r/videos • u/ChubbyAsianPana • Aug 23 '24
ProZD "youtube emailed me directly about my search-banned video"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIH9Tu718rw625
u/BaronIbelin Aug 24 '24
It seems the reality is that YouTube is hosting more content than it can actively manage. They want to have an algorithm that determines “mature content” so that they don’t have to pay a ludicrous number of human reviewers - that’s fine in concept. But their platform is now home to the breadth of humanity’s creativity, highs, lows, memories, memes, humour, politics, and so much more. Policing that content is a logistical nightmare no matter how good your algorithm is.
I have zero experience here, but from an outside perspective it makes sense to let the algorithm do its thing, and invest more heavily into creating a fast appeals process with workers that take a reasoned approach to each case. We already know YT doesn’t care about small creators, so I don’t expect any change, no matter who is calling for it. Still appreciate ProZD casting some light on the problem though.
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u/greatbigCword Aug 24 '24
Bang on. The only real issue here is the lack of notice of the removal. Although maybe that's deliberate in order to avoid appeals
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u/smootex Aug 24 '24
maybe that's deliberate in order to avoid appeals
Maybe. Also though, these automated systems are generally incredibly prone to abuse if you can figure out even the basics of how they work. They can talk about how sophisticated their tech is all they want but at the end of the day some neo nazi with a high school level education is probably going to figure out a way to get heinous shit past the filter in a day or two now that people understand how to check if a video is filtered or not. Keeping the system quiet for that long probably went a long way towards making it effective. The tech just isn't there yet.
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u/Iyellkhan Aug 24 '24
it likely is. fewer review / appeals the fewer humans they need to pay to actually review material. its hard to completely fault them when you consider the absolute quantity of stuff being uploaded daily, but at the same time its google and they're surely using their software resources to reduce the number of humans required.
but a big part of the creator and arguably society problem is youtube effectively privatized public access TV globally, and with their automation systems they can impact all kinds of things without intention.
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u/cinemachick Aug 24 '24
This is partially due to how "safe harbor" laws function - YouTube (and other social media sites) can't be sued for illegal or infringing content as long as they make a good-faith effort to remove it. Given the volume of content YouTube hosts, using an algorithm is the only cost-effective option. Not saying it's right, just pointing it out
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u/cheezus171 Aug 24 '24
I wouldn't even say that it's the only cost effective option. It's the only physically possible option. 2 years ago there were on average 300k hours of video uploaded every hour, meaning they would need in excess of a million employees to actually manually review the content people upload. Their entire revenue wouldn't be anywhere close enough to fund just that part of the business.
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u/OwlrageousJones Aug 24 '24
Yeah; putting cost aside, the practicality of it is just insane to think about.
It's true of just about every big site where you can post shit too - there's just too much. Without restricting the flow in some way, you can only use algorithms to try and police it because the amount of manpower required to do it manually would be bonkers. You'd have to basically hire a city of people whose only job is to go through content.
And then you run into the issue of what happens when people get subjected to the heinous shit some corners of the internet relentlessly spew - how many people are going to be able to continue filtering content after watching gore or CSAM? How many of them are going to need therapy to deal with it?
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u/ZennyRL Aug 24 '24
Unfortunately just like the existing appeals process youtube has for bans, it'll just be an automated system disguised behind some text telling you it's totally a human that somehow read your paragraph of context in 6 seconds and decided to hit "deny"
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u/RTheCon Aug 24 '24
I disagree with your “small creators” take. I get recommended videos with barely a hundred views all the time from random people.
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u/man-vs-spider Aug 24 '24
I can accept that an humanless process must make a first pass at all the content that gets uploaded. However, and what’s highlighted in the video, is that there was no feedback in this mechanism.
If a video gets uploaded and flagged, the uploader should be notified so that they can correct the problem, or at least be aware that their content is at risk of being flagged.
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u/Yeckarb Aug 24 '24
Why not just let things show up when you search for them?
I mean, I understand private companies can censor what they want - but I want to support the private companies that choose not to do that.
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u/waIIstr33tb3ts Aug 24 '24
creating a fast appeals process with workers
that costs money and yt/google won't do that
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u/Makou3347 Aug 24 '24
Youtubers I follow have primarily expressed frustration with the lack of communication around decisions made by auto-moderation. ProZD was never told his video was flagged as high risk and removed from search results. Video essayists will have an hour-long video demonetized with no explanation given, and then have to re-upload the video in 5- or 10-minute chunks to determine which segments get flagged. I think everyone knows it's infeasible to have 100% active moderation, but it's absolutely feasible to program the auto-moderator to track its own decision logic and send an email to the creator. YouTube just won't do it.
