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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

> If a machine could accomplish the task just as well as a human, or the need for the task could be designed away, that task is toil. If human judgment is essential for the task, there’s a good chance it’s not toil.21

It's fun the the engineering at Google is so great at recognizing things, while the product/"human" teams (like whoever came up with the account reviews and other parts) seems to suck so much.

If YouTube applied the same view of what should/shouldn't be automated, they could solve the problem of peoples YouTube channels being locked in front of them, even if they don't break any ToS's.

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The part I really liked is "Is Toil Always Bad?" because quite astute psychology and management ideas appear here. My takeaway is that people who like toil (and there are many zealous oversystemetisers around) are some of the most dangerous to long-term productivity.

However, I really feel for the author, because the distance between this philosophically ambitious position and the reality of using Big Tech products - which in my life are the primary source of pointless makework activity - is sad and frustrating.

Now, one cannot blame the tools for stupid policies that lead their misuse in constructing makework processes, but (to take the Heideggerian stance) they carry certain exacerbating values along with them. Technologies can be 'seductive'.

The point of departure for me, was the definition of "overheads" as justifiable makework according to some value set. Whose values, exactly? And if, in Weber's sense, bureaucracy is an unavoidable side effect of process, then the possibility to design "toil-free" systems is really about complexity management, not post-facto eliminating toil through automation, because that will only break things and introduce more toil (Which is of course the primary theme of Gall's "Systemantics").

At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, goes pretty far in explaining why American infrastructure costs are so high (although I suspect the paperwork burden, NIMBYism, and “citizen voice” are just as important).

I strongly support the Biden Administration infrastructure program. BUT selling it as a “Jobs” program (at a time of near record low unemployment) makes me very wary.

Something can be both - and effectively work as both. Almost anyone can move a shovel even if not very well, but operating heavy machinery has many more dangers.

If your question is “how do we keep a relatively uneducated workforce employed gainfully” digging a canal with shovels Amy be the way to go. Especially if you only have a fixed number of useful canals.

Wait. Are you me? Did I write this in my sleep?

"the definition of "overheads" as justifiable makework according to some value set". What does this even mean? How is this "a value" that's "carried" in "Big Tech" software? What part of "the reality of using Big Tech products" produces makework? Making such a broad, sweeping generalization about an entire class of make zeros sense to me. Does Facebook "justify overheads" in the same way that Netflix "justifies overheads" in the same way that Apple "justifies overheads"? Instead of just lazily blaming toil on "Big Tech", I think it's better to recognize that toil happens everywhere that people care more about short-term solutions than optimizing long-term processes—a fundamental human problem, certainly not one that's unique to the latest fad of technology companies.

These are good questions. Here are some reading sources to help with your exploration of the subject:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Machine

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_and_Civilization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Techno...

https://geezmagazine.org/blogs/entry/jacques-elluls-76-reaso...

This is by design.

You can't expect a free service to have highly trained human judgement whenever you want.

They need it to run fully autonomous. And does run flawlessly for 99% of the users, which is impressive.

I wish they offered a paid option in the 1% cases. Like an arbitration.

But that would be a cost center for them, and they don't want it.

Maybe it should be the other way around, rather than putting the error on peoples expectation of what a free service can do, put the error on the operators expectation what kind of free services they can run?

If you can't run a service without arbitrarily banning people (and inadvertently affecting their livelihood [ignoring the question if people should put their livelihood up to a free service in the first place]), maybe you need to adjust the service you're offering people?

There is no requirement for them to run it fully autonomously, because obviously, they are unable to do so without punishing some of their users without any recurse. That's probably a sign it's really hard to run it autonomously, and they need to do something else.

If you don't want your free service to be a cost center, then maybe change it to not be?

It's not a free service with shitty customer support. The free portion, viewing Youtube, has no customer support whatsoever. The non-free portion, which provides you video hosting and revenue sharing in exchange for your labor producing content, gives you shitty customer service.

> I wish they offered a paid option in the 1% cases. Like an arbitration.

They don't even manage to provide adequate content reviews for the .1% (probably an even smaller percentile) of YouTube creators that bring in the big advertisment revenues for the platform. Providing good support for them would easily pay for itself, and is the single biggest issues creators have been raising for years but nothing has substantially changed.

> This is by design.

Partly due to a dominant market share. If there was more competition, they'd more about user experience.

> It's fun the the engineering at Google is so great at recognizing things, while the product/"human" teams (like whoever came up with the account reviews and other parts) seems to suck so much

There's ~4 orders of magnitude difference in the scope of work between the two.

(In Google’s view), perhaps the need for careful review of these actions has been designed away.

An easy but poor design choice is that locking the user channel will have no immediate impact on revenue, yet it will lessen the requirement for human intervention (due to "Report", copyright infringement claims, etc).

Same can be said for most organizations. Google's privileged hyper-enlightened culture of organizational "niceness" rests on the bedrock of millions of man-hours of near perfect, rigorously vetted engineering.

I think the main cause of this is that humans tend to become very wrong and misguided without accurate feedback. An engineer who is wrong is proven wrong immediately; their code fails, doesn't pass tests, breaks, etc. A people-person design-minded product-guru takes years to be proven wrong, and even then their tactical obfuscation of reality can morph who ends up being blamed.

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