YouTube Will Disable Comments on Nearly All Videos With Kids (variety.com) 172
YouTube said today it will disable the ability for viewers to leave comments on most videos featuring minors, as it tries to contain the damage from a scandal involving child predators leaving coded sexual comments on the site. From a report: YouTube said in a blog post Thursday that over the past week it had already disabled comments from "tens of millions of videos" that could be subject to predatory behavior. Now, it will expand that to suspend comments on virtually all videos featuring young minors, as well as videos featuring older kids that "could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior." In a tweet, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki linked to the update and explained the change: "Recently, there have been some deeply concerning incidents regarding child safety on YouTube. Nothing is more important to us than ensuring the safety of young people on the platform."
Not surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
Was actually talking about the current "adpocalypse" and its causes, and wondered if youtube wouldn't be eventually working towards disabling comments. In fact, I'd go a step further and start phasing out comments in general. While they increase "engagement", they're so incredibly useless that I definitely wouldn't miss them. Leave chats for livestreams, though, as that actually provides instantaneous feedback that can be valuable.
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Was actually talking about the current "adpocalypse" and its causes, and wondered if youtube wouldn't be eventually working towards disabling comments. In fact, I'd go a step further and start phasing out comments in general. While they increase "engagement", they're so incredibly useless that I definitely wouldn't miss them. Leave chats for livestreams, though, as that actually provides instantaneous feedback that can be valuable.
sometimes I go there just for the comments...
Re:Not surprised (Score:4, Informative)
"useless" very much depends on the video. Yes, comments on most entertainment-style videos are probably useless, they can be helpful on how-to videos and the like, especially if the channel is small enough that the creator actually sees and responds to the comments.
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or go one step further by removing ads from all videos featuring children. That would remove the incentives for adults to exploit children for financial gain on YouTube.
It would punish normal families vlogging normal family stuff. Not what I watch, but apparently that's pretty common. Unless you're really stretching the meaning of "exploit" and that's what you meant.
It would remove financial incentives for kids posting whatever kids post about themselves. I'm not sure that matters much, though you'd need some exception for professional performers, I'd think. Much as the web would have been better off without Justin Beiber,
It would not remove the incentive for actual
Re: Not surprised (Score:1)
Big G, Hasbro, Chuck E Cheese, et Al would like to have stern words with you for attempting to interfere with their cash cow programming. These cheap toys (cheap to MAKE, they're still expensive as hell, trust me.) won't just sell themselves, we need an army of tiny, stubborn, whiny salespeople to hock our shit for us until the parents give in.
Seriously, as the father of two young children I can barely have them watch TV. It's a vapid wasteland of 4m of program and 26m of REALLYALLY FUCKING LOUD, REPETITIVE
Re: Not surprised (Score:1)
I should really stop posting from my phone. Spellcheck and auto complete are killing me.
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That would remove the incentives for adults to exploit children for financial gain on YouTube.
Indeed. Children shouldn't be allowed to earn anything until they are 18.
Also children need to be thrown out of the house when they are 18 and stop mooching off their parents.
Also why don't those young adults own houses yet. Their entire generation is so slack!
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
[comments are] so incredibly useless that I definitely wouldn't miss them.
I disagree. When I see a video making an incorrect statement, I often see the highest voted comment is one making a correction. I think this is great.
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I often find more interest in the comments than in the videos, want to kill Youtube further kill the comments, who cares, YouTube is already dying, so meh. Once you provide commenting, take it away and immediately lose readers and Google pretty much truly does deserve to lose users all over the place, pretty nasty bunch and make no mistake.
Reality is the big shits at Alphabet are purely focused on turning YouTube into nothing but a wall to wall advertising channel, all advertising all of the time, ads brea
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Sufferin' succotash.
We've living in a privileged western representative that mostly provides safe water, regular food, and your Mom's internet... but yeah, youtube comments are such a buzzkill, of the like we haven't seen since 1998, when the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
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start phasing out comments in general. While they increase "engagement", they're so incredibly useless that I definitely wouldn't miss them
Really? Never? You've never seen useful information relevant to a video in the comments, or had an enlightening conversation in comments? Maybe the problem is you're only watching trash videos and nothing educational or intellectual. Your idea is preposterous.
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Not ALL comments are useless. Often times a comment will be time stamps because the original uploader was too lazy. People asking for the name of the song / video / game / etc. are also very handy. I've come across a LOT of new media due to user comments: "If you liked this you may also like ..."
Also having questions about the content answered by _other knowledgeable viewers_ provides value.
Throwing the baby out with bath water just dumbs YouTube down even further.