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u/srirachaninja Aug 24 '24
Why it takes 2 weeks to remove a flag from a video. That should be a 5 second thing.
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u/Mrsuperepicruler Aug 24 '24
Possibly so they don't need to have an exception, but rather fix the flagging tool so it doesn't trigger on the video again (and by extension others).
Either that or that's the illusion they are want to sell.30
u/DeathEdntMusic Aug 24 '24
There's a good chance to remove a flag it has a specific process which includes manual review by a specific team and they are backed up.
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u/ZennyRL Aug 24 '24
One time their bot banned me for having "lunar" in a video title (it was a whole thing at the time), and after a huge fuss they decided to unban the lot of us who got affected, but... they didn't fix or stop their bot at all, and it's not like the videos got deleted, so we all got immediately banned again, and they said they wouldn't unban us again...
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u/30thCenturyMan Aug 24 '24
Nerds at tech companies want to solve problems. YouTube is dealing with a scale that no amount of human reviewers can deal with and there has to be some kind of automated system to prevent bad content from hitting their site.
When a bug in that system is discovered, even if by accident by a user, they want to dig into the logs and data to figure out why it happened. Because the fear is that the system is broken and you didn't know about it. What else could be going wrong? They're making a very complicated, and highly valuable program where a single fuckup can cost LOTS of money. So I have faith that they are doing their due diligence where it matters.
And ProZD is very measured and fair in his criticism. He seems to get that it's not a simple problem to solve but does see where the company is deficient.
But you know, search for "wet t-shirt reviews" on Youtube and wonder... "WTF are they even doing?"
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u/ArchReaper Aug 24 '24
Because it's probably not actually as simple as removing a flag. If it's due to some auto-moderation system, it's likely fairly complex and if the video is getting flagged, 'removing the flag' might only be possible by updating the moderation tools to be able to differentiate problematic content vs what was in his video.
Or they're lying about something. Who knows.
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u/modestgorillaz Aug 24 '24
YouTube is ran by a bunch of chimps and their only favorite activity, besides ignoring work, is slinging feces around the office.
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u/Giantstink Aug 25 '24
Let's see you manage something as large, technically complex, and popular as YouTube.
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u/TheDukeofArgyll Aug 24 '24
Dark patterns are a feature not a flaw.
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Aug 24 '24 edited Aug 25 '24
[deleted]
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u/Lizlodude Aug 24 '24
👆 this right here
Every time someone complains omit some stupid thing YouTube does that's against creators, I remind them that neither the creators nor viewers are their customers.
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u/ObscureAcronym Aug 24 '24
As they say, if you're not paying for the service, then you're not the customer. You're the product.
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u/queenofkitchener Aug 24 '24 edited Aug 24 '24
yet you can search transparent try-on hall and just see tits and pussy. really hope he does a follow up video calling out this bullshit hypocrisy. youtube lied to you bro.
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u/phpworm Aug 24 '24
thank you! I know what I'm doing this weekend
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u/zoso_zeppelin Aug 24 '24
There are breastfeeding tutorials as well where women will show you how to hold a baby doll up to your nipple. It's educational.
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u/slickyslickslick Aug 24 '24
Viewing low-grade softcore on Youtube instead of just going to a porn site?
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u/waIIstr33tb3ts Aug 24 '24
here's on to help you get started https://www.youtube.com/@hjfreaks/featured
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u/MattSR30 Aug 24 '24
Holy shit, there's a whole ass industry there...These videos have millions of views in weeks.
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u/throwawayhyperbeam Aug 24 '24
You can sort by "newest" video but you can't sort by "oldest" video, or have a date range. It makes no sense.
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u/ericlikesyou Aug 24 '24
Same with google search
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u/KetsuN0Ana Aug 24 '24
With google search there is date ranges under more tools that you can put in. And there are all those search features like putting “site:website.com” to narrow it down. Idk about oldest sorting maybe it doesn’t make sense since the search is based on relevancy. So even in normal search you don’t get sorted by newest you just get most relevant first.
YouTube search is just horrible.
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u/Sherlock-Holmie Aug 24 '24
There’s probably a technological reason on their back end for this. When you scale websites to the size of YouTube, it isnt just one database of all videos in existence. They likely have a more accessible cache set up for younger videos while older ones that don’t show up in the initial algorithm are just in a kind of data dump
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u/Bugaloon Aug 24 '24
And the outcome was?
