
YouTube Bans Award-Winning Short - protomyth
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/youtube-continues-hurt-independent-animators-bans-award-winning-animated-short-153430.html
======
Nihilartikel
The case of this article is unfortunate, but it's actually missing what I
think is the more serious problem with YouTube for independent artists right
now.. This is just a problem of an unfortunate strike against a video - I
imagine that it will be fixed under appeal. These things happen, as a great
great number of videos need to be evaluated by staff against a complicated set
of criteria and precedents. It doesn't actually speak very much about any kind
of systemic bias against independent artists.

What DOES create a problem for artists is the tuning of the algorithms to be
highly preferential to long form frequently posted content E.g video game
commentary. This is a big problem for creators who work in short, high effort,
highly polished media - E.g animators.

This really really bums me out. I was an employee at YouTube during their
period of great growth and I absolutely loved the platform and potential for
compensation that they gave to niche and indy animators and musicians, and had
great hope for a future where the democratization of video distribution would
lead to a flourishing of art and entertainment that caters to a higher common
denominator than the over-polished, focus group approved, mass market
creativity that passes for main-stream.

Sadly, it looks like the prime goal of increasing return visits and raw view
time has lead to algorithmic optimization of that same mass-media race-to-the-
bottom in quality and diversity in search of a broadly palatable and
compulsively consumable product. It saddens me and I still feel that they
could have it both ways if they took a more aware approach to niche content.
YouTube offers monetization - the fact that artists even need Patreon means
that GoogTube is ignoring a need, and thus a business opportunity. Just
because a piece of work may only appeal to 50,000 people world wide doesn't
necessarily mean that it has less value or merit than one that appeals to 10
million.

I support quite a few animators on Patreon, and the impression I get is that
they are all struggling to keep working on it as a primary job.

~~~
bryananderson
"When you’re young, you look at television and think, 'There’s a conspiracy.
The networks have conspired to dumb us down.' But when you get a little older,
you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people
exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is
optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the
networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the
truth."

\--Steve Jobs

The algorithms are they way they are because YouTube has figured out what
people actually want to watch. Surprise, most people still want to watch
"lowest common denominator" content, just like they did before digital media.

~~~
leggomylibro
Put another way by Terry Pratchett,

"And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it
wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that
you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be
measured, they didn't measure up."

~~~
kaffee
Please! It's Brecht:

    
    
      Would it not be easier
      In that case for the government
      To dissolve the people
      And elect another?
    

Poem in Die Welt (1959)

~~~
leggomylibro
Ha, nice! Thanks, I love finding out about the origins of his aphorisms.

------
adekok
It's impossible to believe that Youtube blocks this video, but can't tell that
the copies are the same video.

Which means they have provisions to block a _providers_ video. Not the
_content_ of a video. They're happy to publish other copies of the same
"inappropriate" content, and to monetize it.

But they won't let the original author monetize it.

If this is something other than "being evil", I don't know what it is.

------
tudorw
Is there a tipping point where the independent content creators tire of this?
Patreon seems to have some traction and just seems a good fit for artistic
endeavours, the fact that you need $100 in income from YouTube before they pay
out must mean there are a lot of people with a lot of viewers whose income
they hold in perpetuity. Same with Spotify, is there a point at which creators
withhold their content, or is the lure of large viewer numbers irresistible ?

~~~
QAPereo
For some things, like churned out entertainment for children, tweens and
teens, YouTube probably has a lock. Those groups don't care about any of this.
For The rest, fragmentation seems inevitable to me.

------
linarism
I'm kind of surprised that Patreon hasn't made a spinoff platform to compete
with YouTube for all the YouTubers flocking to their donation service.

~~~
egypturnash
I wouldn't be surprised if they're playing with one; they're regularly sending
out "how to grow your audience" suggestions to creators that want everyone to
make video content, regardless of how appropriate it is to their craft and/or
personality.

