> If a platform can't afford to hire moderation resources to do the job effectively (read: skilled resources in enough quantity to make effective decisions), then it's not a viable business.

But, it is viable. Many profitable businesses exist that don't pay for this.

One may instead mean that they want such businesses to be made non viable, in which case we should critically consider which business models that we might currently like other consequences of may be made non viable. For example, will users suddenly need to pay per post? If so, is that worth the trade-off?

Businesses that are profiting off un-paid-for externalities aren't socially sustainable businesses. They're just economic scams that happen to be legal.

Imho, we should do what we can to make sure they're required to pay for those externalities.

Then, they either figure out a way to do that profitably (great! innovation!) or they go under.

But we shouldn't allow them to continue to profit by causing external ills.

> Then, they either figure out a way to do that profitably (great! innovation!) or they go under.

They do figure out how. That's the problem. This stuff is all trade offs.

If you say they have to remove the videos or they're in trouble then they remove the videos even if they shouldn't.

You can come up with some other rule but you can't eliminate the trade off so the choice you're making is how you want to pay. Do you want more illegitimate takedowns or less censorship of whatever you were trying to censor?

If you tried to mandate total perfection then they wouldn't be able to do it and neither would anybody else, and then you don't have video hosting. Which nobody is going to accept.

Given YouTube's profits, I think it's fair to say there's a substantial viable middle ground of much more vigorous (and labor intensive) appeals than what's currently done.

And that requirement can be created by more robust, outcome-defined regulation.

> Given YouTube's profits, I think it's fair to say there's a substantial viable middle ground of much more vigorous (and labor intensive) appeals than what's currently done.

People keep looking at the absolute amount of profit across a massive service and assuming that it means they could afford to do something expensive. But the cost of the expensive thing is proportional to the size of the service, and then they can't, because dividing the profits by the number of hours of video turns into an amount of money that doesn't buy you that.

> And that requirement can be created by more robust, outcome-defined regulation.

What are you proposing exactly?

Outcome-based metrics are the things that often fail the hardest. It's reasonable to have a given level of human review when you have functioning CAPTCHAs on the reporting function to rate limit spam reports, but if you then require that by law and LLMs come around that can both solve CAPTCHAs and auto-generate spam reports to target competitors etc., now your cost of doing human review has gone up by many fold but you're still expected to meet the same outcomes. Then they either have to tune whatever metric you're not forcing them to meet up to draconian hellscape levels to meet the one you're demanding or you're now demanding they do something that nobody knows how to do whatsoever, both of which are unreasonable.

And all of this is because the government doesn't know how to solve the problem either. If you want to prohibit things with a "risk of physical harm" then you have to hire law enforcement to go drink from the fire hose and try to find those things so the perpetrators can be prosecuted. But that's really expensive to do properly so the government wants to fob it off on someone else and then feign indignation when they can't solve it either.