This is why we can't have nice things -- b
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Fair points, but, if they're going to have "advertiser friendly comments" being enforced by video creators, we're going to have to have some sort of moderation system in place that can handle the massive amount of comments that some videos get.
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Comments aren't useless, its just that the YT comment system is horrific. Its impossible to view comments on videos with 1k+ comments because of how they load. They lack any kind of threading system really, so you can't have easy to follow conversations on there. If YT would implement a karma system where upvotes improve your karma and then they filter bad karma commenters, then the YT comments section wouldn't be... "the YT comments sections."
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I probably would leave the comments on, but hand all the info for the FBI.
So it has come to this (xkcd 1022) (Score:2)
This is the end of comments on the web as we know it.
As usual, a handful of assholes ruined something for everybody else.
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This is the end of comments on the web as we know it.
As usual, a handful of assholes ruined something for everybody else.
That's a bit of an exaggeration- it's one site. A few others might stop sensitive topics; there was an article just yesterday about an uncensored add-in that lets you discuss any web page even if it doesn't have a built in comment section.
Some options for communication will close and others are open.
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Gab wants to be an external comment section for any 3rd party URL. That is the future of comments.
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Gab wants to be an external comment section for any 3rd party URL. That is the future of comments.
That I'm sure will improve things.
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They're already there. Gab is mainly a honeypot for law enforcement.
As long as it's not Google (Score:2)
Wonder how long it'll take the pedos to move their discussions over to {...somewhere else...}
As long as that moving destination isn't hosted by Google, it's find by them: They can claim that they have done their side of the work to avoid becoming the home base of {...latest scarecrow..}, and get all the precious advertising money back.
Dealing with the backlash of having become a "discussion enabler" for {...latest scarecrow...} and potentially losing ad money revenue (if that's the way they finance themselves) is the destination platform's problem. Not youtubes.
Why stop there? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why stop there? (Score:5, Insightful)
YouTube comments are some of the worst on the internet.
This comment is worse than most YouTube comments.
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This comment is worse than most YouTube comments.
That's correct!
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Watch smarter videos and you'll get smarter comments.
I frequently see good commenting on math and science videos. The ratio is lower on political videos, but still quite valuable when someone points out factual errors and links evidence.
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Taiwan as the real China?
Nothing to say about political memes and funny art?
No adding to a video about a cult, faith, religion.
No comments about a German history video?
Lots of groups, NGO's, nations, think tanks will have great reasons as to why comments should be stopped.
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The comment system on YouTube is not the best but the content matters more than the platform.
Some videos have awesome comments. "PBS Space Time" is a good example but it is in no way special.
It is just like Reddit and Hacker News, which work in about the same way. Some consider Reddit to be the worst, but Hacker News have one of the best comment section, better than Slashdot in fact. It is not specific to HN, there are some awesome subreddits too.
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Maybe you think that by remo
Re:Great (Score:4, Informative)
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If you don't like YT, you technically don't have to use it.
Sure I know I don't have to use it, but please show me the alternative that has about just half as many users. Anywhere?
The right to free speech is not the same thing as the right to the biggest available audience.
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In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news YouTube nuked its head office from orbit in order to deal with a mouse found in their cafeteria kitchen.
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Also, spiders require the LOIC. A rat you can get rid of with a firebomb.
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Well, it was the only way to be sure. /Aliens
Why stop there? (Score:1)
Youtube comments are pretty much garbage, just ban them all and nothing of value will be lost.
Re:Why stop there? (Score:5, Informative)
YouTube comments on most "how-to" videos can be pretty useful, they're another source of information.
Re:Why stop there? (Score:4, Insightful)
How-to videos are a relatively small subset of the total videos on the platform, and even they aren't immune from garbage comments. A quick serach for "how to repair" auto-suggested this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvtoikKG318
Now while the comments on this particular video aren't openly racist, calling for a group's extermination, or cancer, but they're still mostly useless. And the shit-posters on YouTube will start moving around to other videos once they can't comment on a certain category of video as their primary motivation is to shitpost.
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Which you would gladly suppress the conversation on/for because *you* think comments are useless.
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Keeps the asshats busy though. I dont want them all commenting in the wild.
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I agree. Especially the ones from Anonymous Cowards. I think 90% of the quality issues with /. comments would go away if AC posting was removed, at least for a while.
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Sure, if you feel destroying the influx of new users (commenting participants) leading to the eventual disappearance of the entire site is a good solution to the problem. That would eliminate 100% of the bad comments by eliminating 100% of the comments.
This subject has been discussed countless times in the past. Look at those older discussions from the early slashdot.
