave this puritannical shithole.
> was permanently banned for saying "niggardly use of ammo packs"
As a non-native english speaker, if I didn't look up the word in dictionary, I would likely assume it was a derivative of that other word. I can see how that would lead to a ban if moderator didn't bother checking, especially if they are moderating 13 year olds mostly.
I guess if you didn't know how to play chess and you heard white moves first, you'd think that was racist too. Especially since you might be inclined to think adults are too busy to play games.
Oh yes, groups like Asians are being heavily targeted yet they get almost zero attention. We even saw the case at Yale where Asian and White students were being doc'ed points on admissions.
There is even research showing how in many different situations Asians actually have many more cases of hate crimes against them compared to black and Hispanic:
> In general, hate crimes are most likely targeting young adults at ages 18–34, male, and local residents in all three groups. Asian American victims however, have a higher chance than African Americans and Hispanics to be victimized in places where they are not local residents (24% vs. 16.8% for African Americans and 16.3% for Hispanics). Comparing with Black and Hispanic victims, Asian Americans also have relatively higher chance to be victimized by non-White offenders (25.5% vs. 1.0% for African Americans and 18.9% for Hispanics).
> With regard to the incident characteristics, Asian Americans have higher risk to be persecuted by strangers (39.2% vs. 30.7% for African Americans and 30.1% for Hispanics), are less likely to be offended in their residence (23.7% vs. 34.4% for African Americans and 29.5% for Hispanics), and are more likely to be targeted at school/college (17% vs. 8.9% for African Americans and 11.2% for Hispanics). The variables of time, weapon use, injury, and substance show similar patterns for the three groups.
I personally do not think movements like BLM are progress inducing at all. In fact I think they do the opposite. I think movements like BLM put the blame on things like white people and police. It's easy for a politician to use the police as a scape-goat and reap in the votes for being a big BLM supporter. But talk doesn't mean anything. I have yet to see many politicians actually do anything to address some of the root causes of problems such nearly 3/4 of black babies being born to an unmarried mother (https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2104/9429/chad_sc...).
And there is a lot of research showing how huge the single-parent factor is on crime rates:
> States with a lower percentage of single-parent families, on average, will have lower rates of juvenile crime. State-by-state analysis indicates that, in general, a 10 percent increase in the number of children living in single-parent homes (including divorces) accompanies a 17 percent increase in juvenile crime.
I find it wild how the blame will be put on police over-policing areas rather than the root of the problem which is the higher rates of crime in these areas due to factors like the one above.
Overall it seems like America (and some of Canada) is becoming super sensitive and easily offended. It makes it hard for anyone to ever bring up the serious problems affecting different communities. This data isn't racist, the same effects are seen across racial groups including white people. And this is exactly why I hate seeing the weird anti-white, anti-jew, anti-asian wars that are going on. Because the reality is that this is a problem that can affect anyone who ends up in these kinds of situations.
I'd love to see a politician who focused on the roots of problems rather then focusing on making the loud mouth Twitter users happy. It's sad that often times even just mentioning these kinds of stats would be considered a conservative view and probably would end up being called insults and some Twitter users trying to cancel you.
Agreed 100%. The fact that people are downvoting just shows how ridiculous the double standard is when it comes to racism.
First, racism is not the olympics. Nobody wins. Even when its people "punching up". However, it is quickly becoming acceptable.
Take a look at Western Europe and the the level of anti-semitism from the Muslim, Arab and some local community. It's disgusting. You'd think that Europe would have rooted this shit out after WW2 but that isn't the case. Especially in France, people who lived there for generations are moving to Israel and other countries. When I look at that I think of the struggles of Asian Americans and other groups that haven't gotten as much attention because it doesn't fit the traditional racism.
This forced diversity and "punching up" movement like BLM and ACAB are only increasing animosity towards those represented groups. Many employers who used to hire people from the ghetto can't do it anymore because they've been A) looted B) minimum wage is forcefully raised to unsustainable levels C) refreshed animosity towards those groups as a result of the violence witnessed or experience
Lot of African Americans wonder where this racial tension comes from the Asian & other community are either willfully ignorant or incapable of accepting reality-its not racist to assume a a certain patron will steal or commit violence when the overwhelming demographic is responsible for it. It's called risk management similar to how you don't venture beyond a certain street in some American cities or walk into a favela in Brazil. So already trust was very low towards African Americans and other similar groups, now after BLM, its at an all time low. In fact, it has hurt progress. It's going to be hard for businesses damaged by the abuse of trust from those demographics to ever trust them again and it's going to lead to more underserved ghettos, more poverty, less jobs. This sucks for honest folks of those community who see their opportunities ruined because the uneducated ones suddenly were empowered by an asinine political movement.
People keep using poverty, intergenerational trauma due to slavery but these are just fucking excuses. Asian Americans have gone through all of those things back home from the feudal corrupt agricultural lordship of that only ended around 19th century (but some countries still have militant authoritarian power forcing people in squalor conditions in factories making goods for the West), regional war and poverty. Yet these hardships were never allowed to be used as an excuse to break bad, blame other race groups, and other external factors and NEITHER do successful African Americans.
In fact Charles Barkley put it so eloquently
"We as black people are never going to be successful, not because of you white people, but because of other black people. When you are black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people,"
"For some reason we are brainwashed to think, if you're not a thug or an idiot, you're not black enough. If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don't break the law, you're not a good black person. It's a dirty, dark secret in the black community.
"There are a lot of black people who are unintelligent, who don't have success. It's best to knock a successful black person down because they're intelligent, they speak well, they do well in school, and they're successful. It's just typical BS that goes on when you're black, man."
Very good points! These are the same kind of points I have tried to bring up to commenters on Reddit before and I get called racist and told I don't understand. Of course they never try to help me "understand" whatever their "problem" is, but they sure know how to lay out some insults and use their "ism"s.
I think the Malcolm X quote is a very powerful one that accurately represents what is currently going on. I'll quote a snippet of it here but I think the full paragraph is interesting to read:
> “The white liberal is the worst enemy to America, and the worst enemy to the black man. Let me explain what I mean by the white liberal. In America there is no such thing as Democrat or Republican anymore. In America you have liberals and conservatives. The only people living in the past who think in terms of I’m a Democrat or Republican, is the American Negro. He’s the one that runs around bragging about party affiliation. He’s the one that sticks to the Democrat or sticks to the Republican. But white people are divided into two groups, liberals and conservative. The Democrats who are conservative, vote with the Republicans who are conservative. The Democrats who are liberal vote with the Republicans that are liberal. The white liberal aren’t white people who are for independence, who are moral and ethical in their thinking. They are just a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. The same as the white conservative is a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. They are fighting each other for power and prestige, and the one that is the football in the game is the Negro, 20 million black people. A political football, a political pawn, an economic football, and economic pawn. A social football, a social pawn. The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro sides with the white liberal, and the white liberal use the Negro against the white conservative.
His quote so accurately describes what is currently happening it's kinda disturbing. I find it hilarious how a well educated and successful black person warns of exactly this kind of thing and yet we still see it happening. We see businesses, liberal politicians, and liberal supporters who spew BLM love everywhere they go and act like such huge supporters of BLM. Yet when Obama was president very little was ever done to help these black communities. Some even argue Trump's policy changes did more to help black people than Obama's changes did. But no liberal would consider that as it doesn't fit the narrative.
It's easy for a politician to make big talk, but when they ignore the stats and the root cause of the problem then it really is just talk and it's useless.
People think that by pointing out things like we have mentioned that we are racist. But in reality we are just able to see the factual/statistics that demonstrate the real issues. And we can see how the politicians and companies utilize racial justice to increase their wealth and power. I personally would love to see all races treated equally, but current BLM movements have not shown any factual progress and have only shown further negative effects such as more incidents of hate crimes.
What people often don't realize is that calling something a ghetto or low income is not racist. Just because one particular area happens to be made up mostly one particular race doesn't make it racist to address that it is a problem. People like to act like police are the problem and that black people are being arrested in higher numbers because of racist police. When in reality black people are often in low income areas and low income areas are well researched to have higher levels of crime. Thus of course there are more arrests in such areas. But I don't know why people need to blame it on race. Why can people not identify that the 1% bleed everybody dry, and particularly take advantage of the poor. Why can we not fight against the root of the problem, why does it always have to be this race against that race?
I just find society now so disturbing with how someone can shit on one race in order to pump up another race and that somehow makes them gain more power/wealth. Someone should not benefit from being racist, yet that is exactly what is happening. People should benefit from actually making change and addressing the real problems.
It's funny because you see people like Jordan Peterson get called and "alt-right nazi" yet I have never seen a video of someone actually making a valid rebuttal to anything he has said. Just listening to videos of him talk you can tell he has a pretty high intelligence level and knows very well what he is talking about. I find in today's society when someone makes valid and factual statements it has become common to just dismiss them by calling them something rather than trying to debate/discuss what they said. Nobody is open to addressing the actual concerns and would rather do hand waving and police people from saying certain words. It's only free speech when it's for a woke liberal movement nowadays.
One day maybe sanity will come back, but I can't see that happening for awhile. It makes me curious if there are any countries that do have some more sanity and operate on a more statistical based playing field rather than an emotional based one.