That said: making a YouTube is a hell of a lot of work and a huge investment.
Yes I'm sure you can kludge up a simple clone of the basics in Your Favorite
Language in six hours, but can you build the infrastructure to deal with the
inevitable copyright infringement, avoid falling foul to widely varying
obscenity laws across the globe, hire people to screen for that sort of thing,
there's a whole bunch of stuff above and beyond "managing some AWS virtual
storage for video files".

~~~
baybal2
>That said: making a YouTube is a hell of a lot of work and a huge investment.
Yes I'm sure you can kludge up a simple clone of the basics in Your Favorite
Language in six hours, but can you build the infrastructure to deal with the
inevitable copyright infringement, avoid falling foul to widely varying
obscenity laws across the globe, hire people to screen for that sort of thing,
there's a whole bunch of stuff above and beyond "

As I know, current Patreon's stance on what to do with it when they reach that
stage, is to focus on English speaking speaking audience, and have no legal
presence outside of US.

As the US is the only paying off market for 9 out of 10 of any online media
businesses, it makes sense.

Same thing with CDN, if they go that way, they only have to deal with much
smaller loads, and have no need for multi-dc replication.

If they only have to deal with the most creative and valuable share of makers
that they will skim from yt, the will not have to deal with exabytes of cat
videos and other garbage content.

Same on the legal from, for as long as most content is original, the only
issue will most likely be music, but there is already a thriving industry of
RIAA-free music licensing specifically for makers thanks to YT yielding to
requests for automated takedowns/DeMo/and revenue divertions.

Maker relationships? Very straight, steal top 10% makers from YT, depriving it
of majority of genuine creative content. Here YT can't counter that with
pretty much anything: Google sells ads, Patreon sells makers themselves.
Google stays with cat videos, while Patreoners take the tasty stuff.

Predicament looks rather dim for YT unless they will have the willpower to
make a U-turn in their relationship with the creative community

------
andrewflnr
Deciding whether nudity (or anything, really) is "artistic" is hard, and
probably doesn't scale. There may not be a good solution for this problem in
the general case.

~~~
1_2__4
Maybe this isn't a problem we should be trying to solve with computers right
now, then. We've managed to survive as a species and as a western society for
years making these kinds of determinations using people, maybe we should
continue to do that.

~~~
fapjacks
The problem is then that the only possible way to implement that is
crowdsourced voting/flagging, and enough people out there don't get some kinds
of art that they would flag it that way. I think _most_ controversial modern
art would not survive on a platform like Youtube where everyday people make a
determination on the palatability of it.

~~~
alphaalpha101
That's just plainly false. It's entirely possible to implement it using
employees that are human reviewers.

If that's not profitable then they should rework their business model until it
is profitable.

~~~
ehnto
It is entirely possible that the numbers don't work. From a business point of
view if the only downside is that some art videos get incorrectly categorized
then correctly categorized after a manual review then reworking their business
model doesn't make much sense.

This is bad PR for sure but I don't think the system is failing that badly.
The rate at which video is uploaded is truly stagerring, and that's assuming
that the successes of the automation deters many bad actors.

------
mschuster91
I say it again and again: it's time to finally regulate the big social
media/tech giants (Amazon, FB, Youtube, Twitter, but also big email providers
like Gmail, AOL).

Account closures and content removals _must_ have a way to appeal operator
decisions in a court of law. My telco provider is legally barred from shutting
down my account unless I'm 3 months behind in payments - so why isn't the same
valid for the tech giants? In fact, the services of Facebook and Whatsapp are
something I more depend on than having a landline, but I'm straight outta luck
if either service decides to ban me.

And no, "choose another provider" is not a valid option, as there is _no_
alternative because no service allows me to transfer my identity (e.g. email
address) so old contacts can reach me, unlike with phone numbers.

~~~
dageshi
> And no, "choose another provider" is not a valid option, as there is no
> alternative because no service allows me to transfer my identity (e.g. email
> address) so old contacts can reach me, unlike with phone numbers.

With a bit of foresight there certainly is, your own domain pointing at gmail?

gmail removes your account, your email still works you just have to point it
at a different backend.

But therein lies the rub right? It costs money and people won't pay it,
they'll take the free option every time.

Personally I find it hard to see how these companies can be regulated in the
way that you want for services that they give away for free.

~~~
mschuster91
> With a bit of foresight there certainly is, your own domain pointing at
> gmail?

That costs money for the Google Apps Enterprise suite, and you're still
dealing with a company that isn't known for customer service - you may point
your MX records somewhere else but still can't access old emails when they
terminate you for whatever stupid reason.

(Yes, backups are a solution but many people blindly trust the cloud)

~~~
dageshi
Fundamentally companies are not obligated to give you their services for free,
which seems to be what you're demanding?

Now if you were to argue that companies must give you the opportunity to
download your data before they close your account, that I would agree with.
I'd even say a grace period of a few days so you can practically change your
email might be worth considering, but I don't see how you can possibly argue
that companies must give their services away for free just because they're
good at what they do.

~~~
mschuster91
> Fundamentally companies are not obligated to give you their services for
> free, which seems to be what you're demanding?

No, what I demand is that there must be a right to due process in an
independent court of law for services deemed essential for modern social life.
Right now, an underpaid person, who does nothing but watch the most vile
content imaginable, can close my account because he has no time to properly
assess art, political commentary or historically significant imagery (Napalm
Girl), and I have _no way at all_ to actually talk to a human to appeal - even
if I'm a _real_ customer who has paid for both Twitter and FB ads. All I have
(at least for FB) is a "reply" box but no matter what you type in there you
get canned responses back but definitely no human.