Any media is a reflection of the individuals who make it, who are themselves a subset of the individuals who consume it. Therefore if you woul
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Re: Why stop there? (Score:2)
I like how you try to lecture him on what is and isn't censorship, despite clearly having no clue what the word means.
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> Why applaud censorship
Censorship? Where the hell is it written that it is your God given right to comment on videos?
Hysteria (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought I had seen some incredible feats of hysteria before, but this has to be a new high water mark. Because some comments *might* be left by perverts, we are just getting rid of them altogether? "Featuring minors" also is incredibly vague, would this include anything with child actors? What about reviews of something that featured child actors?
I feel like this is just going to push yet another chunk of the creator base to other platforms, if they exist. It might be time for Youtube to decide on the content it really wants on its platform and then build outward from there, as they have obviously moved (or been forced) away from just a general video sharing service.
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There's a reason the keys to the kingdom are so often worded "think of the children". How far we've come that the issue is precisely so many adults "think of th
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"Featuring minors" also is incredibly vague, would this include anything with child actors? What about reviews of something that featured child actors?
Youtube has a now-standard policy to over react and sort it out if anyone of importance complains.
To answer your question, yes it includes all of that and more. Car videos, cats and dogs, the 24 hour count down timer, the seven minutes of silence song, all of that qualifies as "featuring minors"
A mod can go down a whole page of videos flagging all of them without a glance and this is acceptable.
If you think "featuring minors" is any sort of definition or defining term to youtube, it might help in making se
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I am confused (Score:2)
Are these "coded sexual comments" somehow secretly raping the servers or what? If they are coded you would expect that nobody outside of the know actually notices or cares. This seems to be a panic-reaction at best. Talk about throwing out the [censored] with the bathwater.
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And where is the problem with that? Does them looking at some videos suddenly turn these videos "bad"?
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And where is the problem with that? Does them looking at some videos suddenly turn these videos "bad"?
Obviously not, but one must question the source of the motivation to upload videos of your children performing actions clearly intended to provoke sexual arousal.
It's a very difficult problem. The solution is not to do nothing but it is also clearly not possible to eliminate this type of behavior. It's not much different from the way homosexuals were treated as "mentally ill" and remain so to a certain degree today. Is pedophilia a mental illness? Can we differentiate between subjective emotional reactions
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The solution is to ban minors, and videos featuring them, from YouTube.
That will never happen, though, because teens and tweens make up over 90% of all YouTube views and ad revenue.
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And where is the problem with that? Does them looking at some videos suddenly turn these videos "bad"?
The advertisers realized their ads were not reaching who they thought they were reaching, and pulled the ads. That's the problem.
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This is the first I've read of any supposed "sexual predation" in relation to this story. Where did the paedo angle come from? Every other article, including the one linked, only makes mention of macabre & violent content being hidden in the midst of the videos, explicitly for unexpecting kids to see. There's nothing "coded" about it, it's shock material that was meant to be seen.
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Good question. I think it was already discussed here https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
I have no idea where this discussion angle started. Probably just the usual moral panic nonsense.
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Re: I am confused (Score:2)
This is not about the self-harm clips in video for kids, this is about pedophiles watching normal videos of kids and leaving comments pointing out the parts they found most interesting
TFS says it's about pesos, then links to an article about self harm videos. I assume that the dumbass used the wrong link, but as it stands, nothing in the article or summary actually shows any pedo problem.
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Ah. Hence the confusion. These are separate issues. The self harm is an older and decidedly serious problem, the "pedo rings on youtube commenting on videos" issue is a panic just a few days old.
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Why can't they just disable the searching?
It's Yet Another Stupid Moral Panic (Score:2)
Are these "coded sexual comments" somehow secretly raping the servers or what? If they are coded you would expect that nobody outside of the know actually notices or cares. This seems to be a panic-reaction at best. Talk about throwing out the [censored] with the bathwater.
At least some people are of the opinion that the guy who set the ball rolling made most of this up, and basically this is mostly a panic in the grand tradition of such things as the Satanic Child Abuse Panic of a few decades ago...which people are still sorting out the legal fallout of, despite how debunked it is.
I'd honestly start pushing for YT to start at least considering demonetizing videos that get too heavy into whipping up histerias for views--possibly also disabling the view counts from displaying
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Makes sense.
YouTube comments cover a spectrum (Score:4, Interesting)
"Profit" (Score:4, Insightful)
If the next world from a company isn't "profit" then the statement is probably a lie.
A good idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
...not only because of your "regular" suspects.
