5 ms·

> The audience is wherever there's a link to click on. This is where the audience could be. I don't know the solution to be honest. But the reality is, if a v

> The audience is wherever there's a link to click on. This is where the audience could be. I don't know the solution to be honest. But the reality is, if a video is not on YouTube, it will not reach a wide audience. If a popular channel gets removed from YouTube, few people will ever watch it again. In most cases this means short term bankruptcy. People could click. People could follow. But they don't.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> if a video is not on YouTube, it will not reach a wide audience. But that's not because of any technological issue with watching videos hosted anywhere else. There are absolutely zero technological obstacles to people watching videos elsewhere. The reason it doesn't reach a wide audience is because of "the algorithm" (or rather, two algorithms): 1. the one that YT uses to put possible videos for you to watch in front of you while you watching something else 2. the fact that people tend to search on YT and tend to share YT links rather than links to other video locations (a "human procedural algorithm", if you like) I don't see how you can equate the power that this "gives" YT with governmental power. There is nothing stopping anyone from doing things outside of YT other than their (generally incorrect) belief that being unable to leverage "the algorithm" is death. > If a popular channel gets removed from YouTube, few people will ever watch it again. There's no right to use YT's algorithm or network effects for your own benefit. Does that give them great power? It does, yes. Is that like a government? I don't think that it is.
- loup-vaillant 5y ago
  OK we need a bit of nuance there: I do reckon there are many niches that don’t need to cater to a general audience to begin with. Specialised conferences on InfoQ are a good example: their audience is very specific, and is best reached through aggregators like HN or /r/programming. Another example is online courses, that are not casually watched. On the other hand, some important topics are aimed at a general audience: news, politics, scientific popularization, infotainment, entertainment… People don’t actively seek out those things, they stumble upon them and select what they like… with the help of the "algorithm". Whether that’s a good thing is another matter. The way YouTube works is eerily close to doom-scrolling, and I’ve lost a lot of time there. My point is, to even have a chance of reaching a general audience, right now the algorithm and people’s behaviour is such that the only place is YouTube. Now I’m not saying that everyone deserves to reach a wide audience. For one that’s flat out impossible (10 minutes watched by 100K people means over 13 years of total watching time), and most content is either niche or crap anyway. High quality content however, that makes a positive impact on the world (for instance by helping, informing, or entertaining people), does deserve a chance. Does it deserve any particular way to the top? No, of course not. But I do submit they deserve at least a fair chance of being widely watched. And right now, again, that only chance comes from YouTube. --- As for what we should do about it, I see two routes. One is regulation. We could officially recognise that YouTube basically holds the only meaningful key to an important kind of public discourse, such that any video they refuse to show is effectively censored. This makes them a public utility, and should be treated as such. I’m not sure what that should entail for the search & suggestion algorithms, but it sure means that taking down a video is an infringement on Free Speech, and so should be approved by a judge. Yeah, that will never work out. Too many videos to process, not enough judges. So I think we’d much better take another route, if at all possible: find a way to severely reduce YouTube’s market share, and have actual competition between many platforms. That way if someone is kicked out of one platform, they can still use another. Or we could expand self hosting, or multiply the PeerTube instances… What I absolutely do not want (though unfortunately it