I feel somewhat uneasy about the message in this video: it’s the idea that YouTube channels that have high production costs that need to be subsidized by organizations like NSF are in danger.
It’s true. We risk losing high quality stuff, while keeping right-wing subsidized garbage (like PragerU) and we don’t want that. So in that sense I agree 100% with the message.
But there’s a greater danger, and it’s been here all along. It’s the YouTube algorithm, which is already designed to favor clickbait, rage content, and sensationalist lies. The most heavily viewed YT pages are obscenities, not in the sexual sense, but in an intellectual sense. PewDiePie, MrBeast, Tim Poole, and a nightmarish swarm of repetitive, AI-generated children’s cartoon channels — the current is flowing strongly against science media.
I don’t think funding from NASA or NSF or local universities to do science outreach, which is a good thing, is going to be able to succeed against the biases of corporate YouTube. But keep on trying!
I don’t understand why a self-respecting institution should see long-term value in doing outreach to someone who makes their living on a closed platform, particularly one with an opaque search algorithm which functions primarily to service the owner’s wishes. That seems a lazy and unsustainable outreach, and the ephemeral product will submerge as soon as it (or its channel) no longer services the engagemertainment algorithm
Here is a simple, practical solution. Require YouTube, news outfits, etc. to have not one algorithm, but many. Have a right-wing-rage algorithm if you must, but also a calm conservation algorithm, a progressive one, a middle of the road algor., a Christian one, Muslim, atheist, a science one, Democrat, GOP, Just the Facts, and so on and so forth. Let people choose their algorithm, if they want to live in a bubble, let them. Also let them switch algorithms so they can see what the other side is up to. And make the algorithm’s internals public, as is done with security algorithms, so outside experts can probe them for weaknesses. Also make the algorithms public domain so anyone can use them, including companies that can’t afford to write their own. Let 100 algorithms bloom!
This would be a huge win for everyone, except for businesses that want to exploit us. Everyone but villains, in other words. Write your representative!
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blockquote>The most heavily viewed YT pages are obscenities, not in the sexual sense, but in an intellectual sense.
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It’s almost as if democratizing the media and the “free” and “unregulated” Internet was a BAD idea, and that we need “gatekeepers” and “censors” from letting the uneducated trash pollute our culture with bullshit.
Yes, I realize the irony here, but I’ll happily trade in posting tirades online if it meant that our media would be free of these grifters and their knuckle-dragging followers.
#1 Eigen
That’s just it, Twitter YouTube et al are cheap. People are already there so the potential audience is large. If the funding wasn’t there to do their own thing as far as outreach is concerned before now, how do you propose it happen now?
I know that one of the major reasons some will put everything on youtube is ‘publicity and visibility’ and that it gets a huge volume of traffic. However, the traffic to any one ‘channel’ is drastically diluted by the massive number of ‘channels’ the total traffic is spread over.
Who is your audience? How will you make people aware of you? In this age of a ‘crapified’ corporate dominated internet. There are no easy answers. There is so much CRAP on the internet. BUT, there is a lot of valuable information and worthwhile entertainment still to be found if you look beyond the huge, blinding, blaring corporate publicity crap. But, sadly, the sheople love ‘big shiny things’ and will continue to subsidize the Corp Crap and not think deeply enough to seek out valuable sites. And, if there were ‘internet police’ they would likely be owned and controlled by the corrupt corporate powers on the internet and therefore, completely ineffectual or even damaging.
It is not difficult or prohibitively expensive to create a site that allows you to make your messages available without the contamination of the commercial bs. We’ve done it for many.
And, here, PZ on freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ has accomplished that quite well. And, the commenters show they DO bother to try to find worthwhile info and entertainment.
Things are getting scary and more precarious with no effective rescue in sight. Stay safe people, try not to get caught in the MUMP powered death spiral.
