YouTube Blog

[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.

Google already has more than 10k people working on this: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/expanding-our-work-against-abuse-of-our . If 100 people solved the issue, it would have been solved.

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…

Because to truly moderate YouYube, you have to actually watch the videos, and YouTube says they get 500 hours of video uploaded every minute[1], it's pretty easy to estimate the staffing it would take each video once. They're basically getting 30,000 minutes of video every minute, so if they have 30,000 people watching it, 24/7, it basically works. You need 4.2 fourty hour weeks to cover a whole week, so 126,000 people will do it. They've also report 2 billion monthly users, so around 1:16k moderator:user would get full coverage of videos; plus another team for comments. And of course a team of 1/8th of a million won't manage itself, and you need an escalation path, and non-robot moderator are actually not robots, so they won't (and shouldn't) spend their entire worktime watching.

126,000 workers actually seems reasonable to find, the 2 million you'd need at a 1:1k ratio would be hard, I think. The pay is going to be bad, and the garbage you have to watch won't be worth it for most, but you still need a reasonably analytical person to decide if things definitely follow the rules, definitely don't follow the rules, or need to be escalated. And they need to be attentive, because videos can be totally normal and fine and then get abusive later.

[1] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-at-15-my-personal-journey

Well, the article is entirely sourced on a blog post by YouTube [0]. If you don't believe them, there's no story in the first place.

That blog post is basically just announcing a feature that recommends related news videos when you're watching a news video. That's it. You're presumably reacting to the article headline, but the claim in the headline that "YouTube wants you watching more news" appears to be entirely made up by The Verge's headline/clickbait editor.

But ok, let's trust the headline and not the blog post. What do you think the lie is? That the news recommendations will actually be shown for non-news videos not related to the event? That there's some totally separate YouTube feature in the works unrelated to the announced feature that's about making you (yes, you!) watch more news from authoritative news sources, that some buffoon at The Verge was privy to, and accidentally revealed in the headline even though it was unsupported by their single piece of public source material?

[0] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/investing-in-a-multi-format-news-watching-experience/

>Ads may suck, but simply charging for the same service isn't really innovative. Would I pay for a version of Google without ads? Probably not.

Google already does this with YT; YouTube Premium[1] offers you YT experience without ads plus extra perks. And YouTube Premium has apparently more than 25 million subscribers in US alone[2] and 80 million subscribers globally[3]. My thinking is power users are ready to pay for ad-free experience and casual users probably not because they are not heavy users.

>But that's just me - I actually like to know who is advertising for particular searches. A company with an ad budget to rank at the top of ads is probably more trustworthy than an anonymous website.

A lot of spammers and fraudsters see advertising as their most effective gateway and tactic to scamming people so I wouldn't count on reliability and safety of all ads that you see.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/premium

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1261865/youtube-premium-subscribers/

[3] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-music-premium-80-million-lyor-cohen/

I went back to look at when they first changed from star ratings to like/dislike, and it seems like they were thinking about going even further and removing the dislike option entirely even back then.

They made some comments[1] before that change:

> Seems like when it comes to ratings it's pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference. Thus, the ratings system is primarily being used as a seal of approval, not as an editorial indicator of what the community thinks about a video. Rating a video joins favoriting and sharing as a way to tell the world that this is something you love.

> We're glad there are so many awesome videos on YouTube, but all of this begs the question: if the majority of videos are getting five stars, how useful is this system really? Would a thumbs up/thumbs down be more effective, or does favoriting do the trick of declaring your love for a video?

[1]https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/five-stars-dominate-ratings/

> Every profession develops their own lingo over time.

In this case, Twitter packages up two objectively observable things, people you follow and people who are popular, along with Twitter's own opinion about who the bad-faith actors are. It's that last subjective part that is at issue here. Yet all three are lumped together under the term "rank" [1], and we are told it is the bad actors who are manipulating, not Twitter.

I'm not calling for the demise of Twitter's former leadership, just calling out corporate speak where I see it. YouTube is at least transparent in this respect. They openly say that they "reduce" content [2].

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-the-record-straight-on-shadow-banning

[2] https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/the-four-rs-of-responsibility-remove/