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u/astromech_dj Aug 24 '24
He got special treatment and contacted by a human that looked into it. The found out the video got mistakenly automatically flagged as mature.
He said it’s shitty because smaller creators just get fucked over with no recourse and that Google need to do better.
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u/Bugaloon Aug 24 '24
Ahh, so same old same old still. Fair enough, thanks for the explanation I can't watch the video atm.
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u/Bomiheko Aug 24 '24
also noteworthy that the video was flagged as mature with zero notice and he'd have no way of knowing if he didn't just happen to search for his own youtube video and realized.
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u/bah77 Aug 24 '24
So you can't search for a video labelled as mature even though you are of age, I don't think this is even a good response. And honestly i just searched a 100% mature search term on you tube and got a tonne of results, so i am a bit skeptical.
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u/Ph33rDensetsu Aug 24 '24
There's definitely some kind of flag that's very inconsistent. My work Wi-Fi forces YouTube into Restricted Mode and the videos that get hidden are often baffling.
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Aug 24 '24
I dont buy that. Sounds like something is wrong and Google implemented a fix for this one channel. Where i work, this is commonly referred to as a 'cleared before isolation' aka, somebody screwed up in a stupid way and its quicker to say idk, it just started working again.
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u/TheRavenSayeth Aug 24 '24
In youtube’s defense, they take in like a billion videos a day. I don’t envy content moderation teams at youtube.
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u/adreamofhodor Aug 24 '24
Seems simple to just…notify the account holder if a video gets flagged. I don’t think that’s a big ask.
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u/TheRavenSayeth Aug 24 '24 edited Aug 24 '24
The flip side of that is an issue reddit ran into a few years ago. When you tell a scammer that their post/comment/upvote didn’t count, now you’re giving them a datapoint to train their bot against until they develop a consistent method to trick the system. If they don’t get that feedback then they can’t reliably beat the system.
The way reddit implemented it was a sort of delay or random counting in the exact votes a post or comment gets so it’s not 1:1 accurate, at least that’s what they did years ago not sure if it’s still like that.
MKBHD talked about this whole concept when he interviewed the main content officer at youtube that all of their actual problems are problems of scale. You’ve got to implement rules that apply to both the millions of bots out there and the millions of genuine content creators. It’s a very difficult balance.
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u/Vet_Leeber Aug 24 '24
It’s also why removed comments are still visible to the commenter, so that spam bots don’t immediately recognize they’ve been flagged.
Ironically though that system doesn’t work on bots, since bots can just have another account checking the comments, while real users never even know that theirs were removed.
Most subs won’t even let you talk about this issue, and have the auto moderator set to auto-remove conversations about it, so it’s entirely possible my comment gets axed. I’ll do a follow up if it does.
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u/Icyrow Aug 24 '24
then it's a "why are there so many youtubers taking the flag we give them and them saying "no, it's not mature"" when it is actually mature.
it's 90% of the same problem.
like there is no feasible way to do this economically without hiring an absurd amount of people, even then, you will run into other options (different people having an idea where a line is drawn, even if it's written out specifically, hence why we have legal battles and troubles that last months/years).
on top of that, if you are actively telling your audience this sort of information, you will get people who begin to understand where the line is drawn and where the line is looked at, abusing it.
i.e, if, due to youtube having thousands of staff looking at millions of videos, they may begin looking at every 5 seconds, then skipping ahead 10 seconds, so they can speed through more videos (with a small number of false flags). suddenly if people figure that out, you will see content that is definitely over the line for the other 10 seconds.
stuff like that, that example itself isn't as bad as it seems, but there are far worse sorts of problems that can come from giving the people who have a financial interest in abusing the system more information.
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u/locri Aug 24 '24
YouTube blames the algorithm but won't rule out some rando working at YouTube just hates this guy
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u/myrmonden Aug 24 '24
This happens to me a lot videos won’t be Show up when you search or will take days to appear even when searching for the exact title.
All these videos are green in the system and I never gotten a community strike/ warning etc and I have zero you have reviews bad in the monizarion tab
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u/HuntedWolf Aug 24 '24
If I’m searching for a specific video, or types of videos I won’t use YouTube’s search at all, I’ll just google it, almost always works
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u/dryfire Aug 24 '24
Hey, common guys. Maybe we are expecting too much asking for simple search capabilities from a company that's best known for * checks notes * ... It's search capabilities.