While I don't agree with Peterson (I think he's a pseudo intellect looking for power grab from the conservative side like Malcom X described) I do agree with Malcom X's accurate analysis and its frightening how much of it rings true
I will have to read/watch more documentaries on Malcom X. It's sad that many African American youth have abandoned the warnings of MLK to not descend into violence and break bad because he knew that would be used as tools for oppression.
Also I don't disagree with BLM in it's entirety I do think it started out of good faith but its evolved into something totally unbecoming.
They are fighting each other for power and prestige, and the one that is the football in the game is the Negro, 20 million black people. A political football, a political pawn, an economic football, and economic pawn. A social football, a social pawn. The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro sides with the white liberal, and the white liberal use the Negro against the white conservative.
Now you replace the football with other minorities and you have our modern North American political landscape and the whole Carlsen's #MoveForEquality virtue signaling, banning the user of "master" in github and real estate, the whole "amen and awomen" thing, professor getting chased out because Chinese filler word he used sounded like the N word and non-Chinese American students
found it offensive, going to another country as American and demanding the same values and morals from the locals while not bothering to take the time to learn the customs (the constant shaming and review bombing of Japanese Only or Koreans Only establishments in those respective countries because they had unruly foreign patrons who re fuse to learn the language and respect their customs) are all turning North America into something of a foolery. It's being destroyed from within with its cancel culture, placing the individual above society, echo chambers. It's like watching an American remake of the Cultural Revolution that took place in Mao's China.
The virtue signaling industrial complex in North America is getting insane in North America. It is big business and in fact its destroying and moving us away from progress.
I think that one day where everything returns to normal is a distant future and its better off living in another country where they don't tolerate the vilification of critical thinkers.
Why? I don't have anything to prove to you. Anytime I have chosen to engage with someone who has given a response like yours and chosen to give sources and examples I am met with a ignorant response saying something like "you can't be racist towards white people".
It's just not worth it for me to engage like that anymore. How about bringing a discussion to what I said rather than asking for random proof of what I said. Look literally anywhere on the internet and you'll find it pretty easily.
Stuff like that is just one of hundreds of examples. That article is what I'd consider more of a "casual racism" whereas I also see a lot more direct racism as well.
I'd personally rather be in a world where someone doesn't feel a need to specify someone's race before everything. People will add in race when it has no relevance or facts behind it.
I am sure you have heard the phrase "privileged white male" before. I can't even count on both my hands how many times I've been told that. And I'll be told that without the person even knowing my level of privilege, my gender, or my race. When you oppose the current politically correct fad you'll be called racist and people will assume your gender and race and use it as a derogatory/racist statement. It will be used to dismiss and invalidate an opinion.
For me personally my test is often pretty simple. If someone tries to dismiss an opinion by calling someone a "privileged white male" how would that be any better than dismissing someone's opinion for being black? To me they both are racist and just as bad in my mind. Neither is acceptable. Yet in todays society we know which one would be acceptable. As long as it's shitting on a white person or a male you're good to go.
> If someone tries to dismiss an opinion by calling someone a "privileged white male" how would that be any better than dismissing someone's opinion for being black?
It would depend on the content and context of the opinion itself, no? Why not just ask the dismissing person why they say that? We’ve come to the point where we generalize and characterize instead of understanding, then simply disagreeing.
> Yet in today’s society we know which one would be acceptable. As long as it’s shitting on a white person or a male you’re good to go.
White men are getting shat on but still represent or control nearly all economic and political interests (at least in U.S. and it’s empire). I’m really curious to why you feel this way? It’s not like women and Black people have been getting a pass in exchange. I just think social media has made it easier for white men to be (or feel like) targets of vitriolic, but protected speech. Welcome to the club.
From my perspective, it seems in finance, real estate and politics, going along with the “privileged white male” perception (even if an untrue of the person in question) still seems like the best way to take advantage of markets and institutions. And I suspect that’s why, given a megaphone and platform, everyone else is piling on.
You actually answered this question yourself with your next paragraph :). Currently being racist towards white males gives businesses, influencers, and politicians more power. And I fundamentally disagree with this notion. I do not think shitting on particular groups of people should make someone excel. I think it should show what kind of negative person they are and they should lose not gain.
Some of my problem stems from the fact that these phrases are used to dismiss peoples opinions. I am far from being conservative, and also wouldn't consider myself liberal. I hold many views that fall under both spectrums. Some may even be considered more radical on both ends.
If I made a conservative sided comment online how do you think it would fair? Now if I made a liberal based comment how do you think that would fair in comparison? I think that the liberal ideology would gain me woke points and give me praise. Whereas that conservative view would get shat on, may be called some "ism", and then likely also would be called a "white privileged male". This would of course be used to dismiss the opinion/fact despite how true or accurate it may be. It is also making assumptions on race and gender simply based on a single opinion on a topic.
My main issue is that this kind of thinking creates a divide. It's hard to have a conversation on many websites because people hurl insults and don't care to actually have a constructive conversation. I try and come into a conversation being open-minded. The problem I have faced lately is that I feel like I have been becoming more and more jaded and against the other "side". I really dislike this and have been working to try and avoid doing that. But everytime I hear these kind of rude comments it further affirms my believe while also preventing me from hearing what intelligent people on that "side" actually have to say.
For example, people quite violently oppose Trump and Trump supporters. What doesn't make sense to me is why people would rather attack the group of people instead of trying to share their opinion. If there opinion is based on facts/research/science you'd think they would want to engage with the other side and try and get more people to share their opinion. But instead social media and society lately discourages this. It always has to be them versus us. There is no middle ground. Hell people get called "alt-right" and "nazis" for some pretty tame conservative views. I personally think calling someone a "nazi" is very extreme, yet the word gets thrown around like it means nothing. As a side note I find it quite ironic that these same people using these extreme words also will try to police what words others can use that they deem "offensive".
Definitely agree with the us vs. them mentality that is often perpetuated in the media. Most people are practically not far apart, but people also don't want to confront the past and an us vs. them dichotomy is a lot more accessible.
FWIW I just see shitting on white men as some kind of catharsis for women and people of color. There is a lot more deep pain that needs to be expressed before any real racial healing. Ironically, to your point it may have the opposite of intended effect, but I don't think repressing the emotions that come with unpacking Western society's history of racism is a productive move either.
My main issue is more based on how unproductive it is. The media and social media I believe is tearing apart countries and creating huge divide that continues to grow and grow. I find it disturbing that these companies profit off of creating this divide and continuing to spew anti male and anti white sentiment.
> FWIW I just see shitting on white men as some kind of catharsis for women and people of color.
What's funny is that half the time I hear it, it's a white male shitting on white males. I'll hear a white male podcast host complaining about white males. I often feel like it's less about people doing it to feel better about themselves, it seems more like they are doing it to "look good". Kinda like giving themselves a pat on the back for saying a "woke" line. Or I'll see people like A-list actors shitting on white males despite them being an incredibly privileged individual.
And now we even see females being given political position because of their gender and not necessarily their merit. Our Prime Minister in Canada when he got elected made the cabinet 50/50 male-female. The problem I'm starting to see with this kind of stereotyping is that it is starting to put gender over things like ability.
When a politicians first sentence about why they put someone in a position is "because they were x gender or y race" rather than "Because they had xyz skills and were the most qualified" it points to a problem in my books. In my area we had fire departments that had lower requirements for females than males. However the requirements indicate they are what a firefighter requires to be able to successfully meet the standards of the job and keep themselves, their coworkers, and the public safe. So it seems silly when the that "minimum" to get the job done suddenly gets lowered for a group. It's the same job, but one group doesn't have to meet the same standard? Luckily now I have seen these requirements have shifted to use new testing methodologies that better tests candidates against job requirements and is equal for all genders and ages. I got on a bit of a tangent with this, but my overall point is that because of these norms being pushed by the media often-times the politics and PR becomes more important than having the skills required. This is just one side-effect of many that is caused by this kind of weird PC culture that has been going on.
> If someone tries to dismiss an opinion by calling someone a "privileged white male" how would that be any better than dismissing someone's opinion for being black?
Context matters... if you are in the position of privilege and saying things that you can only say because of your position. Then I can see why some people would dismiss it.
The difference is: if you try to dismiss someone in a minority position for saying things that would be okay to say in a privileged position. Then you are just doubling down on that privilege.
This isn't about "white privilege" vs "black privilege" this about privilege in general. Really empathy is the answer and understanding where they are coming from will help you not inadvertently offend them.
Not in this context. When "let's not base our judgements on race" is responded with "you're a privileged white male", we're never going to reach any agreement. It's simply not going to happen.
Yeah this is exactly the kind of idea I am getting at. How can someone ever try and understand other peoples point of view if they are told "you don't understand" anytime they try and understand.
Whenever my opinion is dismissed using my race/gender/or perceived privilege it instantly creates divide. It naturally is going to make me feel more correct in my views and more correct avoiding those kinds of people. This is exactly why we see such a huge divide now in America. People are unable to discuss stuff. And this is also probably partially due to the fact that often times people don't actually have any stats to back up what they think. Often times people are just following trends now and copying what their favourite woke influencer does. I find little people I engage with actually grasp what they are talking about and just regurgitate the same lines over and over.
