YouTube enlists volunteers to moderate site via “YouTube Heroes” program | Hacker News Reader

YouTube enlists volunteers to moderate site via “YouTube Heroes” program

techcrunch.com

43 pointsjoshmn56 comments

More and more big social is democratizing the black magic of boutique PR firms. Want reputation management? Rep-kill your competitors? Damage control your latest scandal? Just hire some mechturks for peanuts to flag the right videos and like the right pages and write the right reviews and submit the right DMCAs and retweet the right tweets and...

It's also a sneaky back-door way of letting state sponsored censorship that stretches far beyond your legal rights. States can implement Orwellian censorship and Youtube has plausible deniability they have anything to do with it.

My first thought on seeing this was this video, that was on HN some time ago -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U

Oh, spectacular. This will go swimmingly!

You know, when I was in high school, we had an all volunteer group of hall monitors, and it was this pointless excursion in self-policing that resulted in frustration on all sides, because both the monitors and the deviants were equally incompetent, and unprofessional.

Only the dumbest volunteered, and only the dumbest got caught. Meanwhile, parking lot shenanigans surged, even though people were still exchanging blowjobs in the elevators in the two-floor wings (yes, even on camera).

So, hallway fights declined, but fights were the only metric that saw progress, and people fought behind the school, in the parking lots, and in the sports fields instead, but at least they weren't fighting in the hallways anymore.

Youtube, meanwhile, doesn't have a single critical metric. Their goal is quality of community. You can't let everybody into your community indiscriminately, and expect to have a high quality community. Selective partitioning and curration of membership creates quality of company; choose your friends wisely. This is why gifted-and-talented programs are so controversial.

Youtube can't simultaneously appeal to the lowest common denominator AND enjoy openly elitist patronage, which is by definition exclusive.

P.S.

In the end, my school district accepted defeat, and paid for professional security guards. The school was unruly enough to warrant the extra line item in the budget, and initially people complained that the students were being alienated, as if they were criminals, to which the stark reply was: Some of them ARE criminals, and here're the arrest records and police blotter to prove it!

So an extremely large for-profit entity is organizing a group of people, giving them things to do that help the company, but isn't actually paying them anything?

This makes unpaid internships look like charity initiatives.

Reminds me of the Ultima Online Counselor's program.

http://www.uoguide.com/Counselor#U.S._Counselor_Program_Demi...

crazy thing is there'll be enough people that want to do it to keep it going..

Moderators will get paid, one way or another. Whatever you pay them with, you will get the kind of moderators who like that as payment. For some people, the power to filter for others is the best payment they could want.

I'm heartened by how many of the nice, kid-friendly youtubers I follow who nonetheless have already spoken up about this terrible idea.

But I mean, isn't that how reddit moderation works? And all of stack exchange?

Why is that okay and this isn't?

Reddit moderation is very dysfunctional, especially since a large part of the job is automated and the criteria for getting banned are largely unknown to the masses.

That does not in any remote way answer his question though.

reddit moderation is more like the owner of a channel deleting videos or comments.

Moderators on non-technical forums are paid by NGOs, where their function is to "manage social media relations" or something similar.

I'd be interested to see a comparison of the contrasts between YouTube's new "Heroes" program and the disgraced AOL "Community Leader" program that was successfully sued for $15M USD in the past. [0]

Participants in the AOL Community Leader Program claimed that AOL was using them as employees without paying them. Thus the lawsuit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program#D...

I never quite understood that lawsuit. The volunteers understood that they weren't being paid when they signed up for the gig, right?

To enforce a minimum wage, you have to guarantee that people actually get paid at all. So in general, unless you're running a non-profit, you will have a really hard time legally with unpaid volunteers. If you don't mandate wages for employees, you have companies exploiting weaker people for their work, often under misleading pretenses.

Did you read the link? They were compensated (with free internet access) in return for which they had to undergo training, work for a set number of hours, fill in timecards, etc. It sounds like it was a part-time job in all but name.

Except they knew it upfront. ...which I would argue would be the relevant criteria.

