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I sympathize with your argument, to a certain degree. The problem, however, is not that fringe or crackpot stuff exists on YouTube, but that it actually gets a
by kieckerjan 7y ago
I sympathize with your argument, to a certain degree. The problem, however, is not that fringe or crackpot stuff exists on YouTube, but that it actually gets a disproportionate amount of bandwidth.
There is an inherent bias in the phenomenon. Say I am the only one on earth who thinks that pigs can fly. If I succeed in convincing one other person, I have doubled my peer group. If I do it a few times I have a crowd and may start to host conferences etc. That's a pretty big incentive. If, on the other hand, I do not think pigs can fly, why the hell would I bother convincing people?
- buildzr 7y ago> but that it actually gets a disproportionate amount of bandwidth. I get the impression that people are merely overreacting to this, so I'm curious about this - do you have any source to back this up? We must also consider that perhaps the same set of flat earthers consistently watch such videos so bandwidth isn't a great metric, viewers is what you want really.
- kieckerjan 7y agoTrue! It would be interesting to contrast the number of flat earth movies vs. round earth movies. There is no easy way to do that. If I type in "flat earth" on YouTube, the first 50 results contain only one defence of flat earth, the rest is debunking. This might be because 1 in every 50 people believes in flat earth. It might be because for every crackpot clip there are about 50 clips debunking it. It also may be the case that debunking flat earth is popular nowadays. It may even be because YouTube already tweaked their ranking algorithm. However, when I search for "hollow earth", I get almost no debunking clips in the first 50 results. That makes me think that the first two hypotheses I came up with probably don't hold water.