I've got to the point where I barely ever comment on any political sounding reddit post because I know the conversation is going to go nowhere and be filled with name-calling. And I hate that I feel like this. I want to be able to converse with people and try and understand their point of view. But unfortunately I just feel constantly attacked.
Hell I mod a couple subs over there. If I make a comment that sounds conservative leaning upset banned users will go post it on subs I mod on acting like I am a "racist mod". Now I have to delete my reddit history often and use alts a lot more. Nowadays you can barely say anything without offending someone.
Cool, bye, thanks for your worthwhile contribution to the site? I don't get the point of your comment, just leave, I don't need to hear an announcement from you.
You came at me saying "List me some “racist things being said about white people” you have seen on the internet so we can all see...". I provided you an explanation and link and your response is that you're leaving now. If you're that upset by me saying some facts/opinions then maybe avoid comment section, I don't know what to tell you.
I figured that would be the feel of the objection.
Maybe I should be grateful as a white person that that's not the world I find myself in. Happy to pick my variable names.
I can't help but feel that the antagonism here is very similar to the antagonism I mentioned about Gendered language. The anger seemed mostly caused by being surprised by being asked to think about something.
The problem is that you're not thinking about the context of the word and instead are using it in a different context to be offended by it. I'd argue that you are the one who needs to think about it a bit more instead of blindly calling others names and trying to police the grammatically correct words someone uses.
Just because you think and associate something with a negative racial implication when you see a word doesn't mean others are. I personally am able to look at a word and understand the context surrounding the word. I'm able to think about that word and know that calling my git branch a "master" doesn't mean that I am a slave driver and or that I agree with it. I am able to think on my own.
> Just because you think and associate something with a negative racial implication when you see a word doesn't mean others are. I personally am able to look at a word and understand the context surrounding the word.
We also only get change requests for the associations that point in one direction.
It's called "in the black" when you're making a profit. Is anyone trying to get accountants to stop calling it that?
Here are some synonyms my thesaurus lists for "white": blanched, bleached, frosted, pasty, achromatic, bloodless, chalky and ghastly. "White noise" is sound without meaning. "White flag" means to surrender. "White label" means you're too cheap for the name brand.
If it's a problem then it's all a problem.
Or, if we're going to change something, we could stop calling people "white" and "black". Where do I submit the pull request for that?
> If we're going to object, shouldn't we object to all of it?
Unfortunately in todays society people policing words only pretend to care to get their woke bonus points. If it's not a current trending word of the day to hate then it doesn't get any attention.
I find the word policing hilarious because like your example illustrate, there is no logic to the hatred.
In this thread someone is trying to justify not liking the word "blacklist". By that logic "black market" should also be a bad word to use. Yet nobody uses the word "white market", but they do use the word "grey market". So what word here is bad? Is using "black market" bad? Then why would "grey market" be okay? It wouldn't make sense. It means they are for some reason associating black with the race, yet are associating grey with a colour. Logically that doesn't make sense.
Yet if "white market" was a thing I bet there would be trouble. Most scary things in horror movies use darkness to set the mood. A scary creature that is pretty much all black like the Slenderman would not look scary if they were almost all white. To us humans we associate different colours with different things. We also use these words as synonyms for different things.
Like you indicate, white is also used for "negative" things as well.
Overall I just can't follow along with the word policing culture. There is no way someone is going to convince me it is "correct" when it logically and consistently doesn't make sense. My mind can't understand why blackmarket would not be offensive but blacklist would.
> The problem is that you're not thinking about the context of the word and instead are using it in a different context to be offended by it.
Please be a bit more careful. Please don't assume you know what or how much I'm thinking.
I think the situation isn't as binary as you seem to be presenting it. The context of the word is a metaphor. The metaphor is commonly used for 'good versus bad'. This being a common metaphor in western language might not be helpful to some people. It's not difficult to be more explicit or to use a different metaphor.
> you are the one who needs to think about ... I am able to think on my own.
:) You know the classic idea: "I know I'm right, therefore you are either less intelligent or haven't thought hard enough!"?
You know how easy that is to think and why our brain gets us to think that way?
No but that is the problem. It's not really a metaphor if it's a dictionary word that has had it's meaning for centuries. It's a word used to describe something.
What you are doing is using an old historical definition for a word that was used in a different context.
A word I use is meaningless if you exclude the other words around it. You exclude the context in order to feel offended by the word.
And you're using your subconscious racial prejudice to look at a word and feel offended by it. When I look at blacklist I think of the colour black and how the colour is darker. Darkness is commonly a negative thing. Thus if I don't want something I put it on a blacklist. Where as the colour white is the brightest option and is something normally associated with positive.
Do you complain when a movie uses darkness to create a scary atmosphere? Would a Slenderman that is white be as scary as a Slenderman that is black to you? No. Because colour is used to trigger different emotional and psychological responses. But this has nothing to do with race. Nowhere did I need to mention or think about race here.
You're choosing to associate a word with a negative when others who don't have these kinds of racial prejudices are able to look at the words context and instantly understand what it means without ever thinking about a race.
Trust me, your word policing is not going to fix a problem with racism. All it does is reveal how you feel when you see a word.
When I see blacklist I'm not thinking about race. When you see blacklist you are. To me that indicates a racist ideology.
Do you feel using the phrase "black market" is wrong? If so then what about "grey market"? "White market" isn't a word that is used so there is no opposing "positive" colour to "black market". So is the phrase still bad to you?
If somehow black market is okay with you then your logic against blacklist makes no sense. And if black market is not okay with you then it also makes no sense logically because grey market is not based on a race.
Interesting how you associate these words with race yet their origins don't relate to race at all but instead a colour.
I don't really agree that if you're in the social majority you can be upset about racism against your empowered majority position... it just doesn't make sense.
That said, if you're white in China/India/Kenya/etc... 100% there is a heap of racism directed at you and I feel for you
I believe you 100% can. If someone's opinion based on solid facts is being dismissed by calling them a "privileged white male" I definitely believe that is very racist. They are making assumptions based on negative stereotypes to dismiss what someone is saying. Even if you don't agree that it is racist you should at least agree it is not productive at all in a conversation. The only objective with a comment like that is to be rude and dismiss them. It's not going to bring anything positive to the conversation. It's not going to help the other side understand how they feel or what they think. All it does is create more divide and more hate.
When someone calls me these names without even knowing my race, gender, or status it's pretty rude. Is it going to make me agree with them more? Is it going to make me support any of their causes more? Nope. It's going to increase my dislike for that "side". And if you get hammered with that enough it is going to create hate.
In my opinion I think the current woke landscape is actually creating more racism. I think it is counter-productive.
Does someone who is vegan yelling and screaming blocking you from getting a burger make you want to join their side? Or would it make you want further hate them and want to oppose them? Would a vegan sitting down and having a no namecalling conversation with you be more effective? I would think so. This is the exact same concept.
Also just because someone is a white male for example absolutely does not imply their status. I think that dismisses how much work someone may have put into life to get to where they are. That person doesn't know how hard they worked to get where they may or may not be, yet they are making that assumption.
Someone’s opinion based on solid fact? So is it a fact or an opinion?
If you view their reply as not productive and they view your statement as not productive... then maybe stop having that discussion until you can both bring more empathy to the table.
If you read the conversation I did stop having discussion with them and told them to stop having a discussion with me.
Facts don't always tell a story or explain the "why". Often times you have to form an opinion based on the facts and that is what you're bringing to the table when discussing stuff. I don't see why I need to explain this concept on a site like this.
The "why" can be more facts but it is not always. Sometimes people create opinions based on facts when a causation is not known.
People also create factually incorrect opinions such as implying police are racist towards black people because they are arrested more. This is them deriving an opinion from a fact about incarcerations. Except the causation is already present, which is that lower income areas simply commit more crimes.
Now I'm not trying to argue about whether you think those facts are correct or not, but I'm using it to illustrate a point. A fact can also be wrong. Maybe the fact was derived from bad research. Opinions and facts can go hand and hand together. I don't know why you're trying to be so binary about it.
I also don't understand how this conversation is productive or is useful in anyway? It seems like we are debating meaningless semantics rather than the heart of the issue.
You clearly aren't out to have a productive conversation. You have an axe to grind on this issue.
I'll take your bait though, see how hard you believe these falsehoods.
Yeah, Police in the US (in some states at least) are racist, now I don't mean individuals necessarily, though I'm sure some are, but institutional (dare I say systemic) racism exists in the system. Incarceration rates are a good correlative bit of evidence, arrest rates, court dismissals for whites at a higher rate than blacks... like take your pick. No evidence (or fact) supports your position at all. Happy for your to bring the data to prove me wrong here.
You can hide behind economics if you like and try to argue "poor people commit more crime" - but then how do you explain incarceration rates of blacks given there are more poor white people than poor black people in the US?
You haven't illustrated any point. Just that you have opinions, with little fact, and seem triggered by people referencing white male privilege.
> I don't really agree that if you're in the social majority you can be upset about racism against your empowered majority position... it just doesn't make sense.
It makes sense for two reasons.
The first is that a huge amount of the "anti-white racism" is directed by "white people" against others nominally in the same group, implying that they aren't actually in the same social group and correspondingly that the targets don't have a majority. As evidence of this, notice that people can be canceled over petty nonsense, e.g. Gina Carano. How could this happen if there was actually a social majority which should nominally be exerting pressure in the opposite direction and winning?