Signing up for unpaid community duties and then trying to pressure myself into a job does not feel honest to me, at all.

It wasn't unpaid community duties, it was compensated work that provided value to a corporation. IANAL, but I think the premise is that, as far as employment law is concerned, they were already in a job.

Competitor Group are being sued in a class action lawsuit [0] by a road race volunteer claiming that volunteers were actually laborers being exploited by the defendant and in breach of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Competitor Group argued for dismissal but their arguments were denied and the case is moving forward. So the courts will decide if, despite "knowing upfront" that they were volunteering, such "work" constitutes "labor". This could have a huge impact at (for-profit) races all over the country that rely on unpaid volunteers, not to mention other for-profit entities use of "volunteers", including YouTube/Google.

[0] http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

> I never quite understood that lawsuit. The volunteers understood that they weren't being paid when they signed up for the gig, right?

You don't understand people fighting for their rights? but I'm sure you do understand corporation exploiting them. There is no "signing up" when the deal is both illegal and unfair. Marx theories didn't go away because some people deemed them irrelevant. Ironically, in this era of political correctness where people apply Marxism to culture and speech instead of economy and workers rights, they should better remember what it is all about at first place and how they are being tricked into fighting useless fights. Your comment can't be more relevant, actually...

Not an expert, but I am pretty sure that the idea to make non-paid, voluntary work that is inspired by a sense of community illegal to strengthen some 21. century understanding of workers rights is the straight up opposite of a Marxist utopia.

I think the key is

> There is no "signing up" when the deal is both illegal and unfair.

If behaviour does conflict with lawyers or philosophers opinion, individual autonomy is to be stripped. (Therefore no agreeing, signing up, etc.) If those people disagree, people are just exploited socketpuppets for a political agenda. Maybe that's Marxist cynicism.

Can I volunteer to coach my son's little league team and then after the fact argue that I should get paid?

> You don't understand people fighting for their rights?

Are or should those be their rights? If I _voluntarily_ step into a volcano should that volcano be liable for my actions?

It's hard to sue a volcano, but you can be arrested for attempted manslaughter if you fail...

Suicide is not legal.

> Suicide is not legal.

Where?

Check out Wikipedia's chart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_legislation#Laws_in_in...

Now, I overstated its ilegality in most cases, but the reality is that you actually have remarkably little choice when it comes to waiving all of your rights away. Try to volunteer for a medical procedure which is governed by, but not yet been approved by, the FDA.

Allowing people to "volunteer" for work in any condition for a for-profit company is also a very slippery slope. It would allow corporations to get around minimum wages, benefits, taxes... you name it. Not allowing volunteers is much better than allowing corporations to erode our rights as a workforce.

There's currently a backlash against this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh_1966vaIA

1,500 likes vs 75,500 dislikes. Most people on the Reddit thread dislike it too: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/53wffb/youtube_intr...

There's a lot of misinformation going on in the Reddit thread. These "Heroes" get better tools for flagging videos faster (among other things), but it's still just flagging. Every flag still gets reviewed by a human at YouTube, according to their documentation:

> YouTube staff review flagged videos 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and videos that violate our Community Guidelines are removed from YouTube. Videos that may not be appropriate for all younger audiences are age-restricted.

> Flagged videos are not automatically taken down by the flagging system. If a video doesn't violate our guidelines, no amount of flagging will change that, and the video will stay on the site. [0]

And that documentation is still true for the Hero program:

> As always, the policy team at YouTube makes the final determination of whether content should be removed. [1]

[0]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802027

[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2803402

> YouTube says that those who participate will be eligible to receive perks, including access to exclusive workshops and sneak preview product launches, for example.

Gamifying content flagging with mass-flagging tools combined with their stupidly vague content rules[1] is a gift to the people that abuse moderation tools for hateful or trolling purposes. Maliciously flagged videos are already a problem (regardless of any human review), and YT is now going to reward (some of) these assholes?

[1] Remember the recent mess regarding the de-monitisation of videos arbitrarily deemed "not advertiser friendly"? The problem isn't that some videos were de-monotized; the guidelines - as written - could apply to anything.

