>Would it make more sense to instead target the patterns used by predatory commentators rather than shutting down the system completely?
Terrible, terrible idea.
Transfer this to the "real world", and see how it plays out - let's build a system that will analyze people's behavior and penalize them on whether it classifies them as pedophiles or not! This will surely protect the children.
Moderation is a notoriously tough problem even without the whole trouble of automating it through something as "ephemeral" as content analysis.
>Transfer this to the "real world", and see how it plays out
This isn't the real world though. This is, tentatively, "pattern match on videos uploaded by non-verified creators with little or no uploaded content, featuring primarily or entirely children, with an unusual level of timestamps in the comments, in an unusual number of playlists that also fit this description."
The main challenge here is more meta: how do you discover these videos before the engagement identifies them as such. I think that's why YouTube went with the overreaching "throw a NN at the problem and just flag anything with kids" solution.
Probably wasn't the best solution from an engineering perspective, as many here have pointed out. But it may have been the smartest thing to do from a PR perspective.
Terrible, terrible idea.
Transfer this to the "real world", and see how it plays out - let's build a system that will analyze people's behavior and penalize them on whether it classifies them as pedophiles or not! This will surely protect the children.
Moderation is a notoriously tough problem even without the whole trouble of automating it through something as "ephemeral" as content analysis.