spiralofhope

just some rough thinking.

Anonymity and mechanics enable immorality + YouTube >

This is a folowup to Anonymity and mechanics enable immorality, which – in short- explain some trolling and describe why I think direct opposition to trolling is not as effective as addressing underlying mechanics.

Now I want to go over some issues with YouTube features.

The first thing to do is to triage the issues and prioritize them. This way the issues that are most important can be discussed first and with the most passion.

But, I want to go down another path quickly. Some questions:

• If I listed issues. Honestly, are they really all that important to address? What are the current and future consequences of not doing so? If the efforts that could be used to address the very most important issues were instead spent on, say, new features, would there be anything that could dissuade you from fighting to fix some or all issues?

• Can you empathize that YouTube (and Google) may be focused on issues which affect the greatest number of users, and perhaps they cannot presently address your most important issues?

• If YouTube were to explicitly state their position on all your issues, and their position did not satisfy you, how would you react?

• Some have talked about other services as supplements or alternates to YouTube. Would you consider migrating? What would be the effort and what would be the “damage” or sacrifice in doing so?

• Knowing your issues with YouTube, what if those same issues were seen in an alternate service? What if entirely new issues — which are significant to you — were found? What if no alternate to YouTube solved all your issues?

• So, let’s go over what I think are voiced the loudest as the most impactful issues.

• These issues are seem to be focused around visibility on the home page. Videos appear there based on some stats like ratings, comments, views, etc.

• Now I have never used any of the Channels or the Home Page stuff, and I don’t have a lot of the specifics of how things work – but I get the just of things.

• I also understand that some YouTubers have had their honours stripped from them either manually at YouTube’s dishonourable discretion or through some mechanic that’s unknown to us.

• Views
• Rating
• Discussion
• Video responses -> often gamed

• Favourited

These relate to the various tabs in YouTube’s “Videos” link at the top. It also looks like YouTube buries some other items in a little dropdown box.

I will also mention that all this ranking stuff has a per-country breakdown. One has to manually click the top-left country and choose “worldwide” to see global rankings.

I don’t see how some issues affect views. So things like comment thumbs, or comments marked as spam don’t seem relevant.

Views of videos are also ultimately effect channel views and channel subscriptions. These things are also tracked on YouTube’s “Channels” link at the top.

Ok, so let’s step back and ask some more questions.

• Do views matter?
• Do comments matter?
• Do video responses matter?

• Do subscriptions matter?

If I were to rank these from most valuable to least, I’d put views last.

It also seems to me that high numbers of these things have significant consequences:

• More user interaction
• More time spent

• Just more effort in general.

This has taken a while, so I guess it’ll be a four-parter:

• Next will be views-related issues.

• Then I’ll do another vid on the remaining issues.

(no more work was done)