The second is that there are plenty of contexts where the majority doesn't even exist on paper, e.g. only 40% of California is "white" so a "white person" who lives in California is a minority. That state is also the place where a disproportionate amount of the attacks happen. And the same is true of many major US cities, e.g. New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston.
The actual power is in the hands of the elites, so a minority. Just because you happen to be a part of the largest demographic group doesn't mean you hold any power. For example, would you say the same thing about Africa back when it was under white rule?
That's stage-2. I.e. after the "minority" becomes the "majority". Then different excuses and "historic" racism is used to justify persecution against a minority.
> > It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist.
> it is not just not intentionally racist -- there is no way any normal person would construe the term 'blacklist' as racist. it is as logically coherent as banning 'black pudding' for racism. it is purely an arbitrary exercise in power, making others submit to show them that they must.
Exactly this. Addressing one issue does not trivialise everything else. 'Addressing' something that isn't actually one of the issues at all[0] trivialises everything else.
0: And there are plenty of actual issues to pick from!
They said banning one was "as logically coherent as" banning the other, not that one was functionally the same as the other. (But since we're on this tangent, the only black pudding I've encountered was (admittedly dark) red, not black. Also revolting, but supposedly that's normal?)
> But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'?
The inverse solution to this stop calling people with darker skin "Black"?
I kind of agree with what you're saying, but also it isn't true:
- Blacktie
- Black friday
- Blacktop
- Back in black
- Orange is the new black
- Men in black
All of those use black in a positive connotation. In my head black/white list has always been a metaphor for light/no light. As in black list can't see, white list can.
In asian Culture white is often associated with the colour of ghosts / the dead... So it'd get awkward if we keep modifying language to suit cultural references especially as English is a global language and while slavery was(is) a global problem it persists only really in the US as a current popular cultural issue.
In replying to you I've convinced myself at least the solution here can't possibly be to change all of the possible references of black to something else... it verges on new speak.
it is purely an arbitrary exercise in power, making others submit to show them that they must. it is obviously trivial, obviously contentious, and changes literally nothing about the material relations between groups. the entire point is to force you to do something stupid to show you that you don't have a choice.
>But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that?
It's not just a language thing. It's an extremely deeply rooted symbolic system. You can't arbitrarily change it, and even if you did... what improvement does shifting the symbols around yield ? That's just increasing the noise to signal ratio.
Even then, isn't the real problematic part assigning elementary colours to skin tones ? Can't you just try to change that instead of contorting the deepest part of a culture on a Procustean bed ?
Peach-pink people aren’t white, and brown people are not black in the first place. Why do self-styled anti-racists not seem to have any problem with that? Why not start there instead of changing the deep symbolism of the colors black and white?
> It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'?
No. That's how it's always been in European culture and it doesn't have much to do with race. It's probably true of many other cultures as well, although I can't say for sure.
I think there are two slightly different approaches.
Your point is completely correct. As is the other comment here at about night and day. The lists are frequent. And not unique to European cultures.
But it's also not reasonable to say that in our particular culture, meaning as a political and social context.
Because I'm trying to make a bigger point than just race, I could imagine reading a similar things to what you're writing back in the late-C20 saying that 'Man' has been nongendered for centuries and in many cultures and in all kinds of language. Hi wouldn't disagree.
But then the next step: so women shouldn't have been worried about companies wanting to hire businessmen. That just doesn't seem ok.
So I definitely think that 'Black equals bad, white equals good' Has all kinds of historical significance, non racist links, and would not have been considered weird until very recently. But in our context I'm not offended that it would be something we find alternatives for.
> I think addressing one issue does not 'trivialise' everything else.
Yes, it does. On my Twitter I have "racism" and "race" including many other trendy SJW keywords blocked. The reason is I simply don't have the time and energy to tend to every single accusation of racism or whatever-isms is out there. And most these accusations have nothing to do with racism. It's just some bully has found a new target to harass.
I think you're right, there are far too many people trying to do good and being led astray by the self-righteousness of a few. Not in the sense of being brainwashed or being influenced by some external force - like the religious right - but simply by the fact that they can't see through the nonsense the rest of us are talking about.
> Not in the sense of being brainwashed or being influenced by some external force - like the religious right
Oh I don’t know about that. The “religious left” of today looks, acts, and smells a lot like the religious right of the ‘80’s to me. It’s the same instinct that’s being leveraged in people, just righteousness wrapped in a polka-dot cloth rather than a plaid one. Institutions clearly promote “right-thinking” whether it’s banning the use of words, doing mandatory internal critical race theory sessions, coordinated deplatforming, and let’s not even get started on the soft sciences in schooling and the state of what’s called “news”. The other day I skimmed a headline about a librarian burning their copies of books by Trump and Rush Limbaugh. In some ways the sheer weight of secular institutional support for today’s self-righteousness makes the American church of the eighties look like amateur hour.
It’s tokenism and if anything it is detrimental to actual, concrete, transformative improvement. Malcolm X spoke at length about this going back to the early 1960’s. And it hasn’t changed. Condescending tokenizing is a way to avoid anything that would take effort or energy while comforting the narcissist in a warm blanket of moral righteousness. If you look around you’ll see endless tokenism but not much in terms of effective improvements.
I don’t doubt these hall monitors think they’re doing the “right thing” or being a “good person”. But really they’re only exploiting people for their own benefit.
I'm always surprised when someone goes through more effort to oppose something than to accept the PR and build a little trust. We did this in a codebase of ours recently, it really wasn't a big deal to make the change and I don't understand why everyone throws up a big stink about it.
If I'm going to spend my energy on something it seems like there's bigger things to tackle than pushing back against branch renames.
A blacklist-to-blocklist PR may be OK for you, but a master-to-main PR is not OK at all for many others. Slavery is definite evil, but these PRs for branch renaming just went too far.
As someone not a U.S. citizen, the impact of PC is ridiculously huge. I know slavery and how bad it is. It appeared in my culture, and it is still there in some form too. However, the ENGLISH word "master" means not much to me. It is just a multi-purpose symbol, like many other words. As the meaning being a main branch, why bothering the renaming?
You claim that you are just spending your energy on something else, but in reality you are giving up the right to use your own language and to maintain the definition the meaning of a well-understood and frequently-used word.
Personally I'm pretty glad that most projects don't break backwards compatibility in config files across the globe for flavour-of-the-month American politics, but hey, you do you.
> I'm always surprised when someone goes through more effort to oppose something than to accept the PR and build a little trust.
That is why I just ignore or reject such PRs. I do not believe that enabling it is a good idea. It is not my job to improve their context-awareness either.
> There's no point arguing, though, just drag your heels until they get bored and go off on some other crusade.
Language and culture generally moves in one direction.
Hoping to put the genie back in the bottle on "blacklist" and "master" is like wishing you could go back to the 90's when guys in high school would casually toss out "fag" in relation to each other.
You can disagree, and dig your heels in, and pitch a hissy fit, but the world and society is moving on and leaving you behind.
Political correctness run amok! My company has now official guidelines that discourage 'whitelist' and 'blacklist' in new features, but I wonder how long before they make everyone go back and refactor these names.
Git 'master' branch derangement is another example of this BS.
My company has mandated all of this. Change blacklist and whitelist, change the git master branch name, don't use master-slave, there's a list of "racially charged" terms and the replacements we're supposed to use.
It's all a corporate virtue signal mask so they can lay people off and increase exec compensation and still claim to have some moral high ground.
It's amazing how much of the world operates in this manner. People are stupid and think they're acting on the right course by banning names they don't like and encouraging them to take action. And because their moral positions are so thin, they don't want to be held accountable and they want their money back.
I used to work in the real estate space. When these "master-to-main" changes were being discussed for git branch names, a lot of real estate companies announced that they were no longer going to refer to a home's largest bedroom as the "master bedroom", citing that term as "racist", "sexist", and "outdated":
So according to your link and yourself, a graduate degree may encompass both master's and doctoral degrees, which would only serve to obscure the meaning.
Also, I don't think you intended it to be this way, but your inclusion of the pronunciation comes off as condescending.
I only included the pronunciation because you used a version of "graduate" in your original comment that has a different pronunciation and different meaning. (gra-jə-wāt vs. gra-jə-wət)
> a graduate degree may encompass both master's and doctoral degrees, which would only serve to obscure the meaning.
Nope, 99% of the time "graduate degree" == "master's degree". Usually "postgraduate degree" is used to refer to doctoral degrees. "graduate degree" is very common and generally unambiguous.
> Nope, 99% of the time "graduate degree" == "master's degree". Usually "postgraduate degree" is used to refer to doctoral degrees.
I've never seen people use the terms this way, and every source I find confirms what I have consistently seen in use, that “graduate degree” and “post-graduate degree” are synonyms that refer to academic (usually not professional, though that varies by context) degrees which typically require a preceding degree of bachelor’s or higher.
>I only included the pronunciation because you used a version of "graduate" in your original comment that has a different pronunciation and different meaning.
You should really learn about linguistic morphology.
Yes, a master/slave relationship in technology. Don't drop the context to support policing words. Context very much matters when dealing with words yet for some reason the context is dropped in order to make it seem like a word is being used in an offensive way. Except it's not, you're just forgetting the context to make it that way.