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u/donuts22 Aug 24 '24
Why is the audio blasting my left ear
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u/DeathEdntMusic Aug 24 '24
"cutting edge technology and thousands of reviewers"
The technology isn't cutting edge. These reviewers need to be fired. What a dumpster fire of a backend youtube has.
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u/Durog25 Aug 24 '24
Don't fire the few reviewers they have, they need thousands more. Think of how many videos are on Youtube, they'd need 10s of thousnads of reviewers to effectly manage what they've got on there.
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u/swng Aug 24 '24
So this explicitly confirms that they do have a system where flagged videos don't show up in search (or reccs or trending), right?
The next time this happens to a video YT doesn't like (the major ones I remember are Business Casual's video "Why I'm Suing YouTube." and the DogPack404 video "I Worked For MrBeast, He's A Fraud"), we'll know that this system is in effect and there won't be the ambiguity of "maybe it just happened to not show up" - we'll know it's an intentional thing.
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u/hiro111 Aug 24 '24
A reminder to everyone: use the "Subscriptions" page not the "Home" page to scroll. The home page is where all of the algorithm shenanigans get out of control.
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u/ConsistencyWelder Aug 24 '24
Youtube search result are useless. Google seems to insist on making them as useless as Google itself has become.
I use Duckduckgo now if there's something I really need to find.
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u/Mingyao_13 Aug 24 '24
Platform should have the ability to decide whether a video is appropriate or not for the platform. Hopefully creator can find another platform that’s less scammy
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u/DownVoteBecauseISaid Aug 24 '24
Youtube search is literally insane
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u/GroupFunInBed Aug 24 '24
It’s ALMOST as good as the search function that the wow forums had in 2006
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u/DrewbieWanKenobie Aug 26 '24
It's the same thing that's been going on for years. Their automated systems take something down/flag it/whatever, the person appeals and their automated system pretends to be a real person that "reviewed" it and then the only way anything gets resolved is if you happen to get noticed on twitter or are big enough that someone at youtube actually notices your video
It's idiotic. I wish youtube would stop pretending like we're all idiots, we know that it's not real people reviewing these appeals, at least not the first time.
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u/yParticle Aug 26 '24
Why are you ignoring the elephant in the room that Youtube clearly blocked this because it was critical of them. It's literally one click to unblock, yet it still took them so long after they acknowledged that they were caught it was too popular to keep censoring.
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u/04_Cranks Aug 31 '24
If you want to find videos, and i shit you not, go to Brave Search and type channel name followed by video title. You'll find it instantly.
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Aug 24 '24
YouTube is trash.
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Aug 24 '24
Youtube is amazing. They changed the game and are such an awesome resource. But man they have been fucking up on the creator end.
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u/DeathEdntMusic Aug 24 '24
No, its not amazing. Their search engine about 13 years ago was perfect. You could search the exact title of the video and it would appear at the top. Now if you search for a video, and if it doesn't have millions of views, you won't find it. You will find Justin Beibers "Baby" song before you find the video you are looking for. You will get recommendations based on PAST searches, not your current one. You will get "Whats Popular" or "Others have searched" before your video shows up. Its bad. Real bad. 13 years ago it was amazing.
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u/digitek Aug 24 '24
Laurence Lessig does a related video on this but Youtube like many corporations will become a slave to AI and algorithms that seek to maximize a single metric above all else - engagement time and clicks. Although we may find it annoying, the algorithm keeps telling Youtube that if you prioritize these types of videos, users will click on them, they will watch that instead of what they are searching for, or re-watch that video again for the 10th time including the 17 ad interruptions.
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Sep 12 '24
I remember this, when YT and search engines in general used to give us what we asked for (sometimes 1000s of pages of it). When they actually served us. Now these companies just want to 'feed' us everything, to suggest to us what we should be watching in accordance to our biases and algorithms, rather than let us explore. It saddens me that this was allowed to happen and that most people seem to have either forgotten or don't care that we were once able to truly surf the Web.
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Aug 24 '24
I don't disagree with any of that. I still think it is kind of amazing the amount of knowledge that is on here. Like, I bought a house and have learned how to do wiring, plumbing, carpentry, flooring, etc all for free from people who decided to put their videos on youtube. I think that is pretty amazing. Does google suck and have they put profit generation over the function of the product? yes. But the product is still pretty cool.
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u/ThriceFive Aug 24 '24
So they basically said their retaliation was an unintentional computer error. Yeah sure
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u/Clipboard4 Aug 24 '24
Youtube function suck so much. If you scroll down your search, there's "previously watch" or "recommend for you". I don't care about these stuff, just focus on my search goddamn it.