~~~
dageshi
Then have government provide an "official" email/youtube platform or hell roll
your own, which with email at least is perfectly possible.

Using these services is literally a choice, it is in many ways the _best_
choice, but it's not the only choice available.

~~~
mschuster91
> Then have government provide an "official" email/youtube platform

Lol I won't ever hand that level of personal data to a government institution.
Having a private company as a custodian of the data at least protects me/my
data from government snooping (okay, does not apply to the US with their
NSLs).

> or hell roll your own, which with email at least is perfectly possible.

No it's not, good luck setting up your own mail server - even with DKIM, SPF
and whatnot configured the major mail providers will classify you as potential
spammer. Thanks to greedy Viagra sellers and casinos, email is all but ruined
for small-ish or even single-person operations.

~~~
ue_
>Lol I won't ever hand that level of personal data to a government
institution.

But you would to a private one? Why?

------
JadeNB
Without wanting to stand up for YouTube—I don't—this complaint:

> While Villa Antropoff contains a few short scenes of cartoon nudity, Youtube
> makes clear exceptions in its policies for works that are presented in
> “artistic contexts.” The fact that a Youtube employee could have reviewed
> this film and not recognized the film’s artistic context illustrates a
> serious breakdown in the company’s ability to police content based on its
> own policies.

seems a bridge slightly too far. To be sure, it would have been nice if the
YouTube reviewer had recognised the artistic context to the piece, but the
failure of one reviewer to do so seems to be evidence of a mistake, or at
worst of misapplication of policies, not of a company run amok (although there
is plenty of evidence of that elsewhere). Since there is a process for appeal,
that seems like the step that should be taken before, or at least in parallel
with, public complaint (although the author mentions that Lunohod has decided
not to appeal).

~~~
cromwellian
The idea that everyone who is a reviewer will have exactly the same appraisal
of what's obscene, extremist, hateful, or even pornography, is ludicrous. No
one even agrees on what art is.

------
touchofevil
Why doesn't Youtube have a few formally trained filmmakers or film theorists
on staff that they can kick these sorts of edge cases up to? Someone with a
filmmaking or film theory education would instantly classify this short as art
that should be available on Youtube. I could see this video being given an age
restriction, but never banned.

~~~
chris_st
According to google, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube... _every
minute_.

There's just no way to have humans moderate that. And if we assume they'd only
decide on films where the ban was appealed, I'd bet it's still too much to do.

Weirdly, the creator of the film in question said they wouldn't appeal the
ruling.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I disagree there's "too much to do" when it comes to having humans moderate
reported or detected cases of terms violations.

We have a near crisis with people having a harder and harder time finding jobs
that don't require college degrees. A lot of older job fields machines can do
just as well, so a lot of old jobs are going away. The people are there.

Google is sitting on many billions of dollars it just doesn't want to spend
(like $100B or so, I believe?). The money to pay for people is there.

However, Google would not be nearly as profitable if it wasn't automating away
jobs that as we've continually seen, automation is pretty bad at doing. This
is a business decision, plain and simple. New jobs for humans aren't opening
up because tech companies are insisting on using automation to do things
automation isn't good at.

~~~
delecti
At 300 hours/minute they'd need 18,000 pairs of eyes judging videos constantly
(not all videos need to be judged immediately, but that's fine). Assuming a
normal employee works 50 weeks of 40 hours a year, that means that each
employee is only working about 23% of the time. In the end they'd need about
80,000 employees to judge everything that gets uploaded. Wikipedia says they
had 57,100 employees in 2015. With inefficiency (HR, payroll, managers,
manager-managers, devs to write video audit software, etc), they'd need to
triple their workforce solely to keep up with youtube.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
As both I and the parent suggested, you'd only need humans reviewing content
that is reported or automatically flagged. And you'd have a second level set
of people for appeals handling.

~~~
dmoy
Right but if, like is happening in this case, the owner of the video
intentionally does not appeal... then what?

------
philfrasty
If you run a fitness-channel on YouTube (I do) and your thumbnail contains a
topless body, the video will not be monetized. No more sixpack tutorials I
guess...

~~~
Endy
Why not just create a static title card for your thumbnail?

~~~
overcast
Because that doesn't attract viewers like nudity does. How many times have you
seen a half naked chick as the thumbnail, yet never appears in the video?

~~~
vanderZwan
Remember when YT immediately counted every view regardless of how long someone
watched, and there was this plague of clickbait? For example headless women
showing their cleavage in the thumbnail, because there were enough horny
idiots dumb enough to click the thumbnail.

That's why they switched to 30 seconds initially, and now to something more
percentage based i think

(Funny enough it is practically impossible to Google the articles that
described these changes when they first happened; I read them bs k then and
I've been looking for them for ten minutes to no avail)