If a process is directly commanding and telling another process what to do I don't see how calling it a master is wrong? It is one of it's definitions.
There is an open source tool that randomly terminates EC2 instances in the interest of chaos engineering called "chaos monkey".
What would you think if the tool was called "concentration camp executioner"?
You might think I'm making an extreme example to make a point, and I am - you would have a viscerally emotional reaction and recognize that the accuracy of a word does not offset the negative connotations associated with it.
I use the word "gypped" in my vocabulary. It never occurred to me that it is a derogatory term towards gypsies. Until very recently, "jewed" was a perfectly appropriate term to use in professional contexts with the same meaning.
The definition of a word is not relevant to the reasons why people are asking for terms like master/slave to exit our ubiquitous technical vocabulary.
Honestly that it's a stupid comparison. In one case you're talking about an animal that is chaotic. Monkeys by nature are pretty wild and chaotic animal so that word makes sense.
Your example doesn't make sense. Why would a tool be called that? You're describing a specific tragic event in event where as a monkey is.... a monkey....
Just stop. Your logic makes zero sense. Do not try and compare an animal to a historically tragic event to justify word policing. That is absolutely insane and is incredibly disrespectful. Your use of tragedies to justify your woke word policing is quite frankly disgusting.
The fact that you can't explain how it makes sense without comparing it to some random tragedy is no better than the people who call everyone with a conservative view a "nazi". Just knock it off.
Chaos monkey sounds completely fine and I can't see how any sane non-racist person would associate that with a black person. If that is what you are doing, I think you need to do some self-reflection on what that says about your own subconscious racist biases.
> Do not try and compare an animal to a historically tragic event to justify word policing. Your use of tragedies to justify your woke word policing is quite frankly disgusting.
deanCommie was trying to get you to see that SLAVERY was also a historically tragic event that people are reminded of when they see terminology like master/slave.
> Chaos monkey sounds completely fine and I can't see how any sane non-racist person would associate that with a black person.
They weren't trying to say that. This whole discussion is master/slave. This is precisely the point - chaos monkey is a fine neutral term that describes what is needed without any negative connotations. "Concentration camp guard" isn't.
Primary/replica is a fine neutral term. "Master/slave" aren't.
Honestly, your outrage about the comparison to concentration camps exactly proves the point that language matters regardless of intent.
What I really have to wonder about specifically this instance of political correctness was, how many people were honestly and truly offended by the term 'blacklist' or 'whitelist' before some lignustics, sociology, whatever professer sat down and figured out it should be offensive and told people to be offended?
I feel like this about many attempts to make language politically correct, but I really do wonder, was there actually anyone out there sitting there being offended by this usage of those words before someone told them they should be?
Like was there actually someone sitting there, using an app, seen the term blacklist and immediately started thinking it was an insult to them?
> Like was there actually someone sitting there, using an app, seen the term blacklist and immediately started thinking it was an insult to them?
My belief is absolutely not. It comes from an ideology that ascribes simple moralistic explanations to things. “This word has man in it so it must mean it excludes women”. “The word ‘master’ reminds people of slavery”, etc.
Good luck speaking out “publicly” about it in the modern corporate environment. You have to not just accept it as true but actively parrot its talking points. Everyone has to be a believer. That’s how the whole thing works.
I don't want to go on too much, I know this topic can be rather divisive and people get sort of heated about it but I really think in many cases things like the black/white list changes are counterproductive.
There are actual race issues genuinely affecting people every day. Making a big deal out of what are essentially non-issues i'd be willing to bet 99% of people never think about or genuinely care about is just going to make the average person roll their eyes and not bother caring.
Which again, is counterproductive. If you want the average person to care about the actual systemic issues, violence and actual racial oppression, forcing them to adjust their language and take time to address issues like the gp's comment is not the way to do it.
Policing every word people say and making them feel guilty for using the wrong ones will not make them care, if anything it's going to make people who are otherwise neutral, who would maybe care, turn hostile.
It pushes people to extremes and leads to places like 8chan or Parler, where people take their language to utter extremes and the opposite extreme where people are finding offense in nearly every little thing.
Do a thought experiment and imagine that there was a negatively tinted term in software engineering with %YOURCOUNTRY% or %YOURNATIONALITY% or %YOURPHENOTYPICTRAIT% in the name. E.g., if you’re from the US, “American pointer dereference” or something like that. (A bit far-fetched; to really resonate the experiment should include some invented cultural baggage which is difficult to do on the spot.)
I want to think I personally wouldn’t be insecure enough to be concerned by something like that, but I have to agree that some might feel uncomfortable even if the intent behind that term was benign.
Whether getting rid of that term entirely is worth it or not is another question (how far should we go? do we spend human-months rewriting all Git histories to replace this term with an alternative currently in fashion? what if it changes again? etc.), but just stopping using it in new codebases might be relatively low-effort.
> A bit far-fetched; to really resonate the experiment should include some invented cultural baggage which is difficult to do on the spot.)
I'll give you a concrete example from the world of finance. In options there are two main forms of exercise. You can have options which can be exercised at expiry and options that can be exercised at any point.[1] When the economist Paul Samuelson started to work on Wall street he was told that he would never truly be able to understand options because he was American and therefore the maths would be too complicated for his mind[2]. So when he came up with the first pricing model that could handle warrants that exercise at any point he named the simple case (at expiry) "European" and the complex case "American" as a dig at his detractors. For that reason to this day we have European and American styles of option exercise.[3]
[1]You can also have options that can be exercised on a given set of dates which are sort of a half-way house but that is a more exotic and recent phenomenon. It is called "Bermudan" because Bermuda is in the ocean between Europe and America.
[2]When I worked in finance (2000-2008) some of this bias still existed. Our swaps desk was almost entirely French.
Seems relevant. How did you feel about that term? Did it trigger slight unease deep down?
I do suspect that the fact that the US doesn’t have a recent history of being oppressed might discount it a little (if one is considered a dominant power, one can afford the luxury of taking some mild negging in stride).
On the other hand, in case of e.g. “blacklist” — it meaning a list of people or entities to deny service — color of skin being unalienable phenotypical trait — history of black skin color used as basis for discrimination and oppression (and indeed denial of service) not long ago (or even now) — it could be a little trickier.
I have no personal experience with either case, though, so who am I to judge.
I don't really have a credible opinion on this topic. That said there are lots of examples of this type of thing in language. Eg in ancient Rome they used to think left-handedness was unnatural, so to this day there are negative words like "Sinister" which literally in Latin means "left" and positive words (dextrous, dexterity etc) which derive from "dexter" which is Latin for "right". Also "adroit" in English means "able" where "a droit" in French means "to the right". And "gauche" means clumsy or lacking grace in English whereas in French it means "left"
Likewise "hysterical" derives from "hyster" (Uterus) and stems from the idea that the female reproductive system made women mad and incapable.
I feel like one of the things that people miss often in discussing these topics is the asymmetry of power. If you're one of the people who has historically been discriminated against you may well have different feelings from people who has historically doing the discriminating.
We should listen to each other more and if these terms are a barrier then there really is no harm to using other terms. I think using friendly language is the least I can do from the point of view of being courteous to others.
Nice examples. On one hand, once etymology of a word is old enough, it becomes forgotten and not many people are offended; on the other hand, once that etymology is brought to light, continuing to use that word may become an ethically questionable choice. That said, the pushback against “master” and “blacklist” seems related not to etymology (origins of those words don’t involve race or slavery) but to connotations acquired afterwards.
> We should listen to each other more and if these terms are a barrier then there really is no harm to using other terms.
Agreed.
I’m personally torn on this issue. On one hand, the fact that these words rub people wrong is an indicator of a deeper problem—in an ideal world, no one would take a term personally because they’d know it denotes a technical concept and isn’t intended to put anyone down; on the other hand, it’s not really that difficult to stop using some terms in new codebases.
On one hand, we should get input from those directly affected by this; on the other hand, those affected may choose to stay silent despite possible discomfort and treat it as a problem with their insecurities rather than the industry.
Yeah, you know what, i've personally experienced that more than once, it's not politically correct to say, but i'm not american so... and it happened in Richmond so meh...
I've also met enough people from different places in the world to understand it happens to everybody for different reasons. Hell there's racism in the world I bet a lot of people don't even realize is an issue. An old Iranian coworker and a chinese coworker of mine hated eachother, for absolutely no reason other than racism.
I also live in a place where the prevalent racism isn't the black/white stuff that goes on in america and where generally black and white people get along reasonably well.
You're right, it's about culture and perspective.
And that's what bugs me most about PC culture. It doesn't take into account culture and perspective. It doesn't take into account the fact that prejudice and racism depend heavily on where you are exactly in the world and it doesn't take into account the fact that a good majority of the things PC culture would consider racist isn't.
All I know is, i've had a lot of great conversations that started with me or someone else asking.
'Hey, where are you from?'
I can't think of one time when either me or someone else was offended by this yet...
> All I know is, i've had a lot of great conversations that started with me or someone else asking.
> 'Hey, where are you from?'
Once in Hong Kong I asked a taxi driver of Indian descent where he’s from, and felt awkward when he responded “Hong Kong”.
This was a failure of applying the golden rule on my part, as I hate when others ask me that.
