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Comment by joshuamorton | Hacker News Reader

> 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"?

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> 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.

> Any episodic context, like 99 percent of the media we consume.

But you're suggesting a single "timeline" for all content. So you get one stream of every show on every channel in order. That's not the usual way we watch episodic content. Hell since the invention of the VCR, we mostly just watch the specific stuff we want, not everything in I ur bundle.

You seem to be conflicting the content made by a single entity with the aggregator. For an aggregator, why does time name more sense than any other view (like say clustered by creator, or as is common today ordered based on presumed interest)?

I want to experience media in the format and order in which the creator of the media wants it to be watched. The episodic content that I watch, I watch because I have faith in the creators of it that the next one will be of the same calibre as the previous. Not faith in the publishers. 99% of the time, this is in the order or is released. There are exceptions, which is why we have the concept of creator-defined playlists. To present the content to the user in an order which is not defined by the creator is at the publisher's discretion, and the publisher should therefore take responsibility for presenting it that way.

WRT conflating aggregators and creators, any decision the publisher makes, they should take responsibility for, such as promoting some content and hiding others.

> This sounds horrendous.

Any "editorial algorithm", by the standards you have put forth, can be abused.

I don't disagree. But what you (or the prior posters) are saying is that the law should prevent companies from trying to optimize for the best user experience. If only showing things in time-order is "safe" for the company, but filtering out spam becomes "unsafe", then I as a consumer am forced to endure a crappy experience for solely legal reasons. Neato.

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