zlacker

>>furcyd+(OP)
I don't know if YouTube's problems are so bad that the argument applies in this case, but in general, "We can't comply with this regulation, it would be too difficult at our scale" is not considered a valid defense. Just as banks shouldn't be allowed to get so large that they can't fail without wreaking havoc on the economy, if algorithmic recommendation and moderation can't work, then maybe social networks shouldn't be allowed to get so large that human moderation is not possible.

>>Analem+6j
The queue for getting your video posted on YouTube would grow infinitely. (Or, more realistically, people would give up and not bother once it takes years.)

But I guess they could charge money to get to the head of the line?

>>skybri+hk
That's not true you can upload a video and not allow it to be recommended until some human review was done. Most youtube channels don't need the recommendation engine.

>>Pretze+tl
That just isn't feasible. Videos would literally take years to get into the recommended status - another comment pointed out there are 500 new videos uploaded per SECOND.

>>LocalP+Rl
If there was one dude, sure. But apparently YouTube is in the business of supporting the upload of 500 videos/second so they need to deal with the consequences of it. It's not like there's any regulation forcing them to be the place everyone uploads videos to and there are some valid competitors (though they're far less into the publishing/editorializing facet - vimeo is much more often direct linked for instance)

>>munk-a+zm
To be clear, I am not speaking for anybody in this thread but myself.

But I will unapologetically and forthrightedly say that, yes, if we're going to assert that YouTube has certain responsibilities for the nature of the videos that it hosts, and that it turns out that the nature of those responsibilities is such that YouTube can't possible meet them, then, yes, YouTube as we know it should be essentially shut down, at least going forward.

I am NOT going to say we should deliberately craft the responsibilities in such a way that YouTube is deliberately shut down. However, if it turns out that they are incapable of applying even the bare minimum effort that we as a society deem it necessary for them to apply, then, yes, it is absolutely a consequence that YouTube as we know it today may have to be so radically altered as to be a different site entirely.

In the general case, when the law requires certain obligations of you as a business, and you as a business can not meet them, that does not mean that suddenly those obligations are not applied to you. It means that your business is not legally viable, and needs to change until it is. It may be the case that there is no solution to being legally viable and being profitable, in which case, your business will cease to exist. Just as there is, for instance, no solution to being a business built around selling torrent files containing unlicensed commercial content to people. You can't defend yourself by saying you can't afford to get the licenses; your suitable legal remedy was to never have started this business in the first place. There's some concerns around grandfathering here to deal with, certainly, but they can still be affected going forward.

There is no guarantee that there is a solution where a company exerting whatever minimal control they are obligated to assert by society is capable of growing to the size of YouTube. If that is the case, so be it. The solution is not to just let them go because they happened to grow fast first.

(My solution to freedom of expression is an explosion of video sites, where each of them has ways of holding the videos to the societally-mandated minimum standard, and no one site can do it all because they simply can't muster the resources to be The One Site, because as they grow larger they encounter anti-scaling effects. Given how increasingly censorious Silicon Valley is becoming, as we are now into censoring the discussions about censoring discussions like the recent removal of Project Veritas from Twitter for its discussion of Pinterest censoring pro-life films, I expect this to increase the range of expression, not diminish it.)

>>jerf+ip
Not speaking on behalf of what I want, but on behalf of what is true:

> It may be the case that there is no solution to being legally viable and being profitable, in which case, your business will cease to exist.

Or your business will exist illegally.

There's this interesting interplay between law and economics, where law is generally taken as a prerequisite for frictionless commerce, and yet at the same time if activities that large groups of people wish to partake in are made illegal, the market just routes around them and black markets spring up to provide them. Prohibition. The War on Drugs. Filesharing. Gambling. Employing illegal immigrants. Usury. Short-term rentals. Taxi medallions. Large swaths of the economy under communism.

There are a couple other interesting phenomena related to this: the very illegality of the activity tends to create large profits around it (because it creates barriers to entry, such that the market often ends up monopolized by a small cartel), and the existence of widespread black markets erodes respect for rule of law itself. When people see people around them getting very rich or otherwise deriving benefit from flouting the law, why should they follow it?

Switching to editorializing mode, I think that this gradual erosion of respect for law to be quite troubling, and I also think that the solution to it needs to be two-fold: stop trying to outlaw behaviors that are offensive to some but beloved by others, and start enforcing laws that if neglected really will result in the destruction of the system.