I’m personally starting to think that, when strangers get together, crowds where there’s less profiling going on are where more interesting conversations tend to happen—and I really tend to take “where are you from?” as a fundamental profiling question (some don’t use it this way, but too many do).
At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, the individual self-confidence that allows one to easily respond “yeah I might look X but I’m actually Y, yadda yadda” is also a great thing.
Well, "beta releases" never for one moment reminded me of my failures in dating or leadership.
But, to tangentially riff on your point, white straight cis males could never be recognized as even being capable of having such feelings, even if they had them. Only systematically oppressed peoples can feel that way, so it is said.
I believe for this experiment to be fair it requires an inborn, unalienable physical trait with particular cultural baggage that resonates with the negative connotation of the term. This combination isn’t that easy to come by, and might be hard to invent for those unaffected. “Beta” is unlikely to qualify (not unalienable); “master branch” maybe not (?); “blacklist” is debatable. Something involving country of origin/nationality/skin color might be it though (if the controversial cultural baggage condition is satisfied).
"Contributed to [x] open source projects, having 95% of my [y] pull requests accepted" is becoming common on resumes at the younger end of the labor market. This kind of PR is easy to automate and serves to boost those numbers on the resume. They don't even have to care about the issue at all, it can simply be a way to market themselves with little effort.
I’ve also had people spam “approvals” on some projects I maintain to pad their stats. Incredibly annoying to get 100+ notifications for that. I reported one particularly bad offender to GH and they were banned for a day, at least. Their profile readme still brags about how active they are.
Black list and its opposite, white list, associate black with bad and white with good.
The usage of black in “black box” means opaque, not bad.
So these aren’t the same.
I had never thought about the connotations of blacklist and whitelist before it was pointed out to me. In retrospect, blacklist and whitelist are unnatural meanings of the words black and white, and blocklist and allowlist make much more sense.
Consequently, I changed the code I’m responsible for at my company to use block and allow.
I don’t see the association as particularly unnatural: black = dark = scary because we cannot see, and white = light = not scary because we can see. The use of the term ‘black’ as a negative modifier predates its use as a descriptor for race.
This is the problem. People will choose to ignore context and other grammatical history because of their own personal incorrect views.
It's not like the word "black" is just used with blacklist. We also use it in other places like black market, black hat, and black site. None of these are related to black people, but instead all relate to a shady dark/scary side of things like you mentioned.
When someone pictures a black market they are not thinking something that looks bright and colourful, they are thinking something that is dark and maybe grungy/sketchy looking.
The word policing is something I am really getting sick of.
> None of these are related to black people, but instead all relate to a shady dark/scary side of things like you mentioned.
Isn't it the other way around though? Black people skin is not of color black as in actual black. And white people skin is certainly not white.
It's the naming of skin tone that is sloppy and figurative. While the association of white with light/visibility and black with darkness/unknown is natural.
Yes, a lot of people would identify as a "black" person, but their skin colour would probably more accurately be called "brown". Personally I think the more correct term is African-American, but people choose to be offended by "black" when used in words even though it relates more to the colour than a skin colour like you said.
Overall I think the logic of opposing words like "blacklist" just falls apart logically in multiple areas and I think your explanation is a good example of why.
The oreo itself may not be racist, but it most definitely is associated with racism because of its colors. So I would caution you in using it as an analogy; it may be why your post was flagged.
What? I have never in my life heard of a damn cookie being called racist. That is insane. I am not going to be caution in the least with using that anaology. I am using a cookie to talk about how ridiculous things are and you're telling me a cookie is offensive. That is insane.
Please do not misconstrue what I have said. The term "oreo" has a long history of being used as a racist epithet. There is nothing wrong with using it as an analogy, but in a discussion on racism, it might be better to pick a cookie with a similar color scheme that does not already have racist connotations, such as a Moon Pie. You are, of course, free to use whatever analogy you feel best expresses your point.
Interesting, I will continue to use it as I think it still demonstrates the point. I have never in my life heard of a cookie being used in a racist way. I've heard crackers being used in racist ways though.
I use blacklist and whitelist. These ideas are a part of my consciousness. The definitions for these words as a result of this change are a conscious choice, not some accidental result of the nature of the words themselves.
I don't use it to mean "black" or "white." I use it to mean things that aren't black or white. Blocklist and allowlist don't exist because they are things. I don't think about the "Black" and "White" in these words. I think about what they mean to people. This is why you don't hear that many people complain that the use of these words in games has changed or changed. The people complaining, I think, are the people who have changed the way they think about these words.
I haven't read heavily into this debate so this comes from a position of ignorance of the arguments. Feel free to link me to a reference if this has been analyzed along these lines already, I would like to learn. The convention seem to me to follow several similar motifs from the sciences.
Black holes do not allow matter to escape and white holes are theoretical constructs that admit matter to the universe.
The color Black is the lack of visible light and white is considered to be the color of "all" light together.
In all cases discussed, black correlates to absence and white to admission or presence. Now I guess it could be asserted that these terms are also racially tinged but again I am not aware of any sources making those assertations. Feel free to link me.
I agree, if I was writing new software, I would probably use a more descriptive term if and where possible, e.g. blocklists instead of blacklists, it is a good practice to use descriptive names anyway.
I don't plan to edit and rename things within my existing software as it would add needless churn, risk, and the risk-benefit analysis just doesn't support it for me. Not saying that my analysis is the same for everyone else.
It seems we are using black for bad and white for good in English, which is strange since we had never used them before. Also, I feel like blocking and allowing makes sense when it comes to language, because bad and white mean the same. But when it comes to code, which the rest of the world uses black to mean bad and white to mean good, I don't know if that makes sense.
I think that language goes back eons. I think the black/white metaphor is employed in the book of Genesis/B'reshith for instance. People have been scared of the dark for more of human history than not. Nighttime is black, when things putrefy they turn black. Uncorrupted snow is white. The examples from nature are legion. What’s weird is using these terms for people.
Maybe the more sensible way to address the language issue is to stop calling people “black” and “white”. Why don’t we focus the scorching blast of social condemnation in that direction? The colors are silly classifications for people’s heredity or skin tone. Seems like the more elegant fix. Even today using the terms black and white can be “problematic” - some people don’t like being referred to as a black man by the wrong person, many white people consider “white boy” to be a racial epithet. So if we’re doing language surgery, let’s just ditch that part of the language and stop obsessing over the natural metaphors from time immemorial.
There was actually debate about this in the black activist community in the mid-late 60s. The more common term was 'negro' then, you can see it in earlier MLK writings, League of Negro Voters, etc. Stokely Carmichael was a leading voice in advocating for 'black'.
The only comment in this entire thread that actually attacks the root of the problem and offers THE solution.
A nonsensical "racial" hierarchy based on nominal colours is the SOURCE of the problem.
For what it's worth, the labels "white" and "black" were NOT chosen randomly by the architects of racial hierarchy (see Bacon's rebellion).
It was a very effective use of symbolism, to assign and label one part of humanity as the untermensch, and thus justify their enslavement and exploitation.
Changing branch names and policing language is akin to bandaid on a festering wound.
> It reminded me of an iconic BBC interview with Muhammad Ali in 1971 where he recalled that all the positive things he grew up with were white, from White Cloud tissue paper to the White House, while all the negative things, from the bad luck of a black cat to the term blackmail, were black. Nearly 50 years later, that linguistic measuring stick is alive and well.
He's right. Lots of English therms equate black with bad and white with good. Blacklist and whitelist fit into that pattern, and changing it takes a small step in the other direction.
Blacklist's etymology isn't racist, but if black folks prefer that we use something else, and something as similar as blocklist is there and easy to use, it seems like an easy fix.
> Blacklist's etymology isn't racist, but if black folks prefer that we use something else, and something as similar as blocklist is there and easy to use, it seems like an easy fix.
Which black “folks” prefer the term “blocklist”? Black people are not a monolith. It seems like you’re just injecting an assumption of what certain people prefer.
Having been at now 3 different orgs implementing the [blacklist->blocklist, slave->replica, etc] routine, it’s always done for the same reason: the unquestionable brand of modern identity politics, diversity & inclusion, whatever you want to call it that is infecting pretty much every tech company (and indeed pretty much every company in general).
It’s an ideology that treats races as monolithic and only recognizes a certain set of opinions as valid. Racial blindness is implicit racism, we need to implement affirmative action policies over the dimensions of the 4-tuple (sexuality, cis/trans, rage, gender) - these are the types of beliefs they enforce.
I'm going to be blunt - these types of anecdotes are just plain stupid. It's people picking and choosing examples to support their desired narrative, and just ignoring anything that contradicts it. There are just as many "bad" things in English that are also white - white elephant, white ant, whitewash, white whale. Why didn't he mention those?
The colour comparisons are also dumb, because "black" skin is actually more like dark brown and "white" skin isn't white at all, unless you're albino or incredibly sick (which again, points to how stupid it is to make comparisons like "white==good").
No, of course not. Look at his list. A "white whale" is something you especially DO want. "White washing" is making something bad look good by covering it in white. A white elephant is something so precious that it's inconvenient. The only word on that list that makes a white thing actively bad is obscure Australian political slang: white ant.
Meanwhile, I can just go black sheep, black magic, black market, black mark, blackmail, black hand, blackball, black mood...
