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I'm not sure I understand your analogy. YouTube has both diversity and quantity at levels tens of orders of magnitude higher than any high-quality-low-quantity good. Given the subjectivity of quality and amounts considered it's simply statistical fact that YouTube will always have things at the highest ends of subjective quality for any category.

The algorithm doesn't select for mediocrity - it selects for viewership, but regardless there are millions of creators at there that aren't optimizing for views anyway. It's the same reason some set of random blog posts or comments on sites such as this one will have quality similar to snippets of the highest quality technical documentation. Sheer diversity and quantity will always win.

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YouTube I'd grant you, not Shorts/Reels/TikTok - the format of the media simply isn't amenable to output matching longer-form work, no matter how much gets produced. To me that reads akin to "there are so many tweets that for any criteria a [set of tweets] demonstrate quality similar to any long-form written piece."

> the format of the media simply isn't amenable to output matching longer-form work, no matter how much gets produced

why not? seems like a tautology. what's a robust set of criteria we can use the evaluate this objectively. I bet you TikTok will win. mind you I am not saying the average TikTok is good, just that there's probably some set of videos that that are of comparable quality than something put together over a longer period of time like a novel.

But that’s more of a theoretical truth than a practical one, isn’t it? High quality novels are easily found. TikTok videos of equally high quality and depth? Perhaps not so, or exceedingly rarely.

Infinite monkeys with infinite time could surely also produce something spectacular and eye-opening, statistically speaking. But umm, you’d have to wait infinite time for it to be done, so it’s not really efficient when time is a finite resource.

Even movies won’t capture the nuances of a somewhat decent novels. I have no hope to see something really complex like “The Malazan Book of the Fallen” in any other form.

I understand what you're saying and that you're not talking about the average. The problem is specifically that short form things are short. It's like the monkeys on typewriters - you'll get some beautifully crafted sentences, but you're never going to get a number of sentences that add up to an actual work of Shakespeare - they're aren't enough atoms in the universe for the number of monkeys and typewriters you'd need.

If a quote can be profound, so can a short.

Nobody's making the claim that a quote or a short can't be profound. Simply that longer-form works have emergent properties.

That's fair. I misinterpreted your comment, perhaps because I skimmed it too lightly because shorts have taught me to skim through information.

I don’t see how it’s is a statistical fact. There’s nothing I’ve seen on YouTube that compares even slightly to a high quality movie or TV series (unless it’s an unauthorised copy of a movie or TV series…).

that's a funny example, because something like Cobra Kai literally began on YouTube, there are others like Hazbin Hotel.

anyway, as for the statistics, for the case of YouTube since there are is no forced directive to which all videos must follow (creatively), you can treat all videos as random attempts. then it's just stats to show that such a distribution will have outliers that match or exceed in subjective quality the gate kept works (traditional tvs or literature).

Well, you’ll never see an erotic film on YouTube, or a war documentary using real combat footage for example, so there are many categories where it’s simply not capable of competing. And even without straight-up banned content, ‘advertiser-unfriendly’ content is aggressively buried by the algorithm, which discourages people from making it, so the ‘quantity’ part might not be true. Some content might be so heavily punished by the algorithm that almost nobody thinks to make it. This is a problem for your position, as it’s not enough for YouTube to win in some categories; it has to win in every category.

sure, but my point wasn't exclusive to them (hence the etc in the first comment). it was just related to any mass media platform, all of them collectively will win. you are right about YouTube in particular though, good point.

That logic only works if you take a “1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters” approach to thinking about creativity.

If you want to argue that art is created by pure randomness that’s fine, but I don’t think we’re going to come to an agreement.

3Blue1Brown. Veratasium. Contrapoints. Tom Nicholas. They have all made extremely high quality, and often profound videos.

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