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Comment by youeseh | Hacker News Reader

When you visit youtube.com, you are shown a small slice of all the videos in the YouTube database that YouTube thinks you should watch. Isn't that curation?

YouTube tries to automate curation with the use of algorithms that cater content to who they think their visitor is.

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> Isn't that curation?

It's not the kind of curation we're talking about, no. We're talking about whether it's allowed (or at least publicly visible) on their website at all, not what is shown on the front page to each user.

Eh, there is some functional equivalence. Less than 5% of videos on YouTube have more than 10,000 views [0]. That means the vast majority of videos are functionally not published. YouTube won't promote any of those videos. They won't show up in on the Home page, let alone the Trending page. They're very unlikely to show up in recommended videos. Unless you're looking for that specific person or a very narrow topic, you're not going to find these channels, let alone these videos.

[0]: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/05/19/1-percent-youtub...

The functional equivalence isn't with curation, but ordering. Newspapers order what goes on the front page, YouTube orders what goes on the home page. The statistic on how many newspaper readers get past the front page, and first few pages, probably follows a similar power law distribution. I don't think that articles near the back are "functionally not published" just because a large % of readers never look at them, so I don't think the similar argument applies to YouTube. YouTube's advantages on this equivalence are also clear, since the newspaper's front page is the same for everyone, YouTube's isn't, and I much prefer YouTube's searching capabilities over trying to search newspapers to see if they have anything on my interest.

I don't really get what you're trying to prove here, I mean yes we can see the algorithm as a form of curation but the point here's different, newspapers have a set amount of pages and articles whereas YouTube has 400 hours of content uploaded every minute. Hence it's not fair to compare the two of them, in my opinion.

All I'm getting out of your argument if YouTube is using these arguments they are trying to say that they do so much business they should be allowed to skip rules, and that they are potentially violating orders of magnitude more copyright than other industries.

Should we allow companies to skip out on laws just because they scaled their business up?

A newspaper isn't the right metaphor. Google runs a print shopt.

It's not a metaphor. They both engage in referencing copyrighted material, but YouTube gets to skip out on the laws that appky to other industries.

This board is usually in agreement that patents that are effectively of the pattern of "were doing something that's been done before, but it's on the internet so it's different now" are complete bullshit.

Why are we giving a pass to internet based companies when it comes to copyright, just because they are making a lot of money?

No, Youtube takes a cut from the ads that are run on the videos of the creators. So they are directly profitting from the content. A print shop as metaphor would work if a creator would have to pay youtube to host his video, but all further proceeds would go solely to him.

If Youtube profits directly from whatever they are hosting it is not that farfetched to say that they might also be liable for what is shown

YouTube certainly used to be quite happy to recommend videos with less than 1000 views if its algorithms decided they were relevant. Not sure if it does that so much these days.

I don't get <1000 views videos recommended to me on the youtube homepage, but definitely get videos with as little as 80 views recommeded to me by the "related videos" feed.

Ah, good point.

> When you visit youtube.com, you are shown a small slice of all the videos in the YouTube database that YouTube thinks you should watch. Isn't that curation?

If it's Youtube's suggestions that are the problem, I suppose Youtube could be more careful in what content they suggest for you without banning other content to exist. It's just going to be harder to stumble upon when it's not what you're looking for.

> When you visit youtube.com, you are shown a small slice of all the videos in the YouTube database that YouTube thinks you should watch. Isn't that curation?

That doesn't have any effect on which videos they're hosting. All the ones that aren't featured are still there. It's not as if Hollywood would be satisfied for YouTube to be hosting infringing content just because it wasn't featured.

The law extends to videos beyond the front page

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