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I don't think it is as simple as business models. Fundamentally, there is a lot of content out there. So much so, that it is necessary to have some algorithm a

I don't think it is as simple as business models. Fundamentally, there is a lot of content out there. So much so, that it is necessary to have some algorithm assist in curation. Any algorithm you choose will favor certain types of content over others (unless you literally choose randomly, in which case you aren't really solving the original problem). The question is what should that algorithm be optimizing for. We have seen what problems optimizing for ad revenue causes; but I see no reason to think that optimizing for some other metric wouldn't produce a comparable class of problems. Ultimatly, the problem of algorithmic curation is a new problem, and no one has a good answer for it. Whatever answer we pick will have significant influence on the public discourse, because so much of said discourse is filtered through the algorithm.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
There's another way of looking at things. The success or failure of a content sharing service is reflective of it's ability to give people what they want to see. If you don't like the content you're getting from a video service, you're going to go swap to another that does. In other words, growth implies content selection is working. But of course this leads to what I think is the real problem: network effects. The reason people use YouTube is because people use YouTube. What I said above is true in a world with sufficient competition, but YouTube has no meaningful competition. They constantly hurt their content creators but the creators stay there nonetheless because YouTube has the users. And YouTube has the users because YouTube has the content creators. --- By focusing on the content curation as the issue, I think we take a monopoly as granted. But there are ways you could help enable competition such as by removing barriers to content delivery. Imagine a public content delivery network where whitelisted providers (just to avoid it being used for unlawful content) can stream from. Pair this with rules against exclusivity for free content delivery services, and some way for content creators who upload the content to the service to cleanly opt in to allow their content to be used by various services for some standard contract (%revenue, one-off fee, etc), and away we go. Very off the cuff idea, but the idea is just to help foster more competition.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

There's another way of looking at things. The success or failure of a content sharing service is reflective of it's ability to give people what they want to see. If you don't like the content you're getting from a video service, you're going to go swap to another that does. In other words, growth implies content selection is working. But of course this leads to what I think is the real problem: network effects. The reason people use YouTube is because people use YouTube. What I said above is true in a world with sufficient competition, but YouTube has no meaningful competition. They constantly hurt their content creators but the creators stay there nonetheless because YouTube has the users. And YouTube has the users because YouTube has the content creators. --- By focusing on the content curation as the issue, I think we take a monopoly as granted. But there are ways you could help enable competition such as by removing barriers to content delivery. Imagine a public content delivery network where whitelisted providers (just to avoid it being used for unlawful content) can stream from. Pair this with rules against exclusivity for free content delivery services, and some way for content creators who upload the content to the service to cleanly opt in to allow their content to be used by various services for some standard contract (%revenue, one-off fee, etc), and away we go. Very off the cuff idea, but the idea is just to help foster more competition.