Technology Connections, a brilliant channel run by Alec Watson that usually does how-things-work videos about everything from pinball machines to HVAC systems, released an outstanding video 2 days ago about this subject, which he termed “Algorithmic Complacency.”
FD Signifier promotes Nebula which costs 6 bucks per month. That’s cheaper than Youtube Premium. There’s some overlap with Youtube per content creation. I looked into it and meh.
Just discovered this guy’s Youtube channel. Stuff on animals:
He might have a part on spiders…
The algorithm is optional.
Just because stuff is “suggested” is no good reason to click on it.
And one need not search for stuff within YouTube itself.
Regarding “Youtube Premium”, I don’t get why anyone would pay money for it, myself.
Ad-blockers are a thing.
(Hell, I don’t even have an account, premium or otherwise)
I usually don’t have too much trouble with the algorithm unless I deep dive on tangents or do too much hatewatching. I have nuked my history/other settings before and started back from scratch on the feed recommendations. That’s a bit hard to take. The spoonfeeding is preferable to that. I have subscribed to channels based on feed recommends.
I don’t know how much impact the NSF has on my feed.
As for the nasties PZ brings up in the OP, the only time I see Poole is if Pakman, Majority Report, Secular Talk etc talk about him.
I do have Yarvin in my feed, but that’s out of morbid curiosity given the current news. Weird dude.
Marc Rober at #43 is the only one on that list (that I am familiar with) that is worth half a shit.
Mastodon’s algorithm is…you. Where you hang, what you follow, and at a push, what seems to be boosted/retooted/retweeted by those where you hang. (This is what I’ve gathered, not from any great experience.)
I think this goes a long way towards #2 Ted’s point, because in the Fediverse everyone builds their own place in an friendly chosen place, and decides which wall of their house should have a window in it.
On #4 Seachange’s (very good) point, I wish I knew. I only read the transcript of the video PZ included, wherein the YouTube creator’s plea for people like them to get more beneficent Patreons and more support from funding institutions, and it seemed that any institutional money or time sent in their direction was wasted unless YouTube continued to promote them in perpetuity. Not a wise funding decision. So this is where an institution with any sort of communications and outreach budget should curate its own media and hold its own media. And if it has no such budget/time resource, then they aren’t providing any access to anyone and that makes the YouTube influencer’s point moot.
I shouldn’t have picked Mastodon… it’s just the only Fediverse application I know which might be the sort of thing an institution should support for outreach.
More practical, with the same (hoped) effect: require them to expose their internal databases — videos, keyword index, and such — via an API so that anyone can build their own front-end, with its own search that uses its own ranking methods. Links would still go to the video on YT and generate traffic and potentially ad views for YT, though of course sites providing their own front-ends would be able to put their own ads in a sidebar on the search page or wherever, or use the ranking algorithm to promote their own (monetized) YT content.
In practice, we’d probably end up with Bingtube, Yandextube, Facetube, X-Tube, and some kind of heavily censored Jinpingtube, run by the usual suspects, along with a smattering of smaller and more indie ones. DuckDuckTube, perhaps.
First off, the pre-internet MSM still had a pro-imperialist, pro-business, pro-war bias among other problems, even if they suppressed both right-wing and left-wing extremists rather than only the latter.
And second, this is, fundamentally, the same type of error that conservatives keep making: to want to turn back the clock to a supposed “golden age” before all this unpleasant change started happening. I shall note that, and I shall additionally note that it is not generally possible to solve a problem with the same thinking that caused it in the first place.
No, the only way out is through, even if it’s not yet obvious how. I will note that while the early internet had its fair share of kooks and wingnuts, they didn’t dominate the conversation back then, and that was when it was at its most unfiltered and “raw”. It seems to have become a problem only when it came under increasing corporate control and was increasingly seen as a profit center and a propaganda vehicle rather than an unimportant sideshow.
