While youtube does not really work for me, courtesy dial-up network speeds, I had to watch a video regarding some interesting screencast.
Clicking on the youtube logo, it took me to the newly-launched youtube india site. Along with the oh-so-boring featured videos about some people talking into their webcams thinking I’d give a crap, there was the most watched videos tab, I was curious to see what India’s watching.
Rest assured, the videos triggered my gag reflex. Now let me tell you something about my gag reflex. I found out today that there was no water being served in my hall, partially because it’d turned yellowish. Nobody knows why, but I had been drinking away from my near-opaque google-branded water bottle like a depressed celebrity. While normal people would’ve thrown up after finding out, I barely shrugged. Heck, not even the frog in the HJB mess would do the trick. It takes something really really really shocking (nope, not even goatse) to get me disgusted.
Now, back to youtube.
The videos were disgusting. Not “Oh dear kird, my children shouldn’t be watching this” disgusting. (I believe in almost-free media). This was “Jeez, what kind of self respecting person watches this” disgusting.
I am well aware of youtube’s content policy. Outright nudity is disallowed from the videos, and apparently Youtube india hadn’t gotten the message, or that’s what someone who pointed it out to me told me. Either that or that people are too busy doing other things at the time to really flag the videos as inappropriate.
I’d just hoped youtube implements a scoring mechanism, where certain keywords automatically flag the video as adult. Yes there will be false positives, and the digital pussies (a.k.a the blogosphere) will cry out about censorship and bullshit, and google will worry about losing not-evil points.
But this is india that we’re talking about. These people asked Google to take down orkut because there were anti-india communities. I can guarantee, the moment times of india(btw, screw you toi) publishes an article on this, about the kind of content that’ll appear one click from the homepage, we’ll be in for a surprise.
And no, this is not a complaint or rant. It’s a bug report. Unfortunately I’m not in google’s private intranet anymore, so I can’t post it where people will read it, but hopefully someone will over here. This is not a problem with how the program works, but how the people here works. There’s no brigade of overzealous losers going and flagging all the videos like they’re there in other countries.
So please, implement a scoring mechanism, look for specific keywords, and flag preliminarily, and allow to flag false positives from the user-side. And you’ll probably prevent everyone who’s not at your website from coming after your ass.
I couldn’t care less about the content, it won’t affect me in any way, but it can lead to trouble if this market isn’t treated with caution.
Proof is in the PuddiNG: i33 (dot) tinypic (dot) com (slash) k1t8a1.(extension for portable network graphics) Most images are not safe for work. The above image is not safe. Period.
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