Agreed - the lesson here is platforms like YouTube have a lot more control than most assume. An easy to use, censorship resistant, video host seems needed.
> An easy to use, censorship resistant, video host seems needed.
Are you sure? It sounds nice, but I think in practice it would be overrun with quacks selling herbal remedies that claim to make your boobs bigger, just like email. So instead of censorship being built-in, you get censorship tacked on after-the-fact. In the world of search engines, bad content drives out good.
Alternatively, you have a dumb pipe that takes care of hosting video without trying to host things like comments or recommendations, so even if you upload spam nobody actually sees it unless they find it elsewhere. But that’s not a solution to spam. It’s just making it somebody else’s problem.
I'm sure. And yes, we need to solve that problem too. But it's more like a spam folder than a deletion. Like someone else on HN pointed out, "label, not remove"
Technically yes, but I think this sort of argument is trying to force people to see all censorship as the same.
The type, scope, and implementation of the censorship matters. Hackernews removing spam comments is different than YouTube removing this guys account which is different from YouTube removing any video that is critical of google. And all of those are completely different from Thailand arresting anyone who criticizes the king.
If you insist on saying all of these things are the same and if you are against one of them then you have to be against all of them, then you aren't going to get much support for fighting censorship.
There's the definition of censorship, and then there's people's perception of censorship as something the government does. Beyond that, it's not just that many people can't distinguish the two, but that they've merged aspects of each into the same thing in their head.
Censorship is natural and expected in many, many contexts. Any time a parent punishes their child for saying something they feel is unacceptable, that's censorship. It's just censorship in the hope of teaching their children how to be responsible members of society.
The difference between censorship at the individual or group level and at the government level is that with individuals or groups it's possible to find to other people or groups (or create your own) where that speech is not censored. At the government level, where they can control all aspects of expression, that might not be possible, which is why it's more of a problem and why it's set as a fundamental right in some countries.
YouTube does not control all expression through video. There are both other video streaming platforms, and peer delivery networks that can have platform front ends, and social media networks (which YouTube might classify to some degree as also) that allow video dissemination but are operated differently and have different restrictions.
YouTube is censoring people, just like it has always done since day one, and in new and evolving ways as their policies change. That's expected, and legal, and the same thing every other commercial platform does, and if people have a problem with a specific type of censorship YouTube performs, they should give their attention to a platform that doesn't, but not just because there's censorship at all, because of course there is.
> YouTube does not control all expression through video. There are both other video streaming platforms,
For almost all intents and purposes, the audience is on YouTube only. Use anything else, and you are basically guaranteed to divide your audience by two orders of magnitude. Such is their monopoly on videos that are over 1 minute long.
This makes YouTube deplatforming very close to actual government censorship. The only meaningful difference is the lack of due process.
This is even worse logic than some arguments in this sphere.
The audience is wherever there's a link to click on. Anyone who can watch YT can watch vimeo or peertube or even a self-hosted video. There's no problem with that click - the problem is getting people to click.
You want YT to do more than host videos, you want them to market videos to their users. If YT was a completely passive video host (i.e. when you watched a video, there were no links to other videos at all), saying "the audience is on YT" would be meaningless - people could watch YT videos all day and would never ever see a link to any video that they didn't learn about via some other mechanism. What you seem to object to is YT removing material from participating in "the algorithm", which is essentially a marketing process.
> The audience is wherever there's a link to click on.
This is where the audience could be.
I don't know the solution to be honest. But the reality is, if a video is not on YouTube, it will not reach a wide audience. If a popular channel gets removed from YouTube, few people will ever watch it again. In most cases this means short term bankruptcy.
People could click. People could follow. But they don't.
> if a video is not on YouTube, it will not reach a wide audience.
But that's not because of any technological issue with watching videos hosted anywhere else. There are absolutely zero technological obstacles to people watching videos elsewhere.
The reason it doesn't reach a wide audience is because of "the algorithm" (or rather, two algorithms):
1. the one that YT uses to put possible videos for you to watch in front of you while you watching something else
2. the fact that people tend to search on YT and tend to share YT links rather than links to other video locations (a "human procedural algorithm", if you like)
I don't see how you can equate the power that this "gives" YT with governmental power. There is nothing stopping anyone from doing things outside of YT other than their (generally incorrect) belief that being unable to leverage "the algorithm" is death.
> If a popular channel gets removed from YouTube, few people will ever watch it again.
There's no right to use YT's algorithm or network effects for your own benefit. Does that give them great power? It does, yes. Is that like a government? I don't think that it is.
OK we need a bit of nuance there: I do reckon there are many niches that don’t need to cater to a general audience to begin with. Specialised conferences on InfoQ are a good example: their audience is very specific, and is best reached through aggregators like HN or /r/programming. Another example is online courses, that are not casually watched.
On the other hand, some important topics are aimed at a general audience: news, politics, scientific popularization, infotainment, entertainment… People don’t actively seek out those things, they stumble upon them and select what they like… with the help of the "algorithm".
Whether that’s a good thing is another matter. The way YouTube works is eerily close to doom-scrolling, and I’ve lost a lot of time there. My point is, to even have a chance of reaching a general audience, right now the algorithm and people’s behaviour is such that the only place is YouTube.
