YouTube | Chris Aldrich

👓 The Most Measured Person in Tech Is Running the Most Chaotic Place on the Internet | New York Times

Read The Most Measured Person in Tech Is Running the Most Chaotic Place on the Internet (New York Times)

YouTube’s C.E.O. spends her days contemplating condoms and bestiality, talking advertisers off the ledge and managing a property the size of Netflix.

📑 YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant

Annotated YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant by Mark Bergen (Bloomberg)

A 2015 clip about vaccination from iHealthTube.com, a “natural health” YouTube channel, is one of the videos that now sports a small gray box. ❧

Does this box appear on the video itself? Apparently not…

Examples:

But nothing on the embedded versions:

A screengrab of what this looks like for those that don’t want to be “infected” by the algorithmic act of visiting these YouTube pages:

📑 YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant

Annotated YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant by Mark Bergen (Bloomberg)

The idea was to reward video stars shorted by the system, such as those making sex education and music videos, which marquee advertisers found too risqué to endorse. ❧

This is an interesting concept. Too often, too many people are “shorted by the system”.

📑 YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant

Annotated YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant by Mark Bergen (Bloomberg)

YouTube doesn’t give an exact recipe for virality. But in the race to one billion hours, a formula emerged: Outrage equals attention. ❧

Talk radio has had this formula for years and they’ve almost had to use it to drive any listenership as people left radio for television and other media.

I can still remember the different “loudness” level of talk between Bill O’Reilly’s primetime show on Fox News and the louder level on his radio show.

📑 YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant

Annotated YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant by Mark Bergen (Bloomberg)

When Wojcicki took over, in 2014, YouTube was a third of the way to the goal, she recalled in investor John Doerr’s 2018 book Measure What Matters.“They thought it would break the internet! But it seemed to me that such a clear and measurable objective would energize people, and I cheered them on,” Wojcicki told Doerr. “The billion hours of daily watch time gave our tech people a North Star.” By October, 2016, YouTube hit its goal. ❧

Obviously they took the easy route. You may need to measure what matters, but getting to that goal by any means necessary or using indefensible shortcuts is the fallacy here. They could have had that North Star, but it’s the means they used by which to reach it that were wrong.

This is another great example of tech ignoring basic ethics to get to a monetary goal. (Another good one is Marc Zuckerberg’s “connecting people” mantra when what he should be is “connecting people for good” or “creating positive connections”.

📑 YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant

Annotated YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant by Mark Bergen (Bloomberg)

The conundrum isn’t just that videos questioning the moon landing or the efficacy of vaccines are on YouTube. The massive “library,” generated by users with little editorial oversight, is bound to have untrue nonsense. Instead, YouTube’s problem is that it allows the nonsense to flourish. And, in some cases, through its powerful artificial intelligence system, it even provides the fuel that lets it spread. ❧

This is a great summation of the issue.

📺 IndieWebCamp New Haven | YouTube

Watched IndieWebCamp New Haven 2019 from YouTube

Introductions and Keynote: Connected Learning & the IndieWeb by Kimberly Hirsh
at Southern Connecticut State University, Davis Hall, 501 Crescent Avenue, 06515 New Haven, Connecticut.

I had joined a tad late this morning and only watched the YouTube stream instead of joining the Google Hangout channel.

I wanted to rewatch the entire opening to see Kimberly Hirsh’s keynote a second time. I almost feel bad that she gave it remotely so that she couldn’t experience the direct feedback and adulation of people watching it live. Of course the benefit of a streamed version is that I got to watch it bleary-eyed in my pajamas (because of the time difference between New Haven and Los Angeles) and it will live on for others to watch and enjoy long into the future.

Congratulations Kimberly! And thanks again for taking the time to talk to all of us.

📺 Kinesin protein walking on microtubule | YouTube

Watched Kinesin protein walking on microtubule from YouTube

Extracted from The Inner Life of a Cell by Cellular Visions and Harvard (http://www.studiodaily.com/2006/07/cellular-visions-the-inner-life-of-a-cell/)

hat tip to reference in note 21 on page 221 of The Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies.

I’m pretty certain that I’ve seen this or something very similar to it in another setting. (Television perhaps?)