But one of the major problems kids face today, is the endless onslaught of their peers who often will ridicule them, stalk them - too many times leading to possible suicide, because a kid can't handle snide comments as well as adults, will often hide this from their parents, and suffer in silence, shamed by their anonymous schoolmates and cyberbullies who also are kids, and don't quite understand how serious this is before suicide threats become real.
Personally, I think there should be an age-restriction on video uploads. And commenting should be something that could be in closed circuits only, like family and "approved" friends. Then it would be okay, much like a family album online with keys that only invited parties can get.
Re:A good idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
You identified problem that kids are unable to cope with adversity and your proposed solution is to further insulate them? How is that going to result in them growing up to become well-adjusted adults capable of coping with life? Kids eventually grow up and have to face adult life that is at best indifferent to your problems, and at worst cruel, mean, and full of unnecessary suffering.
Re:A good idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
You identified problem that kids are unable to cope with adversity and your proposed solution is to further insulate them? How is that going to result in them growing up to become well-adjusted adults capable of coping with life? Kids eventually grow up and have to face adult life that is at best indifferent to your problems, and at worst cruel, mean, and full of unnecessary suffering.
Good parenting is the key. It's not our job to raise peoples kids, but it IS our job to find ways to project the masses from obvious abuse, it might not be ideal, but this is not a perfect world, and youtube is NOT your or my property. As it is now, it's basically just an entertainment platform made by their content creators, either for profit or for fun.
I'd like to live in a sensorship free world, that is my dream, yet as I get older, I realize we need some basic rules for things, for example - if we didn't have any kind of police, we'd basically be a society of survival-of-the-fittest and it'd be total anarchy. No, I don't always agree with the lawmakers, and I hate new rules as much as the next person in here.
But the bullying I've seen of kids, mostly BY other kids - tells me that there's certain media that we're not ready to handle properly yet, and we need some way of regulating it. If YouTube was open source, owned by the public, controlled by the public - it would be a different story, and maybe we'd have better ways of controlling the outcome of this kind of "overwhelming" success.
YouTube is truly victims of their own success, on one hand - they have massive server fees to pay for, on the other hand - they've got millions of entitled people who thinks that their services should remain free and uncensored. You really can't please them all.
I miss the "old" uncensored YouTube - but it ain't worth the life of a single kid, or adult for that matter.
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I miss the "old" uncensored YouTube - but it ain't worth the life of a single kid, or adult for that matter.
It absolutely worth it. We can't protect everyone from everything, and if we try we will end up in either surveillance dystopia or tyranny or both. It is tragic, but some people will die no matter what you do.
Re:A good idea... (Score:5, Informative)
You are choosing to be willfully ignorant that children today are exposed to orders of magnitude more cruelty, meanness, and unnecessary suffering in social settings than we had to face.
This is hysterical overreaction and symptomatic helicopter parenting response. Crime is down, every school is on anti-bullying initiative, every teacher and parent is hypervigilant about all kinds of nonsense issues (i.e. stranger danger).
Children today are insulated to the point that basic coping skills fail to develop due to atrophy. Hence we have trigger warnings and victimhood culture. Just add the numbers, helicopter parenting hysteria started sometime during 80s. Now look at what is going on in Universities and places where most workers are young (startups and tech).
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Fuck you and your rules, you goddamned spineless pussy.
...said Anonymous Coward.
As a parent (Score:2)
Wasn't one of the biggest channels... (Score:3)
Interesting timing (Score:2)
This happens around the same time that dissenter add-on for most popular browsers came out:
https://dissenter.com/ [dissenter.com]
Should be interesting to see if it manages to become popular enough to replace website implementations for more than just the actual dissenters from mainstream if youtube et al start to clamp down on comment sections that hard.
So what stops..... (Score:2)
Make the internet Adults safe, only 15+ yrs old (Score:1)
"Won't someone think of the children!"
Guns, internet, Speech silencing excuses.
#FreedonToHear what you want us to hear, F Censors/excuses.
You be with the children when on internet, be a good parent.
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Helicopter parent != good parent.
gab? (Score:2)
yesterday's article about gab providing the ability to have comments for every page on the internet in mind, it doesn't matter anymore if your site allows comments or not. except ofcourse, that youtube can now wash their hands in denial as it's no longer their problem.
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What the hell is "bullshit"? Is there an actual bovine inside my screen taking a dump?
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Yes, but only unneutered males.
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What's with this fucking "predator" bullshit language?
Found the pedophile.
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Are they talking about EATING children?! What's with this fucking "predator" bullshit language?
Astonishingly, some words have more than the one literal meaning.