> We're optimizing for click through rate. That's it. There's no editorial judgement... I think Google in general needs to start taking seriously the idea that

> We're optimizing for click through rate. That's it. There's no editorial judgement... I think Google in general needs to start taking seriously the idea that this is an editorial judgement. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with optimising for click-through rate, but doing that will skew the options you offer to your viewers in specific ways. Those outcomes are still Google’s responsibility, even if they are the result of choices which are not under Google’s direct control, because Google has made the editorial choice to use click-through rate as their primary metric of choice. (It’s relatively innocuous in this particular case, but when Google uses click-through to choose between content offered up by other people, Google is setting up feedback loops between consumers, content producers and the algorithm that mediates between the two which can trap the system as a whole in pernicious local attractors in the phase space of possible choices that may be impossible to escape.)