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I don't think the logic here holds up, and the issue is the author's ignorance of the technology and dataset involved. It's very easy for Google.com to show non

by yllus 8y ago

I don't think the logic here holds up, and the issue is the author's ignorance of the technology and dataset involved. It's very easy for Google.com to show non-toxic results in its Video tab; it basically limits itself to retrieving results from sites humans have whitelisted for inclusion in Google News. They don't whitelist QAnon crackpot sites, so naturally you'll never see those results come up. YouTube, however, is a completely different paradigm - no human pre-filtering happens before content goes online, and its _point_ is to search a catalog of millions of amateur-produced videos. That's very different from searching a few thousand media orgs and their indexed results. Hell, if you only got the results of the media orgs (from their YouTube channels) you could reasonably conclude that YouTube search is broken. My conclusion is that there's no technology solution being held back from YouTube; it's just that Google Video tab just has a completely different point to it.

80386 8y ago
Consider the possibility that turning Youtube into Google News is the goal of the people who talk like this. The internet democratized publishing. That made a lot of people unhappy - not just because of nonsense like Q, but because it let people say they weren't too keen on Communism in China, Ben Ali in Tunisia, or Clinton/Macron-style progressivism in the West. China went and un-democratized it, and a lot of people want the same thing to happen here. It's like how social conservatives wiped out queer communities in places like LiveJournal by targeting NSFW content - they can't come right out and say they liked it better when the only easily accessible sources of information were two local papers and three TV channels, all of which could be depended on to (for example) come out in favor of the war in Iraq, just as the social conservatives couldn't say they wanted to wipe out the fags. So they're targeting conspiracy videos instead.
anonymouzz 8y ago
I think it is a matter of target metric. You can optimize just for click-through/watch time (short term reward), but you can also target a composite of that and quality/trustworthiness (long term reward). YouTube seems to mostly optimize the former, while search seems to compromise between both.
wtracy 8y ago
Do you have any basis for claiming that Google Video Search only shows whitelisted videos? I thought only Google News was limited that way. I did a few quick searchs on the video tab, and pulled up a lot of videos from YouTube and at least one from Know Your Meme and another from Giphy. None of them seem like obvious whitelist candidates.
commandlinefan 8y ago
Ironic that the author is accusing YouTube of profiting off of conspiracy theories... by promoting his own conspiracy theory.

by yllus 8y ago

80386 8y ago

Consider the possibility that turning Youtube into Google News is the goal of the people who talk like this. The internet democratized publishing. That made a lot of people unhappy - not just because of nonsense like Q, but because it let people say they weren't too keen on Communism in China, Ben Ali in Tunisia, or Clinton/Macron-style progressivism in the West. China went and un-democratized it, and a lot of people want the same thing to happen here. It's like how social conservatives wiped out queer communities in places like LiveJournal by targeting NSFW content - they can't come right out and say they liked it better when the only easily accessible sources of information were two local papers and three TV channels, all of which could be depended on to (for example) come out in favor of the war in Iraq, just as the social conservatives couldn't say they wanted to wipe out the fags. So they're targeting conspiracy videos instead.

anonymouzz 8y ago

I think it is a matter of target metric. You can optimize just for click-through/watch time (short term reward), but you can also target a composite of that and quality/trustworthiness (long term reward). YouTube seems to mostly optimize the former, while search seems to compromise between both.

wtracy 8y ago

Do you have any basis for claiming that Google Video Search only shows whitelisted videos? I thought only Google News was limited that way. I did a few quick searchs on the video tab, and pulled up a lot of videos from YouTube and at least one from Know Your Meme and another from Giphy. None of them seem like obvious whitelist candidates.

commandlinefan 8y ago

Ironic that the author is accusing YouTube of profiting off of conspiracy theories... by promoting his own conspiracy theory.