> A "white whale" is something you especially DO want. "White washing" is making something bad look good by covering it in white. A white elephant is something so precious that it's inconvenient. The only word on that list that makes a white thing actively bad is obscure Australian political slang: white ant.
The white whale was an aberration, a freak of nature (just like a black sheep). White-washing has indisputably negative connotations. A white elephant is something that is incredibly expensive but fails to deliver any value.
> Meanwhile, I can just go black sheep, black magic, black market, black mark, blackmail, black hand, blackball, black mood...
I can play this game all day, too. "White as a sheet", "deathly white", "bleed someone white", "wave a white flag", "white feather". But again, none of this has any relevance whatsoever because white people aren't literally white and black people aren't literally black. We know racism exists, you don't need to manufacture some supposed linguistic association to prove it.
Yes, master could mean master copy, but that analogy falls apart quickly. Obviously it's not master/slave (I don't even know what a slave branch would mean). But that doesn't mean it's a good name. And not being a good name doesn't mean we should change it everywhere (because change has a cost that must be weighed).
Blacklist and Whitelist are not 'unnatural' just the opposite, that's why we use terms, because they are natural. 'Darkness' is after all 'opaque', at night we can't see, 'light' is one of the most ancient metaphors for knowledge etc..
It just so happens that it might not map to skin colour very well, but I don't think it's appropriate to change them because there is no connotation.
I buy that in some cases, there is language that can affect people and perception, just not in this case.
> It just so happens that it might not map to skin colour very well
Personally I think it's the skintone names that are weird. White to mean a certain shade of pinkish beige... Black to mean a whole range from beige to brown to dark blueish brown.
Our brains are very good at differenciating skintones, unlike shades of cyan for example. But for some reason the skin tones names are caricatures.
Blocklist to me means a list of blocks, like blocks on a disk. I am not a fan of using it as a replacement for blacklist.
I am in favor of denylist, though. I have never liked blacklist as far as I remember. I could never remember whether black means let it through or stop it.
I get similarly confused with "in the red" and "in the black" - which one means I'm losing money?
Don't even get me started on the CIA's black phones (which are green) and red phones (which are black). At least I think I got that right.
>I had never thought about the connotations of blacklist and whitelist before it was pointed out to me. In retrospect, blacklist and whitelist are unnatural meanings of the words black and white, and blocklist and allowlist make much more sense.
This is everyone's story with these words. This movement was not driven by POC taking issue with the word "blacklist". It started with some white dude's shower thought that because "blacklist" was a negative thing, and because "black" also can refer to skin color, that the term was thus racist [1]. Then a bunch of other white dudes ([2]) were like "oh yeah for sure that makes so much sense" and here we are--everyone goes along with it because they (rather patronizingly) think that someone else will be offended.
The word "blacklist" is many hundreds of years old. It does not have a racial origin. It's just a word. Nobody actually makes the association between "blacklist" and "black people" unless you tell them to! Our brains aren't nearly so stupid!
In China, the color white represents death. Policing language like this is insane. Maybe just stop using colors to refer to people. I don’t see Asians standing up for the color yellow or asking for yellow traffic lights to be changed because of negative connotations with driving (that’s probably going to end up in a comedian’s routine by EOY - I release it under GPL ;).
Point being, what’s easier to fix?? Color associations with people or overturning thousands of timeless metaphors across many cultures?
A lot of words that we use are arbitrary anyway. I respect people's preferences for their style of communication, but let's stop pretending that things like blacklist and whitelist are difficult to understand.
Funny thing is, since nobody ever submits PRs to change it in the opposite direction, even one person going around on GitHub would be virtually guaranteed to eventually change all of them.
I don't know how radio stations handle "Alice's Restaurant" since I listen to my own copy but I did see Arlo Guthrie sing it live at a concert when he was in town a few years back. When the song got near the slur, he stopped playing for bit and went off on a short tangent before picking the song up after the slur. It's his song so I doubt anyone minded him changing how he performs it. The change felt a lot more natural than simply bleeping or cutting the audio.
There's a distinct difference between trying to make things less accidentally discriminatory or exclusionary.. and banning an entire channel in an often un-appealable way (which can in many cases end up disabling peoples personal google accounts etc as well).
It wasn't un-appealable. They restored it within 24 hours per the article.
Please don't hyperbolize about this stuff. If you want people to take you seriously about real censorship you need to not fly off the handle with accidents (which have ALWAYS been with us, c.f. buttbuttination).
I don't know the details of this particular case, but it's not a hyperbole.
Another commenter here pointed out the Markiplier case. They banned entire Google accounts for spamming emotes in YouTube chat and those bans were un-appealable. They unbanned the accounts only after the public outrage on Twitter.
Besides, people don't take it seriously anyway, because they actually agree with real censorship and they dismiss it with the "private company" argument.
> I don't know the details of this particular case, but it's not a hyperbole.
The details of this particular case were in the linked article. And they show that this wasn't unfixable or unappealable or otherwise beyond relief. It was a fuckup and they fixed it.
Characterizing it "un-appealable" is hyperbolic by definition. It's not helpful. And it happens almost every time something like this comes up, and people like you end up redirecting to something else, like that emote spam thing. And per your text it seems like that was resolved via appeal too!
It's just very tiresome to see everyone screaming so loud about something that doesn't seem like a big deal. I mean, if they really wanted to be censoring you, don't you think they'd come after threads like this first?
Just make a call. Is "blacklist" worth keeping? I've spent 25 years working in security, "blacklist" is a pretty core part of the lingo, and: fuck it; "blocklist" is just as good. But other people will answer for more-inclusive alternatives to "MITM", and I'm probably not going to change that.
At least 50% of the drama about these language shifts comes from people who can't handle making decisions that make people unhappy. Just put your big kid pants on, make a decision, and deal with the response, without hyperventilating about "cancellation".
Following the example of trend-setting hip SV companies like Twitter ( https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/twitter-drop...) our BigCo has recently issued a policy, and those terms have been quicky replaced everywhere accordingly. It isn't a trend, it is already happened reality.
In addition to that, the "Social Justice 2.0" system has added a negative mark to the commenter's IP address, lowered his credit score and increased the mortgage payment's social justice tax by 200 bucks that will go to support the underrepresented minorities (after paying the private jet bills for the minorities fund's manager).
> Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything?
Maybe the advertisers are doing this on purpose? Deep down they know they would lose almost nothing by pulling from those platforms for a short period of time (the quality of online advertising has been in doubt for a long time), while pleasing the vocal minority.
At the same time, by playing moves like this would absolutely bring Google/Youtube to their knees, making it clear who is paying the bill.
> Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything?
They can't, because there were a number of high-profile media storms blaming companies for advertising on YouTube when some of the content was distasteful by chance (like videos by terrorists). It's great that you're an adult about it, but the media and media consumers love getting upset over things like this. Advertisers used to be more accepting of YouTube as a platform instead of a curator of content, until the public outcry against it. This is why we can't have nice things.
>can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything?
This is what I don't understand. If my memory serves, the whole demonetization debacle started when some activists at a newspaper wrote an article about big brands having ads on Alex Jones' content, in which they reached out to the brands and asked "are you happy with your content being seen next to XYZ?"[1][2] It struck me as just another article in a long list (that continues to today) where a legacy media giant lashes out at new media because they're worried about ad revenue being taken from them, the 'rightful' recipients.
If people are watching a video, regardless of the content, they are almost certainly there because they enjoy that content. Isn't this the point of all advertising; you want your brand on display when someone is enjoying something to (sub-consciously?) associate your brand with the enjoyment the viewer is experiencing? I wonder if there is a case to be made for loss of earnings for shareholders if the pool of eyeballs seeing their brands messaging is continually diluted.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the brands don't want their advertising funds to go to an organization they have moral disagreements with, but that certainly hasn't stopped them in the past. Is the income from a washing machine sale any less valuable if it comes from someone not politically aligned with you, or if they saw it while browsing a porn site? (I'm not interested in discussing Alex Jones). It seems to boil down to not wanting to be 'cancelled' and have the twitter-mob making waves and threatening boycotts.
Or maybe cancel/ban chess, as it promotes racial differences and dispute settling by the means of aggression/opponent termination. A harmonized/normalized society may not see the color differences or military-style subordination with royal elites hiding behind sacrificial peasants.
At least make all figure look alike, gender-less and class-less and color them in random rainbow colors.
There are way too many videos for manual review and the relatively rare false positive (one high profile case every few months vs how many videos uploaded every day?) is worth the gain in efficiency. But there should certainly be a better manual review process once the AI messes up.
Perhaps this is true - it's quite plausible that there are too many videos uploaded to YouTube for any manual review to scale in a cost-efficient manner.
However to me this does not negate YouTube's good-faith responsibility to clarify what kind of product they are and what they intend to do with their service as the years go by. These mistakes are extremely costly and potentially offensive to the end user, no matter how rare they may be in daily practice.
YouTube made very foolhardy decisions to encourage the ingestion of any and all video content from just about all kinds of people. This had the impact of normalizing video content production practices, giving AI-directed content moderation a false sense of success in its early days of deployment. As content has grown more complex and nuanced on these platforms, the AI systems deployed have miserably failed to accommodate these changes in the ecosystem. It's all in an (IMO) futile effort for YouTube to make good on their reckless company roadmap without specific people having to take personal responsibility for their blunder.
