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Comment by drawkward | Hacker News Reader

>YouTube is one of the last driving treasures of the internet

From where I sit, YT looks like one of the worst inventions humanity has ever created.

These blanket statements are really not that valuable if you fail to mention by what measure you find it to be such a bad invention.

When I am responding to

> it bears mentioning that YouTube is one of the last driving treasures of the internet

and you fail to comment on that blanket statement, your bias pierces the pretend mantle of objectivity in which you cloak yourself.

I am going to stick with what I said. One person says YouTube is incredibly good, another one that it is incredibly bad. No reasons are given that lead either of you to your assessments. So what insight have we gained?

Somehow both things are true, and I don't know how we disentangle them.

YouTube the site where people can dump videos is incredibly useful because there are visual tutorials for everything.

YouTube the site where people form parasocial relationships with flat-earth-fluencers and break their brains is the worst invention since leaded gasoline.

Some things cannot be disentangled. This is one of the biggest platforms in the Internet and you have to deal with the varying expectations of an incredibly diverse audience. Having to shape the policies on such platform in order to satisfy your users must be a very hard job as you never actually reach a "goal". All you can do is optimize the site for what you think the majority of users want from it and your own ethics. But tomorrow you might need to change direction entirely.

I am curious to see how this plays out for YouTube and all the social media platforms out there. I am certainly rooting for YouTube to be able to successfully walk that line as it is by far the most valuable platform to me personally.

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