looks like we’re headed there), is the kind of regulation where YouTube is mandated to filter videos, in such a way that the only solution is an unsustainable level of automation with lots of false positives, no due process, and no way to appeal (like right now in fact, only it’s official). --- A better regulatory route would be giving platforms a clear choice: either behave as a utility, which means utter neutrality: no integrated search or suggestions unless it’s demonstrably neutral, no filtering, and no arbitrary take down; on the upside, if they happen to host illegal content, they’re not responsible until a judge tells them to shut it down. Or, retain the biased searches and suggestions (they do have value), all the filtering they want, arbitrary take downs and bans… but then they are treated as editors, and become responsible for everything that happens on their turf. If someone manages to publish some illegal content, they are penally responsible and may in extreme cases go to prison. Either you’re a carrier, or you’re an editor. Under that rule, YouTube would either become a mere host, at which point we don’t even care about their market dominance (though I suspect their market share would drop as they’re deprived of most of their network effects); or they would become an editor, and that’s so unscaleable they’d need to shrink like hell to be sustainable. And again, they’d lose market share and we’d get the diversity that is needed to make sure that being banned from one platform is in practice very different from actual censorship.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    1) I think that YT could make a legitimate case that its recommendation algorithm is neutral (assuming that it's not actually biased by backroom payments etc.). That is to say: it doesn't represent any point of view about anything, and simply tries to show a user "more videos related to the one you're watching". The devil, of course, is in the details of what "related" means. 2) I don't agree that not-on-YT means no wide audience. If I have 2M twitter followers, and I post a link to a video on (say) Vimeo with a sufficiently click-baity description, that video is going to get "a wide audience" (or at least, a large one). There are ways of alerting people to a video's existence beyond YT's own algorithm. The original (hah!) meaning of "went viral" didn't mean "YT recommended it to lots of people and they all clicked". It meant "link got shared by lots of people in an ever-expanding tree of contacts". That can still happen. 3) What's hard are the videos that fall in between the cracks. Not "my kid's 3rd birthday party singalong from last week", and not "the latest video from whomever the current k-pop phenom is". Videos that get, say, 200,000 - 2M views. 4) It's unclear how much view counts on YT are impacted by channel subscriptions vs the algorithm right now. Supposing for a moment that they are heavily correlated with subscriptions, YT could drop the algorithm and not see gigantic shifts in view counts. But I have no idea whether that's true, and I can think of lots of reasons why it may not be. A service that only shows/points you at videos from channels you've subscribed too is radically different from the YT of today.
    - loup-vaillant 5y ago
      > I think that YT could make a legitimate case that its recommendation algorithm is neutral They’d have to remove shadow banning at the very least. I’m also virtually certain that their algorithms are machine-learning based, and as such very difficult to inspect, debug, and other ML based algorithms have proven to be biased in other contexts (like facial recognition). > I don't agree that not-on-YT means no wide audience. I… stand corrected, I guess. Also, I’ve just discussed it with my partner, and she pointed out a marginal exodus away from YouTube, which may amplify and chip away at their dominance. > A service that only shows/points you at videos from channels you've subscribed too is radically different from the YT of today. It would be indeed. YouTube is significant in the way it merges 3 tools together: hosting, search, and recommendations. They could be separate. (By the way, Google itself tends to merge search and recommendations, the famous "filter bubble".)

