In Search of Lost Time on YouTube | Hacker News Reader

In Search of Lost Time on YouTube

thenewatlantis.com

66 points80mph26 comments

From time to time I have these "nostalgia attacks", usually late at night when it's only me and whisky. I go down the rabbit hole chasing old commercials, fragments of news shows, live concerts, music videos and so on from the 80s. It's a magical feeling, for a brief moment my mind goes back in time, a true time machine. I just hope that the old obscure stuff won't disappear from YouTube, sometimes I get the itch to start downloading and preserving it, but part of the charm is discovering "new" stuff, watching over and over the same videos wouldn't be as much fun.

YouTube is a precious archive of another time in all our lives. Let’s hope it’s not eaten up by the chase of profit and/or politics.

> by the chase of profit

I am honestly surprised how Google was able to keep up YouTube for so long despite a severe lack of profits. Even though Youtube made a net loss in the hundreds of millions for years Google kept it up and running and drastically expanded its feature set into areas like live streaming etc.

As far as I know YouTube has now reached break even, but I believe Google deserves credit for having the vision and tolerance for failure to keep YouTube up for such a long time without a dollar of profit, not to speak of the enormous political and financial risk YouTube poses because of copyrighted or harmful material.

It would be interesting to hear an updated figure now. My impressions is heavily increased monetization across the whole thing. Nowadays, more than one ad shown, often unskippable, and constant nags/"reminders" about YT prime (red?) and Music.

I don't think Google deserves credit for keeping a money losing YouTube alive for so long. It's anti-competitive. Innovation that might have existed and been better was likely strangled because it couldn't compete with the money losing behemoth that is (or was) YouTube.

I do think they get credit for not killing it off, as they often do to other projects. Are the YouTube losses equivalent to loose change to Google? Probably, but that won’t stop me from being thankful someone had the vision to keep it alive.

"YouTube reflects and shapes our modernity" - this quote spoke volumes to me. Anyone can access videos now from years back and with things such as YouTube rewind it is possible to look back at significant events from different years in a easy to understand short video.

The YouTube rewinds have been getting worse though.

For reference and context, The New Atlantis was founded by an organization called the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which is “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.” (https://eppc.org/about/)

How does that influence the article? Can you point out how a different moral tradition would look at the topic?

The publication has a specific bias, but often tries to appear unbiased. I wanted to make the bias clear.

> The publication has a specific bias, but often tries to appear unbiased.

You just described all mainstream publications.

I think it's that people who self proclaim they are pushing a certain moral tradition have clear agendas, not whether it would be different if they self proclaimed a different moral tradition.

I did have a read, but failed to detect any "judaeo-christian" moralising even to a very sensitive reading, and was pleasantly reassured by the mention of Roland Barthes.

YouTube does not have a big influence on society. Culture reflects society and not the other way around. Although YouTube can act as a censor and slowly cast away people from society.

An intriguing hypothesis, is there any data to support this theory ?

YouTube's algorithm shows people more of the stuff they like to watch. The most popular content on Youtube is primarily driven by demand, not by execs at Youtube.

Is that what it does? I find it likes to recommend stuff i absolutely hate because i've, what's the word, engaged too much in the past with videos i hate, and people like me tend to engage too much with videos they hate too.

Google is being pressured by politicians to replicate the results they want. Slowly YouTube is becoming a huge real life social experiment, where Google is trying to control public opinion through censorship and the recommendation engine.

Google is trying to earn money, as much as they can. No need to imagine a conspiracy about censorship and control public opinion...

I am sure that is the goal, on some level. But it is not good at that goal.

>YouTube's algorithm shows people more of the stuff they like to watch.

More of the stuff that will increase a user’s watch time; subtle difference. I’d be surprised if they haven’t also experimented with adjusting for overall ad revenue; some specific ads pay more than others.

There is not only a hypothesis but there is a whole science behind it. That's part of the PhD research of Larry Page for the PageRank algorithm. It's pretty much like a modified way of Academic Paper ranking. Innovators, Influencers, Advocates, Envangelists are all terms used to qualify the types of edges on a social graph.

Not really. PageRank is a centrality measure for networks, not a sociological theory / hypothesis. It is very useful in finding the most popular nodes in a network, but it says nothing about whether this popularity is byproduct of culture or the other way around.

Immediate counter-arguments:

Most professional YouTubers complain about having to tailor their videos to suit the recommendations algorithms. Historically, many short videos were padded out to just over 10 minutes in order to reach the minimum threshold to insert a midroll advertisement; today, many videos are as long as possible to take advantage of the algorithmic prioritisation of view time over view count. There is widespread dissatisfaction with the recent necessity to use clickbait thumbnails and titles, due to YouTube's increasing weighting of click-through-rate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8

Most analysts believe that the high weight on view time is causing the YouTube algorithms to promote the kind of videos that their heaviest users watch. The problem is that these heavy users aren't representative of the general population - they're far more likely to be interested in conspiracy theories or extremist politics.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtu...

The vast majority of YouTube video views are as a result of algorithmic decisions by YouTube - what to show in the recommendations bar, what to prioritise on the home page, what to put at the top of search results. Those algorithms are not and cannot be neutral. These algorithms aren't just shaping which videos people watch; YouTube creators freely admit to tailoring the content of their videos to fit the recommendations algorithm.

> Culture reflects society and not the other way around.

The entire fields of sociology, media and literary criticism would like a word with you. Or several million words.

The important thing to think about is cultural reproduction: the things that we carry with us in our heads that make up our culture have to come from somewhere. They are acquired over our lives but especially in our youth, and in the 20th century and beyond they are to a very great extent acquired from media. The 20th century was the TV century. A significant part of the hours devoted to watching TV and absorbing culture from it have now switched to youtube.

And there are two important feedback loops that youtube has accelerated. One is the process of making a piece of media in response to or influenced by another. The hyper-accelerated version of critique is now the "reaction" video. The second is the process by which we influence other people's culture by making suggestions as to what they consume. To a certain extent recommendations are culture; we used to have a standard ""playlist"" of literature we called the "canon", and within film and music genres you can still find discussions of canonical works.

Every recommendation by Google's automated system is a cultural statement, and in aggregate these can have as big an effect on society as a TV channel's choice of programming. The BBC's Reithian mission was to inform, educate, entertain; what is the mission that Youtube are carrying out with their recommendations?

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