
YouTube employees say violent threats from creators have been going on for years - unclebucknasty
http://www.businessinsider.com/former-youtube-staffers-say-video-creators-have-threatened-employees-2018-4
======
mschuster91
Basically the article confirms what I wrote back when the shooting occurred
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16754438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16754438)):
Youtube (and the other social networks!) desperately need a customer support
that actually deserves to be called a support.

When you have a service where people's livings depend on, and you take away
their income source (in corp doublespeak: demonetize them) AND at the same
time offer them only canned responses or, worse, no contact at all, some of
them WILL be driven to desperation. Hell, the inhumanity actually IS the word
"demonetization": it sounds harmless but it is everything else than that.

And even worse: Youtube has _recognized_ that there is a problem with the
consequences their non-existence of a support has, but, typical for US
culture, they head for fighting the symptoms (increasing "security") instead
of fixing the problem (hire support staff with a decent bit of leeway).

~~~
spondyl
I always wondered why tech companies had such an impenetrable inward
communication until I came across the following insight:

"If you have a billion users, and 0.1% of them have an issue that requires
support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three
years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally
resolve, then you'd spend 19 person-years handling support issues every day.

If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you'd need
20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up. Amazing."[0]

It's not necessarily the exact same source that I discovered back then but the
idea is the same. Even a tiny portion of customer service would still soak up
a large amount of money, perhaps rightfully so, but at the scale some of these
companies are, it quickly becomes unsustainable.

[0]:
[https://plus.google.com/+DeWittClinton/posts/1hRWj489oEz](https://plus.google.com/+DeWittClinton/posts/1hRWj489oEz)

~~~
pavlov
It's a misleading estimate because it doesn't define "user". In the case of
YouTube, there are a billion users but only creators would require support.

Maybe there are 100,000 YouTube creators who get paid anything meaningful? (I
have no idea, just guessing.) If 0.1% of them require support, that's 100
requests per day. Any moderately successful mom-and-pop SaaS gets that much.

There's no financial reason for Alphabet not to provide personal support to
YouTube creators. They just don't want to.

~~~
polishTar
What you're suggesting is how it already works. Partnered creators all have
access to a creator support email (with a 1 business day SLO). Top partnered
creators (aka the "creators who get paid anything meaningful") will also have
a partner manager they can contact for 1-1 advice/support/etc.

~~~
pavlov
Great. So maybe the bar for support is set too high? Someone making $50 /
month on YouTube is meaningless to Google but may spend an enormous amount of
time on that content in the hope of a breakout. Those are probably the people
whose mental health is most at risk.

It’s Alphabet’s community, they own it. Extending more support to dedicated
members may not make direct business sense but it could be the right thing for
long-term community health.

~~~
chongli
But how do you tell those dedicated users apart from all the bot accounts that
post millions of hours of garbage backed by a computer voice narrator?

~~~
isoskeles
Bot accounts won’t be calling customer support.

------
post_break
This is what happens when you promise ad revenue, and then slowly, without any
information, begin shadow banning channels and videos, meanwhile YouTube still
runs ads and gets the cut. You will get crazy people who depend on YouTube for
income, and then without any warning your income is slashed. Did you break the
terms? No. Did you get banned? No. You just get 1/8th the views because who
knows why?

Well you say to yourself, just go somewhere else. Where? There is no video
platform that offers the ability to advertise like YouTube that has even close
the amount of eye balls. Well then just use Patreon! Yeah good luck getting
people to sign up unless you're wildly popular and do this as your day job.
You're basically squeezed into this hole where you were making money, enjoying
what you were doing, and trying to build something with YouTube, and now
you're trying to read between the lines of what is advertiser friendly and
won't get your shadow banned. It's an abusive relationship that people who
have money think you should just do something else.