I agree that their monetization policy is pretty vague; I wish it was clearer but they probably have to cover their bases.

As for "people that abuse moderation tools for hateful or trolling purposes": these people won't be given access to the tools. According to the site [0], you only get points and level up for actually flagging things correctly, and you get kicked out if you're abusing it. And the improved flagging tools are only available once you reach a higher level. So it would be pretty hard to abuse (especially since even after all that, there's oversight).

[0]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7159025

> Every flag still gets reviewed by a human at YouTube

Blizzard claimed something similar recently. Long story short, they weren't actually reviewing every report, and there were a number of people who were wrongly penalized or banned.

If Blizzard, a company with a lot of consumer good will and a stellar customer service group, can't get flagging right, why do we think that Google will, with a user base exponentially larger than Blizzard's?

Censorship based on feelings of a "heroes" group. What could possibly go wrong?

Curation Flickr style, for me, is an acceptable alternative to hamfisted policies on the one hand and 2ch-style free for all blather on the other.

Groups get to run their group/forum as they wish with only occasional direct oversight by actual employees (threats, harassment, copyright, some succession disputes, etc.)

I think all these resent attempts to censor speech and engage in narrative peddling are going to backfire on the companies. There is nothing more frustrating then taking the time to comment on something or participate in a conversation and have those comments removed by someone who has an agenda or simply disagrees with you.

There has already been a fair amount of attempts to start alternatives to popular sites that start to censor. Voat has been fairly successful in pealing off Reddit users. GNUsocial, Wikipedia clones etc.

It would be nice to see some of these services like Facebook and Youtube have a sizeable chunk of there users taken away by companies that make an public commitment to limited data retention and freedom of speech.

Finally, a reliable way to contact YouTube support: add 400 sentences of subtitles

Worked incredibly well on deviantART for years. I found when a community cares about itself, it will usually take care of itself. This becomes especially true if the community exhibits and fosters a sense of pride.

YouTube stands for nothing, unlike deviantArt who attracts a certain kind of public.

that is not correct, YouTube is a community for cat lovers.

On the other hand, my first thought was Wikipedia.

Imagine a group of 'heroes' that goes on a crusade for something it deems desirable, such as gender-balance, right-to-carry or 'kid friendliness', and creates fairly strict rules as to how to present a video clip on YouTube ("yes, your video may be sarcastic, but some people may fail to see that, so we added the standard YouTube disclaimer; we also bleeped out your usage of the word 'ab*ion', as per rule 451)

Then imagine anything they do still has to go through someone working at YouTube. Sure there's a chance that someone may agree with their fairly strict rules but on the other hand that someone also doesn't want to lose their job by abusing the powers it gives.

This should be called YouTube Large Scale Stanford Experiment.

Nah, this will go the way of Microsoft Tay and Facebook's automated curation. 4chan will run the system to generate jokes for themselves, until Google finally kills it.

Potential volunteers might want to read the following before signing up: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/

AKA "Trust and safety council" /s

Flagging abuse aside, I think the text transcript is actually a really good idea to refine their STT system. The automatic transcript that YouTube uses has improved to about 80% whenever I try to use it. This will no doubt help their effort in improving their accuracy. Too bad the PR team bundled it into this "Heroes" nonsense.

Multiple people thought this is a good idea.

It's cheap and easy. That's what most people think is a good idea.

from youtube/google/alphabet's perspective it's a really good idea

from a "we want to have two billion users but don't want to hire any support staff" perspective it is genius...

You can report the video. Not that there would be a reason to do that.

huh i was wondering why my comment didn't show up..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12551249

before:

THEY REMOVED MY COMMENT, THE GOVERNMENT DONT WANT YOU TO KNOW!!

after:

THEY REMOVED MY COMMENT, THE KID DOWN THE STREET DOESNT WANT YOU TO KNOW!!

i think you have a typo here ;)

Sorry, when alien abducted me they did something to my brain.

Every time I try to warn others about them all that comes mi munt ot si emaningalss biggerish. well, thanks obama

Reply on news.ycombinator.com