4 ms·

I'm not too sure if true neutrality is not the best answer after all. I think these bans are detracting from the real problem, which is that it's Youtube's syst

I'm not too sure if true neutrality is not the best answer after all. I think these bans are detracting from the real problem, which is that it's Youtube's system for promoting content that is causing problems, not the content on Youtube itself. Youtube has made itself too important a platform to be left in charge of deciding what content people should watch. Frankly I would feel much more at ease if we could all decide that Youtube doesn't get to decide what content should be deleted, provided they also can't keep recommending videos. Let me explain. By recommending videos youtube has a huge amount of influence on what content is promoted and what content isn't. However youtube's bottom-line isn't to recommend good content (despite what they claim it is) but it is to maximize ad revenue, which means they need to make people watch as many videos as possible. Superficially this would seem like it should drive Youtube to recommend good content, but it's beginning to look like it is biased towards addictive content, which has questionable quality at best, but might veer towards harmful conspirational theories at worst. It's a classic example of value drift, Youtube has turned into a paperclip maximizer that is beginning to harm humans to produce more paperclips.

nyhc99 6y ago
This is a great point and is also true of Facebook and a number of other platforms. Roger McNamee spoke at length about this issue with Sam Harris on his podcast back when it was called Making Sense. His point was essentially that the AI that controls the recommendations is trained to maximize clickthrough rates, and so it learns in its own way to feed us articles that make us angry, because we click and share more that way. Hence the tendency to lead people down rabbit holes of extremism.
pchristensen 6y ago
The podcast "Your Undivided Attention" gets into the tech and public policy of this. Basically, their suggestion is to modify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, so that storage and retrieval is still a safe harbor for providers, but recommendation algorithms should be treated as editorial decisions and be open to the same liabilities that other communications media are exposed to. So a chronological feed of subscriptions to InfoWars, Stormfront, Plandemic, etc would be protected by law, but YouTube, FB, etc could be held liable for harm caused by content that they recommend. People retain their freedom to speak and publish, but they have no right to promotion or amplification.
- contravariant 6y ago
  That sounds interesting, I'll be sure to check it out, thanks.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  But this favors one recommendation algorithm (time based) over others. What makes ordering by time non-editorial?
  - Supermancho 6y ago
    > recommendation algorithm (time based) Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book? It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events. Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      > Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book? Yes exactly. > It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events. In what context? > Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway. This sounds horrendous. You want to encourage content creators to spam you with content so that they're always at the top of your "feed"?
      - jexah 6y ago
        > In what context? Any episodic context, like 99 percent of the media we consume. TV show episodes happen in a specific order of events, movies are constructed of scenes in a specific order, community growth around a channel is built around common experiences already shared, even looking at history channels, if a story spans multiple videos requiring multiple media releases, when each video relies on information provided from another, the content creator would have to be daft to release them in the reverse, or worse, a random order, when everybody is waiting to find out what happens next. From my perspective, it seems like the only videos that are viable outside of this context are long-form videos (1hr+) or viral trash.

nyhc99 6y ago

This is a great point and is also true of Facebook and a number of other platforms. Roger McNamee spoke at length about this issue with Sam Harris on his podcast back when it was called Making Sense. His point was essentially that the AI that controls the recommendations is trained to maximize clickthrough rates, and so it learns in its own way to feed us articles that make us angry, because we click and share more that way. Hence the tendency to lead people down rabbit holes of extremism.

pchristensen 6y ago

The podcast "Your Undivided Attention" gets into the tech and public policy of this. Basically, their suggestion is to modify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, so that storage and retrieval is still a safe harbor for providers, but recommendation algorithms should be treated as editorial decisions and be open to the same liabilities that other communications media are exposed to. So a chronological feed of subscriptions to InfoWars, Stormfront, Plandemic, etc would be protected by law, but YouTube, FB, etc could be held liable for harm caused by content that they recommend. People retain their freedom to speak and publish, but they have no right to promotion or amplification.

contravariant 6y ago
That sounds interesting, I'll be sure to check it out, thanks.
joshuamorton 6y ago
But this favors one recommendation algorithm (time based) over others. What makes ordering by time non-editorial?
- Supermancho 6y ago
  > recommendation algorithm (time based) Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book? It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events. Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book? Yes exactly. > It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events. In what context? > Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway. This sounds horrendous. You want to encourage content creators to spam you with content so that they're always at the top of your "feed"?
    - jexah 6y ago
      > In what context? Any episodic context, like 99 percent of the media we consume. TV show episodes happen in a specific order of events, movies are constructed of scenes in a specific order, community growth around a channel is built around common experiences already shared, even looking at history channels, if a story spans multiple videos requiring multiple media releases, when each video relies on information provided from another, the content creator would have to be daft to release them in the reverse, or worse, a random order, when everybody is waiting to find out what happens next. From my perspective, it seems like the only videos that are viable outside of this context are long-form videos (1hr+) or viral trash.