In other words, the internet doesn’t have an unfilteredness problem, it has a capitalism problem, much as most other things do these days. The profit motive distorts incentives and turns everything it touches to shit, from pro sports (compare to amateur/college) to the internet to science to government. What we need, it seems, is some sort of actual honest-to-God socialist revolution, this time without it getting hijacked by some Stalin-alike bent on warping it into just another damnable oligarchy disguised as a democracy. Unfortunately I don’t know how to do that, and history has shown that it is very difficult to keep that sort of hijacking from happening.
The technical term is, I shit you not, “enshittified”. :)
The guy Mamadou Ndiaye I linked above has an interesting origin story related to the pandemic:
https://www.nj.com/entertainment/2024/02/he-talks-about-animals-and-16-million-people-listen-meet-njs-viral-tiktok-zoologist.html
I love his videos, but they may not be for everyone. Twisted humor I relate to. His honey badger stuff is great. His horny dolphin stuff is NSFW! Not since Steve Irwin have I been so captivated by animal content.
I think it’s more with people finding it ever so easy to find and stay within their media ‘bubble’.
That’s all the algorithm wants; engagement means advertising revenue.
Back in the day, there were noises about micropayment systems (like, fractions of a cent per article type of thing), but the infrastructure didn’t allow for it. Now, it could be done, but the paradigm is advertising revenue.
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“His honey badger stuff is great. His horny dolphin stuff is NSFW!”
His clickbait is par for the course.
“Top 10 Most Criminally Misunderstood Animals” is the featured one.
Previous one:
One would never know to what animal he supposedly refers, without a thumbnail or a click-through.
Classic case of clickbait.
(It’s not a husky, and it’s not a human)
I saw a video (while back now) from a respectable YouTuber all about clickbaitiness of titles and thumbnails.
Same video, same story, O so different the results.
Fact of it is, most people are simpletons when it comes to this stuff.
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I do admire the work ethic of successful youtubers, but. Whether or not I like them.
Gotta keep that content churning out, and if you stop… well, there goes your income.
(Shout-out to those who are for real for real; like LindyBeige and the Metatron)
Perhaps we need laws about algorithms making it illegal to have algorithms push misinfo, disinfo and incite hatred and division?
@2 Nah, they have at least two algorithms. One suggests content, based on popularity, what you watch, and who makes them the most money fastest, and weirdly, this last item seems to erase all the channels that provide accurate, complete, and useful information, and instead spits out stupid shit like 5 minute crafts. But, they have a second one, which is a moderation algorithm. The way that seems to work is this, based on the results of someone I know trying to post on youtube – 1. You post a handful of videos, topless, which isn’t violating the TOS, which talks about women’s rights, and the right to go topless, but you also make the mistake of making a lot of leftist, or anti-mysogeny comments. 2. All the people posting anti-women stuff get wind of it and scream to the algorithm, “TOS violations! Porn! She has links to art pieces that may have full nudity in them, and everyone knows all pictures like that are porn!” 3. The same person gets fed up with this, removes the links to her outside stuff entirely, tries to do everything from using pixilation, to black bars, to literally algorithmically adding clothes to herself in the youtube version of her vids, etc., but the “algorithm” has now learned to see her, her content, and possibly just her face, and automatically porn. 4. Even posting a video, fulling clothed, with no connection to outside content at all, and talking about the complications of dealing with his father’s recent death, is quickly, efficiently, and without a single human at youtube bothering to even check if the algorithm is working right, instantly flagged as a TOS violation, labelled as containing adult video content, and taken down, along with a new violation on file for the poster. Now, maybe, “if” you have millions of followers, and are making youtube lots and lots of money, you might get a real person to look at someone, or the algorithm itself, flagging your video, and it won’t matter if the content is a screed in which you just read the worst hate speech and Nazi crap from X, and say you love it, someone will “review it” and maybe decide that its worth slapping you on the hand, at most, but keeping your channel up. But, if you are literally anyone else some lazy ass behind a desk sits down and feeds the (probably LLM) a prompt asking, “Does this really contain bad things?”, and the algorithm looks over the video again, using its prior training, and spits out, “Yep! I definitely found something in it that identifies this user as porn, therefor the content must be!”, and the violation/ban stays in place.
