Comment by jand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jand | Hacker News Reader

I do not feel comfortable about this.

From my point of view the proper way to solve this is to educate people and build up "media competence".

Who defines what a harmful video is? Such classification is always influenced by current trends, social norms and so on. What might be harmful to a child might be not even worth a shrug to an adult. What is fact today, might be laughable tomorrow and heresy the day after. Have fun navigating this.

If you think that youtube guides people on downward spirals towards extremism and is not willing to acknowledge or change it - talk to your kids and peers about it. Repeat this until they are able to decide for themselves.

But pushing some information (sort of propaganda) and hiding some information (sort of censorship) both lead down a dangerous path.

I can't put my finger right on the spot, but it seems like nuking a hurricane.

There’s a sucker born every minute. Or more than one sucker per minute, even. Far more people join the Internet every day than could possibly be reached by education. That’s kinda what “Eternal September” was: the moment when the Internet began growing too quickly for the existing social mores of IT people to become impressed onto the next generation of Internet users.

Barnum’s sideshows eventually stopped, but it wasn’t education that stopped them. Mostly, it was government regulation stripping away all the big draws (the big-top shows) by making a lot of them (rightfully) illegal. That just required a few experts and politicians to achieve consensus on the subject; a secular shift in public opinion wasn’t required.

>But pushing some information (sort of propaganda) and hiding some information (sort of censorship) both lead down a dangerous path

What information is this pushing or hiding? This is trying to better understand how YouTube is making these recommendations, so it is a known factor when you talk to your kids and peers.

> What information is this pushing or hiding? This is trying to better understand how YouTube is making these recommendations, so it is a known factor when you talk to your kids and peers.

Well, I personally doubt that this project aims at purely understanding the recommendation logic and then doing nothing. But i might be mistaken. Time will tell.

What do you think it is for? I can't imagine any nefarious plans providing this level of control over what data you send them.

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