Member-only story
Let’s shitmix the algorithm
YouTube is an Angry Librarian who is in love with Mr. Beast.
“One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain:
No more thy glassy brook reflects the day,
But, choak’d with sedges, works its weedy way;”
l.39-l.42, The Deserted Village, Oliver Goldsmith, 1770.
Can we consider YouTube a Library anymore?
In the early days of the internet, a common metaphor to understand the then “new” 1990s Web was a Library. The Web could be understood as a collection of searchable and openly accessible information resources, that would enrich everyone’s educational opportunities and, as we use the phrase these days, democratize knowledge access.
YouTube’s modality is not just a library of democratized information of all kinds. In a Library, all content is ranked equally. It sits there passively, awaiting our attention. It is not pushed upon us. We search for this content using a known and stable classification scheme (such as the Dewey system). At some deep level the content of the library is, within different schools of thought, meant to be authoritative and trustworthy. Reliable even. If we can’t find something, we ask a librarian for help. It is a place of peace and reflection.
In a Library we can walk in anonymously. In a library there is not much harmful or toxic content, and, while we may disagree with some content, if it is gross or harmful we can avoid it thanks to the Dewey classification (like Medical), unlike “recommendations” to watch squeezing pus from infected blackheads that was doing the rounds on YouTube recently [1].
As the second most used website in the world, unfortunately YouTube is not now this happy Library place. In Youtube, there is not a publically known and published information retrieval schema, there is instead automatically tagged content and with a unbelieveable 500 hours of video being uploaded each minute, generating $31 Billion in Advertising revenue for the platform owners [1].
We cannot use YouTube anonymously, otherwise it cannot serve videos that maximise advertising returns, or promote Mr. Beast and his rather odd transfixed-stare thumbnail so he can shred a Lamborghini.
