
YouTube Limits Mods to Viewing 4 Hours of Disturbing Content per Day - Erlangolem
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/13/17117554/youtube-content-moderators-limit-four-hours-sxsw
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tsumnia
Good to hear; a few years ago I'd read an article about a former moderator
about the practices needed to remove YouTube videos. One particular practice
that was necessary was to watch the video IN FULL (many videos involving
death) and document the entirety of the video's contents. The article also
talked about how there was no type of psychological support to the moderators
and that many left the position after about 6 months.

EDIT: Here are two articles:

[https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-
moderation/](https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html)

The first link has a good comment on why this is a big deal: "If someone was
uploading animal abuse, a lot of the time it was the person who did it. He was
proud of that," Rob says. "And seeing it from the eyes of someone who was
proud to do the fucked-up thing, rather than news reporting on the fucked-up
thing—it just hurts you so much harder, for some reason. It just gives you a
much darker view of humanity."

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tialaramex
Sometimes there's a task we need a human for, and it turns out humans can't do
it for long periods, but because we've sort of internalised this idea that a
working day is 8 hours, we struggle to accept the idea that a person who put
in say, two hours with a two hour break has done a day's work. It feels
intuitively unfair.

But the universe doesn't care about our intuitions.

The example that immediately comes to mind for me is railway lookout.
Sometimes for practical reasons rather than closing a railway to send people
onto the track, or deploying technological countermeasures to protect the
workers, we have to resort to a human stood at a vantage point looking out for
trains and signalling to their co-workers on the track. In principle this
should happen only when it's absolutely necessary, in practice humans, even
those who actually work on the track, often think it sounds _easier_ and pick
it over safer alternatives.

Humans are really bad at being lookout because it's very boring. You stare
into the distance, and Either a thing happens, or it doesn't, for minute after
minute. With practice, and in the knowledge that if you screw-up your co-
workers (probably friends) may die or be gruesomely injured by a train,
workers can remain focused on this very boring task for almost an hour in test
conditions.

But try telling a team of hard-working manual labourers that an hour as
lookout, then a proper break for a couple of hours and then one more session
of an hour as lookout constitutes a working day. They can agree intellectually
that this is so, having done the job, but stood there, not breaking a sweat,
just kind of bored, if one of them is mistakenly not relieved they will try to
grit their teeth and carry on. And then, perhaps, the boredom overwhelms them,
and before they know it a colleague is lying broken in a ditch, there are blue
lights, people crying, investigators are asking them questions about what they
saw, what they remember...

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ghostbrainalpha
I had a friend who reviewed AdSense websites for disturbing content for
Google.

She had a promising career right out of college and was excited to be working
at Google, even though it wasn't what she wanted to be doing. After about a
month she would just start crying randomly on nights and weekends when we hung
out.

After about a year she quit to become a baker. I really think she has a kind
of PTSD from it.

If there was one job I wish the robots could take, its this one. Although its
important that it be a super highly qualified AI, and not the crap we have
now.

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snowwrestler
It's tempting to think that dogfooding would be useful here. If everyone at
YouTube had to moderate content, even some small percentage of their time, it
would keep the problem fresh in everyone's minds as they build and run the
business.

This is probably not actually a good idea... moderation takes training and
making everyone do it could make it harder to recruit and retain talented
engineers. The attractiveness of the idea is probably more attributable to how
frustrating the problem is.

~~~
Erlangolem
Could you take your idea, but remove the actual moderation part? Every week or
month, have a lowlights reel of the worst the mods had to sort through played
at meetings. It couldn’t be four hours, and only the mods would moderate, but
everyone would get a sense of what’s out there and what the mods are doing.

~~~
ramblerman
The point was that we have X hours of horrible material to sift through. Why
not see it as a team effort, let everyone carry the burden a little bit, and
perhaps in the process build products with that reality in mind.

Not do more harm by collecting the worst of the worst and forcing everyone in
a room to watch it....

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throwaway2016a
One job I look forward to being replaced by AI.

I worked for a search engine / media company early in my career. Big enough
that if I said the name you might remember their TV ads from the 90s. But when
I worked there it was after the dot-com bubble and the content moderation team
was down to one guy in a room with the door shut so know one else could see
his screen.

So on top of looking at disturbing content all day he was isolated from other
humans. And it's not like he could discuss his job with them. It's not really
"polite conversation."

I wouldn't wish that job on anyone.

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dsschnau
If you're liming mods to that maybe you should limit users too....

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swarnie_
Mods do it for a job, users are free to close the window and walk away
whenever they want.

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artursapek
I wonder what that column in their database is called...

This disturbing Youtube video problem is an interesting one, it feels like a
persistent DoS attack on the platform.

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londons_explore
This is a way to limit costs.

They already promised to hire 10k people.

If you only have to pay each for 4 hours rather than 8 per day, you pay less.

~~~
craftyguy
Not to mention it's impossible to be a full-time employee working just 4 hours
a day, so they also don't have to pay those 10k employees full-time benefits.

~~~
Endy
Let's be honest, that's probably most of their thinking. Google has forgotten
the "Don't" part of "Don't Be Evil".

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koolba
I wonder if that factors in watching the content at x2 speed, ie 4 hours of
viewing vs 4 hours of total content.

The 2x speed viewing is handy for things like subtitled recipes and I’d
imagine would be used for something like this as well.