There are way more than one rare false positive per month. These cases are so frequent they usually aren’t even considered news anymore. A few months ago some creators tried to organize but I’ve not heard anything from that effort recently. Google isn’t a government, there isn’t much you can demand from them. They aren’t accountable to you.
> Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything?
Would be great but it's never happening. They'll continue shaping the internet by threatening to pull support unless everything is changed to match their sensibilities.
When they don't incorporate quick banning they get piled on by a mob for letting this or that bad person on their platform. And it's near impossible to monitor all of Youtube just with content moderators.
That’s the perception - but usually it’s at most a few hundred busybodies on Twitter, out of Google’s billions of users.
People just need to start ignoring these people. They are a tiny minority of people. (It just so happens that seemingly half of them are journalists at the nation’s biggest newspapers.)
NYT in the end though, is just one big blog, owned by a group with their own interests. Only when their interests line up with those of Google and Facebooks owners would they work in tandem.
The solution for those wanting unfettered culture in the Information Age, not beholden to big finance and big techs whims, remains free and distributed software, such as running your own blogs, peertube, etc
An opaque algorithm could be unknown but consistent and thus learnable. YouTube is also nebulous, in that it is fuzzy and inconsistent; what is allowed on one channel may ban another.
Do we really need to split hairs like this? The algorithms aren't completely opaque, as they have been trained on a set of representative inputs, and are continuously monitored. They are based on neural networks, presumably, with weights inspectable by the engineers deploying the model. So it is more "nebulous" and not completely opaque.
We do, because in terms of writing english black boxes are opaque by their very nature. OP could remove "black boxes" to make the sentence correct.
You can't actually see inside a black box. That's why it's a "black box". Sure you can probe it, but that's not the same as being "nebulous", a thing you can actually see through sometimes. I expect better of HN.
Did you really imagine that the physical characteristics of a nebula where what the comment referred to? Black boxes that are mostly dust and ionized gasses? Black boxes that last 3-4 million years? Black boxes that span up to 10 astronomical units across?
Youtube doesn't need stupid black boxes to make stupid decisions; look at their recent banning of a satirical Pewdiepie music video, for allegedly encouraging harassment. (It was a joke aimed at a nursery rhyme channel, how do you harass a nursery rhyme channel?)
Their algorithms seem to be looking for the words "black" and "white". I posted a comment to a YT video just today describing my daughter's experiences in high school, the school's recent heavy emphasis on black lives matter (the topic has crept into History, Cooking, Math, and even Chemistry) and the kids, including the few black kids at the school, think it's excessive. The comment disappeared when I refreshed. I reposted (have learned to always cmd-C), and it was taken down again. So I substituted "bite" for white, "back" for black, and this time it stayed up. Ridiculous and counter-productive, in my opinion.
He doesn’t know why his podcast was flagged. He mentions a few possibilities-one of which is the black and white thing, which would be a mistake. It’s notable how guarded his speech is, as though he might say something else verboten.
I’ve watched hundreds of chess videos on YouTube and never heard of one getting flagged until now.
Amadgator is a one of the top chess youtubers, after carlson and hikaru. They should have a human-check placed by channel size - if for nothing else just to not get bad PR like this.
ML absolutely can, if you bother to implement it that way. And non-ML systems can be just as opaque. The problem isn't ML per se, it's lazy organisations that don't care.
Not really. The limitation is mostly in the training set. If you train an ML algo on a set of videos that you either banned or didn't, sure, when you run that in prod all you'll get out of it is "ban or no". But if the training dataset includes a ban reason, then the inferences will include reasons too.
What is opaque is how the algo decided the thing was violating the policy.
That applies to supervised learning. For unsupervised learning, you can still do this by requiring a valid rationale as part of the "win condition".
There's a difference between "we can't tell you exactly why X was classified as it was", and "this phrase was classified as bad". Here, YT knows exactly what triggered the issue and can review the decision.
Delegating prosecution of possible hate speech to commercial entities was always going to be bad.
Youtube is essentially a public forum with audience of entire countries, where the people who run it choose what gets amplified, what gets shunned and what get outright blocked.
Who would be happy with a private entity deciding the future mindsets at this scale?
That is it exactly what I’ve been saying about twitterführer Dorsey ever since he blocked the NY Post. Though in his case he went so overboard with banning and blocking everyone with a viewpoint he didn’t agree with that he made all the other world leaders take notice and be concerned that they could get blocked just as easily. I expect that after the next G7 summit we will start to see the social media companies broken up and/or regulated, or countries may just bleed them with fines to enable new players to get a foothold.
What’s funny is how this shows how bad poor algorithms can be at scale. Even with human intervention.
These cases have lots of exposure and people who notice. So the real QA is in these edge cases where customers find bugs. I worry about how not so visible algorithms.
I had a company market to me about sentiment analysis. I asked their accuracy and they answered that they can’t actually test but their training model has x%. So to make decisions accordingly. But then I had coworkers doing stuff like what percent had what sentiment vs the other with no assumptions.
I think the problem is people are kind of bad with probabilities so something either is or isn’t. And I seem to witness a gulf where there are people who kind of understand and then people who don’t but trust the output.
Again with the lies. Youtube did _not_ block agad's videos for racial slurs... "Experts suspect" that may have been the reason youtube blocked the video(s). Youtube didn't say why.
Lots of talk about false positives. As a human, when dealing with fuzzy logic, I like to focus on recognizing when something is wrong to reduce false positives.
Maybe Google should put more effort in training AIs to recognize when they don't know instead of shoehorning an answer.
An analogy is I would expect a non-stupid human who has never seen a screw before, but trained to work with hammering nails to quickly recognize something is wrong the first time they're presented with a screw and not attempt to hammer it flush.
YouTube should not be blocking any channels or taking down videos in all but the most egregious circumstances. These companies are absolutely out of control and have been for a while.
Their either needs to be competition for Youtube or they need to face regulation. You can't have it both ways. The system does not work without one or the other.
There already are competitors to YouTube, and technically there's nothing stopping anyone from making their own video hosting site. Except overwhelming first-mover advantage and network effects, of course.
I wonder if this could be manipulated the way redditors used to manipulate Google image by posting 'this is a house' with an image of a potato and after enough upvotes, the potato would appear first if you searched house on Google image.
What if people start publishing hate speech but replace the hateful words by, say, 'Alphabet' ?
Will the AI learn that Alphabet is a hateful word ?
Surely someone with enough resource should be able to do that.
good idea but no need for that: The word 'Google' is increasingly so loaded with hatred against it, that in the future the algorithm will just ban the whole mother company.
It should be a criminal act to ban someone from your platform without pointing exactly to why they were banned. "Oh but we can't expose details of our ban process for people to game" Bullshit. They just don't want to have to answer to anyone for cutting them off.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say criminal offense, but when your platform is a monopoly, maybe additional regs would be required. I still think in old-school Internet or even BBS terms - if I run the forum, I can boot you. But that’s where there was a marketplace of forums.
> "Oh but we can't expose details of our ban process for people to game" Bullshit.
Exactly. If that were the reason, they should also make the rules of the platform secret, since making the rules public will result in people "gaming" (aka "acting in accordance with") them.
the chess is a very aggressive game of premediated threats and attacks with the goal to achieve dominance and control over another player. It fosters individualism and combativeness instead of teamwork and collaboration. I think it should be age restricted like say alcohol and driving.
Agadmator’s channel is truly a gem. He provides excellent analysis of interesting games and includes some great dives into chess history as well. I hope google gives an adequate explanation for this and makes sure it doesn’t happen again (not holding my breath)
I know I've got an audio plugin (AU/VST) called Bit Shift Gain, because it applies the exact gain changes required to just bit-shift the exponent of the floating point value one bit without touching the mantissa. It's a handy plugin for clean gain changes (completely reversible without loss so long as you're gain boosting, not clipping, and then cutting again).
I can't say its name on youtube on my own channel, 'cos YouTube thinks I'm saying something else. (not sure what would happen if I kept on doing it. Maybe they would start sending me apprentice Nazi traffic :D )
are there any mirrors to youtube? i tried to search this but nothing promising showed up. i think this might be due to the sheer size of the video site. but is there a site that saves the newest videos for the last 3 days?
So, assuming YouTube makes some manual adjustments to their algorithm to not flag/ban chess content, I wonder if actual hate speech will start pretending to be chess content in order to avoid detection.
Isn't this old? We were just talking about this very problem seven months ago. It's hard to believe Youtube didn't put in some hack or retrained for chess to avoid this high profile embarrassment in seven months.
From a quick read: last June, the channel was banned for “harmful and dangerous” content. The ban was removed in under 24 hours. YouTube has not confirmed the reason. And yet:
> Experts suspect that it was the usage of words like "black" and "white" that confused the Yutube's AI filters.
Well, if experts said it, it just be true! The experiment they ran is speculative as best and the article just ran with it as absolute fact. If the filter was caused by use of “black” and “white” wouldn’t every chess channel fall victim to it? The filter isn’t new, why was it triggered once last June?
A lot of questions raised and an article that has no interest in answering them. It’s credited to “Buzz Staff”… I think it’s always suspect when no one wants to attach their name to something they wrote. A smell of clickbait running all the way through this one.