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dschuetz
It's a two-sided coin actually. You cannot blame Youtube for people's choices
to go fully dependent on viewer count revenues, it's irresponsible to say the
least. But, you can blame Youtube for changing the rules whenever and however
they sit fit without considering such grave consequences. This thing with
Youtube demonetization is pretty messed up. In any case, would you rather
invest in a Ponzi scheme? No, who would be _that_ stupid, right? Right?

~~~
pluma
You absolutely can blame YouTube for encouraging content creators to go "all
in".

They are absolutely aware of this and the design of YouTube highly emphasises
these metrics (which in turn translate to financial success). They allowed the
formation of networks (few successful channels are "independent", finding a
network is usually one of the first steps creators take when seeking to become
"professional"). Their promos (e.g. Rewind) routinely feature content with
high production values that are only possible with financial investment and
they actively promote the idea of having YouTube "celebrities" (although
lately there has been a shift towards "importing" TV personalities).

What YouTube did was create a culture around their platform that encourages
people to go full time and earn money by producing content for YouTube for
free and get a cut of the ad revenue in return.

In order to fight creators who gamed the system they then went and created an
air of mystery around what content they actively promote (just listen to
YouTubers talk about "the algorithm"), leading to various superstitions and
conspiracy theories while intentionally driving creators to change the kind of
content they create in order to adapt.

Then they pulled the rug underneath creators by secretly demonetising videos,
resulting in revenue to drop for seemingly no reason until they made the
monetisation status more visible (which sparked the "adpocalypse" drama). At
that point many creators diversified their income via patreon but this relied
on viewers to actually part with their money, which only worked for channels
with very dedicated fans or a consistent level of quality (further adding to
the pressure to churn out new content and reach a wider audience).

Meanwhile YouTube has been abandoning the independent creators that drove the
site's initial success in favor of big name production studios moving content
from TV over to YouTube or creating tie-ins. The independent creators that
still do well are mostly the ones heavily relying on clickbait to drive fews
and churning out short and shallow content that allows them to feed the
algorithm and stay relevant (although even these now often rely on product
placement and sponsorship deals).

On the one hand this is a classical story of a startup pivoting as it adapts
to market changes and hits problems of scale. On the other hand there is a
massive social cost YouTube is all but neglecting to take responsibility for.

YouTube doesn't care how their changes affect the livelihoods of creators.
Free market libertarians will say they shouldn't have to care about this and
they are absolutely right legally speaking. But let's not pretend the effects
those decisions have on real people's lives weren't predictable.

There's the old Web 2.0 joke that "there's nothing social about social media"
but YouTube certainly lives up to that. Note that all of this wouldn't be half
as bad if YouTube were at all approachable to its creators. Instead, by using
an unpredictable "algorithm" to hand out punishments (demonetisation, content
claims, strikes) and rewards ("trending", "watch next", etc), YouTube creates
a victim mindset which naturally breeds resentment.

EDIT: If anything, YouTube is a high-risk high-reward precursor to other
"sharing economy" companies like Uber, except Uber's playing field is much
more level.

~~~
spamizbad
I fail to understand how any of this justifies violence and threats against
YouTube employees. Tying your income to an "algorithm" will always be a high
risk proposition. The whole field of entertainment video itself has always
been a very tough business to break into that carried with it lots of risks.
People thought YouTube was easy money, and perhaps for a while it was, but it
would be naive to assume that gravy train had any long-term potential.

The world of television is full of stories of pilot episodes that get picked
up, are a smash hit for a few seasons, but get cancelled. The producers of
those shows didn't have right to shoot up ABC, NBC, or Fox and many just
licked their wounds and tried again.

~~~
Dibbles
People tie their income to Youtube because they think Youtube is fair. They
certainly give the impression that it is (we only demonitize terrorist videos,
etc.). But because Youtube is completely controlled by a messy algorithm, they
don't live up to that impression at all. People find out when it's too late.

~~~
pluma
This is pretty much it.

YouTube disavow their responsibility by deferring their decisions to "the
algorithm" and surely you can't blame a machine. But the obvious truth is that
they're in control of it and could change it -- even if it is too complicated
to predict, nothing is forcing them to use it and they could still replace it
with something more predictable but less "error-prone". Instead they chose not
to, which means they are entirely responsible for the outcome.

This isn't unique to YouTube either. Plenty of tech companies try to hide
behind a wall of maths to justify unethical behavior.

------
dawnerd
I suspect Twitch has/will have the same problems as more creators move over to
live shows to fill the gap left by Youtube.

------
Density
so much for "don't be evil"

~~~
UncleMeat
Ridiculous. I work in security. Public facing security names often get threats
from organized crime. I'm not at Google, but is what I do evil?

The existence of threats does not mean what you are doing is evil.

------
captainbland
"Speed of your thrusts?"

Somebody's gonna get injured.

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senectus1
this is totally unsurprising.

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rajacombinator
YouTube and Google are brutalistically antihuman companies. It would be
trivially easy for them to solve these problems, but they don’t care.

~~~
UncleMeat
Trivially easy to solve violent threats?

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rqs
Off-topic, but "creators"?

It's funny to think that some people think they can be called "creator" just
because they're making and uploading video to the Internet.

Yes, some of those videos are fun to watch, maybe informative, but to be
honest, I don't think they "created" anything more than other media did, so
why give them that title?

"Producers" maybe better?

~~~
onion2k
It differentiates them from "consumers" who watch the videos. When you have
two different groups of users you need two words.

Also, I think you underestimate how much work goes in to some popular
channels. People with millions of subscribers often have production teams that
would rival a well funded TV show. It's something I find a little saddening
when kids say they want to be a YouTuber as a career choice; they think it's a
guy in his bedroom with a camera and a laptop. It _really_ isn't.

~~~
rqs
> It differentiates them from "consumers" who watch the videos. When you have
> two different groups of users you need two words.

So the "consumer" is the viewer, and "creator" is the video maker/uploader.

Well, that make more sense when you put those two words inside the YouTube
circle.

Thank you and corobo for explaining.

