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- (likely written earlier than this porting date)
- Originally titled “Explanation, Escalation”, and directed toward YouTube, but it’s universal.
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This appears to be incomplete, and might have been badly-ported from an ancient system to the earlier system, with information being lost in that transition.
There have been previous and there are current efforts to organize users to resist certain trollish behaviors.
My concern, and my suggested solution runs much deeper.
A perceived lack of responsibility, or any sort of detachment from people and consequence will being out another sort of personality from some people.
Take something simple, like anonymity. The executioner wore a mask. This was to protect identity, and it served to bolster confidence in their task.
Today, there are guards, police or military who wear sunglasses, goggles or masks, and this causes a kind of cold separation.
What the internet has done, is to grant an assumed anonymity. This, combined with distance, emboldens some.
To me, morality is what you do when no one is watching. When you don’t act even when there would be no consequences in taking advantage, that is what it is to be good.
But not everyone thinks like this. Separation from consequence brings out the worst in them.
It is as though their morality is determined externally.
It is as though the external rules and their consequences are there to be bent — to be played like some kind of game.
Some people use cheat codes in games, and still somehow find a sense of satisfaction when “winning”. Some people try all angles in the mechanics, looking for distances and tactics and patterns to exploit.
In these cases, the rules and mechanics of the game are an external pressure that is just not empathized with, so cheating isn’t wrong to them.
For some people, the “rules” and even laws of life are seen as external and are not empathized with.
They game the mechanics of systems in the real world, not empathizing at all with them.
But the mechanics they exploit have real people attached to them, so they are doing very real wrongs to very real people. It is this separation, this distance from empathy with people that the mechanics grant, which “enables” abuse.
So what I’ve described are how rules and mechanics allow perhaps normally moral people to become immoral.
Now, directly related to this is my anti-theistic view on theism’s externalized morality. A set of rules and mechanics external to oneself grants a kind of numb detachment. Some people exploit those mechanics. Some people hide their personal responsibility behind those rules.
I think I’ve made my perspective fairly clear. Now I’ll try to apply it to YouTube.
YouTube has a few main things to explore:
- The user agreement and terms of service
- The interactable feature set
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The abuse-management feature set
The user agreement and terms of service (TOS) are hardly read by anyone. For those that do read them, they are at best vaguely influential. More on that shortly.
An abuser would generally ignore these documents, but there can be come level of “exploiting” the rules and regulations, in some cases.
The interactable feature set can and is regularly exploited. The very nature of the website mechanics makes it ethically detached from an abuser. They find holes in the system.
The abuse-management feature set is usually added as a stop-gap measure after the main feature set is in use. This sort of stuff is usually implemented in direct response to specific attacks.
Let me step back and explain where I’m going. While others propose organizing people-power to counteract undesired activity on a case-by-case basis, I want to solve the underlying issues.
Undesirables are limitless. Resources of some level must be put forth to counter each and every one of them.
We cannot hope to eliminate the immoral detachment so many abusers feel.
But we could hope to have underlying mechanics changed to remove known exploitation.
Let’s look at some known issues:
- Starring videos
- Thumbing comments
- Marking comments as spam
- Flagging videos
- Tag-spam or tag-matching (related videos)
- Thumbnail scams
- Account spoofing
- Enemy subscribers
- Hateful or bad messages
- Bad comments on one’s channel
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Bad comments on one’s videos
(was this never completed, or was information lost during porting?)
Why care about ratings? is noted as being the follow-up.
