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September 15, 2006
Need for disassociation
Need for disassociation: Universal blasts YouTube & MySpace for publishing their content. Most commentary focuses on how wrong Universal is, but the real key idea may be that social services need to implement content-exclusion and member-exclusion architecture from the start. Today it's Universal & music/film, but it could just as easily be "hate crime" stuff which you need to remove to avoid the local police -- the problem isn't unique to large media corporations targeting a social service. Some services try to implement a "flag objectionable content" button for member screening, but then you're always chasing, trying to clean up stuff you'd rather not publish rather than stop it from the start. I don't think free & universal membership is possible for most publishing services -- email accepted content from anyone and got spammed, Usenet accepted content from anyone and got spammed, blogsearch accepted content from anyone and got spammed -- the incentives are set up for a tragedy of the commons. YouTube currently accepts anonymous membership -- the only recourse an aggrieved party has is thus the service itself -- there's no feedback loop to reach the person who actually made the decision to upload the content some found offensive. (Disclaimers: I think most of the content in question is boring, and would not like to be locked in a room with most people who find it worth swiping, but then again I think that Sonny Bono and others have done stupid evil with their lawmaking -- they *all* crazy. ;-) Just because it's a social service doesn't mean it must be socialism -- better to have independent, decentralized decisionmaking, backed by appropriate feedback structures.
Posted by JohnDowdell at September 15, 2006 07:42 AM
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