Now I’m not saying that everyone deserves to reach a wide audience. For one that’s flat out impossible (10 minutes watched by 100K people means over 13 years of total watching time), and most content is either niche or crap anyway. High quality content however, that makes a positive impact on the world (for instance by helping, informing, or entertaining people), does deserve a chance.
Does it deserve any particular way to the top? No, of course not. But I do submit they deserve at least a fair chance of being widely watched. And right now, again, that only chance comes from YouTube.
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As for what we should do about it, I see two routes. One is regulation. We could officially recognise that YouTube basically holds the only meaningful key to an important kind of public discourse, such that any video they refuse to show is effectively censored. This makes them a public utility, and should be treated as such. I’m not sure what that should entail for the search & suggestion algorithms, but it sure means that taking down a video is an infringement on Free Speech, and so should be approved by a judge.
Yeah, that will never work out. Too many videos to process, not enough judges. So I think we’d much better take another route, if at all possible: find a way to severely reduce YouTube’s market share, and have actual competition between many platforms. That way if someone is kicked out of one platform, they can still use another. Or we could expand self hosting, or multiply the PeerTube instances…
What I absolutely do not want (though unfortunately it looks like we’re headed there), is the kind of regulation where YouTube is mandated to filter videos, in such a way that the only solution is an unsustainable level of automation with lots of false positives, no due process, and no way to appeal (like right now in fact, only it’s official).
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A better regulatory route would be giving platforms a clear choice: either behave as a utility, which means utter neutrality: no integrated search or suggestions unless it’s demonstrably neutral, no filtering, and no arbitrary take down; on the upside, if they happen to host illegal content, they’re not responsible until a judge tells them to shut it down.
Or, retain the biased searches and suggestions (they do have value), all the filtering they want, arbitrary take downs and bans… but then they are treated as editors, and become responsible for everything that happens on their turf. If someone manages to publish some illegal content, they are penally responsible and may in extreme cases go to prison.
Either you’re a carrier, or you’re an editor. Under that rule, YouTube would either become a mere host, at which point we don’t even care about their market dominance (though I suspect their market share would drop as they’re deprived of most of their network effects); or they would become an editor, and that’s so unscaleable they’d need to shrink like hell to be sustainable. And again, they’d lose market share and we’d get the diversity that is needed to make sure that being banned from one platform is in practice very different from actual censorship.
1) I think that YT could make a legitimate case that its recommendation algorithm is neutral (assuming that it's not actually biased by backroom payments etc.). That is to say: it doesn't represent any point of view about anything, and simply tries to show a user "more videos related to the one you're watching". The devil, of course, is in the details of what "related" means.
2) I don't agree that not-on-YT means no wide audience. If I have 2M twitter followers, and I post a link to a video on (say) Vimeo with a sufficiently click-baity description, that video is going to get "a wide audience" (or at least, a large one). There are ways of alerting people to a video's existence beyond YT's own algorithm. The original (hah!) meaning of "went viral" didn't mean "YT recommended it to lots of people and they all clicked". It meant "link got shared by lots of people in an ever-expanding tree of contacts". That can still happen.
3) What's hard are the videos that fall in between the cracks. Not "my kid's 3rd birthday party singalong from last week", and not "the latest video from whomever the current k-pop phenom is". Videos that get, say, 200,000 - 2M views.
4) It's unclear how much view counts on YT are impacted by channel subscriptions vs the algorithm right now. Supposing for a moment that they are heavily correlated with subscriptions, YT could drop the algorithm and not see gigantic shifts in view counts. But I have no idea whether that's true, and I can think of lots of reasons why it may not be. A service that only shows/points you at videos from channels you've subscribed too is radically different from the YT of today.
> I think that YT could make a legitimate case that its recommendation algorithm is neutral
They’d have to remove shadow banning at the very least. I’m also virtually certain that their algorithms are machine-learning based, and as such very difficult to inspect, debug, and other ML based algorithms have proven to be biased in other contexts (like facial recognition).
> I don't agree that not-on-YT means no wide audience.
I… stand corrected, I guess. Also, I’ve just discussed it with my partner, and she pointed out a marginal exodus away from YouTube, which may amplify and chip away at their dominance.
> A service that only shows/points you at videos from channels you've subscribed too is radically different from the YT of today.
It would be indeed. YouTube is significant in the way it merges 3 tools together: hosting, search, and recommendations. They could be separate. (By the way, Google itself tends to merge search and recommendations, the famous "filter bubble".)
You can't come into my print shop and print Nazi literature. Could you print it yourself? Sure. So I'm not preventing you from printing it - I'm preventing you from printing it on my equipment.
It is censorship, it's just that not all censorship is bad, and people should care more about the details than that the definition fits for a word they have knee-jerk reactions to.
The parent and the government ones are similar because the censored individual can’t easily switch government or switch parents.
(And when the social media platform (google) owns not just the video site but also the search engine and the browser - it starts to move closer to the government/parent example.)
We traditionally grant children less rights (at least as far as self-determination) than adults, so this aspect is really in keeping with broader cultural norms.
And sure, the google.com/YT/chrome empire does move closer to the government example, but how much closer is a matter of some considerable debate. I'd argue not by much, but I know others would disagree.