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

> if a video is not on YouTube, it will not reach a wide audience. But that's not because of any technological issue with watching videos hosted anywhere else. There are absolutely zero technological obstacles to people watching videos elsewhere. The reason it doesn't reach a wide audience is because of "the algorithm" (or rather, two algorithms): 1. the one that YT uses to put possible videos for you to watch in front of you while you watching something else 2. the fact that people tend to search on YT and tend to share YT links rather than links to other video locations (a "human procedural algorithm", if you like) I don't see how you can equate the power that this "gives" YT with governmental power. There is nothing stopping anyone from doing things outside of YT other than their (generally incorrect) belief that being unable to leverage "the algorithm" is death. > If a popular channel gets removed from YouTube, few people will ever watch it again. There's no right to use YT's algorithm or network effects for your own benefit. Does that give them great power? It does, yes. Is that like a government? I don't think that it is.

loup-vaillant 5y ago
OK we need a bit of nuance there: I do reckon there are many niches that don’t need to cater to a general audience to begin with. Specialised conferences on InfoQ are a good example: their audience is very specific, and is best reached through aggregators like HN or /r/programming. Another example is online courses, that are not casually watched. On the other hand, some important topics are aimed at a general audience: news, politics, scientific popularization, infotainment, entertainment… People don’t actively seek out those things, they stumble upon them and select what they like… with the help of the "algorithm". Whether that’s a good thing is another matter. The way YouTube works is eerily close to doom-scrolling, and I’ve lost a lot of time there. My point is, to even have a chance of reaching a general audience, right now the algorithm and people’s behaviour is such that the only place is YouTube. Now I’m not saying that everyone deserves to reach a wide audience. For one that’s flat out impossible (10 minutes watched by 100K people means over 13 years of total watching time), and most content is either niche or crap anyway. High quality content however, that makes a positive impact on the world (for instance by helping, informing, or entertaining people), does deserve a chance. Does it deserve any particular way to the top? No, of course not. But I do submit they deserve at least a fair chance of being widely watched. And right now, again, that only chance comes from YouTube. --- As for what we should do about it, I see two routes. One is regulation. We could officially recognise that YouTube basically holds the only meaningful key to an important kind of public discourse, such that any video they refuse to show is effectively censored. This makes them a public utility, and should be treated as such. I’m not sure what that should entail for the search & suggestion algorithms, but it sure means that taking down a video is an infringement on Free Speech, and so should be approved by a judge. Yeah, that will never work out. Too many videos to process, not enough judges. So I think we’d much better take another route, if at all possible: find a way to severely reduce YouTube’s market share, and have actual competition between many platforms. That way if someone is kicked out of one platform, they can still use another. Or we could expand self hosting, or multiply the PeerTube instances… What I absolutely do not want (though unfortunately it looks like we’re headed there), is the kind of regulation where YouTube is mandated to filter videos, in such a way that the only solution is an unsustainable level of automation with lots of false positives, no due process, and no way to appeal (like right now in fact, only it’s official). --- A better regulatory route would be giving platforms a clear choice: either behave as a utility, which means utter neutrality: no integrated search or suggestions unless it’s demonstrably neutral, no filtering, and no arbitrary take down; on the upside, if they happen to host illegal content, they’re not responsible until a judge tells them to shut it down. Or, retain the biased searches and suggestions (they do have value), all the filtering they want, arbitrary take downs and bans… but then they are treated as editors, and become responsible for everything that happens on their turf. If someone manages to publish some illegal content, they are penally responsible and may in extreme cases go to prison. Either you’re a carrier, or you’re an editor. Under that rule, YouTube would either become a mere host, at which point we don’t even care about their market dominance (though I suspect their market share would drop as they’re deprived of most of their network effects); or they would become an editor, and that’s so unscaleable they’d need to shrink like hell to be sustainable. And again, they’d lose market share and we’d get the diversity that is needed to make sure that being banned from one platform is in practice very different from actual censorship.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  1) I think that YT could make a legitimate case that its recommendation algorithm is neutral (assuming that it's not actually biased by backroom payments etc.). That is to say: it doesn't represent any point of view about anything, and simply tries to show a user "more videos related to the one you're watching". The devil, of course, is in the details of what "related" means. 2) I don't agree that not-on-YT means no wide audience. If I have 2M twitter followers, and I post a link to a video on (say) Vimeo with a sufficiently click-baity description, that video is going to get "a wide audience" (or at least, a large one). There are ways of alerting people to a video's existence beyond YT's own algorithm. The original (hah!) meaning of "went viral" didn't mean "YT recommended it to lots of people and they all clicked". It meant "link got shared by lots of people in an ever-expanding tree of contacts". That can still happen. 3) What's hard are the videos that fall in between the cracks. Not "my kid's 3rd birthday party singalong from last week", and not "the latest video from whomever the current k-pop phenom is". Videos that get, say, 200,000 - 2M views. 4) It's unclear how much view counts on YT are impacted by channel subscriptions vs the algorithm right now. Supposing for a moment that they are heavily correlated with subscriptions, YT could drop the algorithm and not see gigantic shifts in view counts. But I have no idea whether that's true, and I can think of lots of reasons why it may not be. A service that only shows/points you at videos from channels you've subscribed too is radically different from the YT of today.
  - loup-vaillant 5y ago
    > I think that YT could make a legitimate case that its recommendation algorithm is neutral They’d have to remove shadow banning at the very least. I’m also virtually certain that their algorithms are machine-learning based, and as such very difficult to inspect, debug, and other ML based algorithms have proven to be biased in other contexts (like facial recognition). > I don't agree that not-on-YT means no wide audience. I… stand corrected, I guess. Also, I’ve just discussed it with my partner, and she pointed out a marginal exodus away from YouTube, which may amplify and chip away at their dominance. > A service that only shows/points you at videos from channels you've subscribed too is radically different from the YT of today. It would be indeed. YouTube is significant in the way it merges 3 tools together: hosting, search, and recommendations. They could be separate. (By the way, Google itself tends to merge search and recommendations, the famous "filter bubble".)