I spent some time looking at Youtube reccommendations in fresh browser session (no cookies or account) yesterday and was contiually amazed by the types of videos that would often have 10M or even 100M views. The clickbait styles used by nearly all large channels have gotten so amazingly efficient that it seems like they near-perfectly pinpoint various biases and draws in our psyche now, and looking at the large categories of different genres of suggestions was an almost surreal experience in how similarly they targeted potential viewers. A lot of the content was obviously fake, and much of what was not obviously fake was significantly exaggerated for obvious reasons, with the method of exaggeration varying according to the genre of content.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the platform as a whole after this, about all of the both wonderful and terrible changes it causes for our world. Some sections of YouTube are not just equivalent to television, but much worse and clearly actively harmful, but other sections are so amazing (educational content being one of the best examples imo) that it would be far too careless to dismiss the platform or its incentives as inherently bad.

I suppose the best we could hope for is that we find some ways to improve the viral algorithms (and incentive structures that produce them) that control our Internet ecosystem over time, because there are better ways to align incentives with the goals of humanity than we are currently doing, even if it is hard to get there. I often find that society actually does really care about and improve on these issues, but the reason why it is often easier to be pessimistic is because the changes that we make in response often occur very slowly, often over the span of decades even.