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Comment by restingrobot | Hacker News Reader

To make my first point clear, here is a scenario:

I walk up to you on the street and suggest you give me a dollar.

I walk up to you on the street and take a dollar from you by force.

Youtube is a platform, in order remain a platform it MUST remain neutral. You cannot have an open forum with bias. There are certain mutually agreed upon rules, (no nudity, extreme violence, etc.), those limitations are more than enough to handle the vast majority of "negative" content.

I whole heartedly disagree that we need a bias towards positivity. Who determines what that definition is? Something you see as negative, I might happen to enjoy. If Youtube begins to censor itself in that way it is no longer a platform and is now responsible for ALL of its content.

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Thanks for the clarification on the first point. Won’t youtube effectively shove the next recommended video to a user as long as auto-play is activated ?

Also they are the default view, I’d argue suggestions are a lot more than just “suggestions”. It would be akin to a restaurant “suggesting” their menu, and you’d need to interrogate the waiter to explore what else you could be served. For most people the menu is effectively the representation of the food of the restaurant.

For the neutrality, if you recognize there are agreed upon rules, as you point out, the next question becomes who agreed on these rules, and who made them ?

Who agreed nudity should be banned ? Which country ? What nudity ? and art ? and educational content ? and documentaries ? at which point does it become nudity ? The more we dig into it, the more it becomes fuzzy, everyone’s boundary is different, and all the rules are like that.

Any rule in place is positive to a group and negative to another, for a rule to stay in place it needs to have more supporters than detractors, or put it another way have more positive impact than negative ones.

The current set of rules are the ones that were deemed worthwile, I think it’s healthy to chalenge them or to push for other rules that could garner enough agreement to stay in place.

> Won’t youtube effectively shove the next recommended video to a user as long as auto-play is activated ?

You can very easily turn auto-play off. There is plenty of opportunity to switch videos. It would be different if youtube forced you to watch the next video in order to use the site.

>For the neutrality, if you recognize there are agreed upon rules, as you point out, the next question becomes who agreed on these rules, and who made them ?

Youtube made them. Those are pre-conditions for uploading videos. They don't have to have any reason why they made them, those are conditions that must be met in order to upload a video. So by uploading a video you are agreeing to them.

>Any rule in place is positive to a group and negative to another

I don't agree with this generality. However, this discussion is not about the legitamacy of the rules to use youtube, it is whether or not youtube should censor videos, (that meets basic rules of use). My opinion is no, your's as you stated above was:

>I personaly think anything dealing with human content can’t be left neutral, as we need a bias towards positivity.

I agree with you that Youtube should routinely challenge their own rule sets. That is not the same as censoring their content, or in this case modifying their recommendation algorithm.

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