Simple, fast, efficient, and utterly f-ing stupid. But, lets be fair here, its precisely what a lot of morons in the GOP have demanded for years – a system that can automatically flag content for.. well, content they don’t like. Doesn’t matter that it doesn’t work, that feeding it enough violations, along with the content you want it to check, will invariably lead to it flagging literally anything as “undesirable”, etc., its automatic, and they can pretend it works, because it a) blocks a lot of people they hate, yeah!, and b) somehow magically lets through Nazis, hate speech, and other things they “do like”, also yeah!, from their perspective.
So, yeah, they have at least “two” algorithms. lol
One conversation that is missing is the design a viable alternative platform conversation.
Image a platform called science tube. You can put up science videos but they get peer reviewed. A scientist in the field has to give it a tick before publicly available.
How would that work? What funding and resource issues arrise? Who gets chosen as a peer? How is the system most easilly gamed?
“Image a platform called science tube. You can put up science videos but they get peer reviewed. A scientist in the field has to give it a tick before publicly available.”
Imagine a cabal.
More to the point, there are a great many good science videos on YouTube.
Such is the vastness of videos and channels that, even given Sturgeon’s law, the quality content is rather extensive.
Already more than one person can consume in their lifetime.
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Not to drive the point home, but for those who seek, there it is.
(Forcing the rest to watch quality content, well… wishful thinking)
Like anything else though, you need to know who to ask to find it, or what to look for. If you know neither, then what you get is some dipshit that claims, “science is in crisis”, in between posts about how they think all the new stuff in astronomy about dark matter is bunk, and why X, Y and Z sciences are doing something or other – which may or may not contain complaints by them about how its also bunk. Oh, and lots of stolen content videos, and/or even less sensible people, posting stupid nonsense that “looks sciency” according to the algorithm, but was probably produced by the disco institute. Its not pretty when it comes to finding legit things, if you don’t already know what search to do to find them, and/or where to look for them in the first place, via a direct link.
The other “sites”, while acceptable, often pay wall, due to the fact that they don’t have advertisers paying to keep them “on the air/internet”, which is a problem for some people that need to find legit content (and isn’t too convenient for me either), or is not a viable replacement because it “only” supports specific types of content, and a lot of the people left out in the cold, or even just unfairly skinned alive by youtube, for illegitimate reasons, are left trying to find some jinky, half functional, site, which also has to be pay walled, to keep their content on it, and may coexist with things they absolutely didn’t want to be associated with at all, just to be able to post it, because they have been backed into a bloody corner, and its not deemed “useful enough”, to have the privilege of being on a “science site”, or the like.
Its basically the, “Oh, your art includes nudes? Well, we want that moved to the basement.” “Oh, wait, actually we need the basement, put it in by the mops.” “Oh, no, the janitor is an advertiser and doesn’t want his mops next to your painting, I am afraid you will have to leave the building.” So.. you go shopping around to find some place else to display you art, and the only place you can find is a small room in the same building as the adult toy and video store. And.. this might not even be nude art, it might be you promoting sex education, but running afoul of the crazy advertisers, and discovering that, again, the only place you can post your education material is the equivalent of next to the cities only strip club, and two doors down from the BSDM dungeon.
Its real nice when they don’t like you content, so drive people to stupid crap instead, but its deemed “sufficiently legit”, as to be allowed some place damned inconvenient, hard to find and get to, but still theoretically “family friendly”. Such a tragedy, when compared to the places some people find themselves when youtube either shoves them in the janitor closet, or just plain throws them out, and gives up the space to Joe Rogan, or one of the numerous “family values” groups that hate families, kids, parents, and rights, instead.
Its just all so… bloody stupid. But, then, most censorship always is.