Comment by froobius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by froobius | Hacker News Reader

YouTube has so much questionable content on it that gets millions of views... Parents who've found ways to monetize their kids. Dangerous / unpleasant pranks being pulled on members the public. Conspiracy theories. Fake game shows where the winners being given money are actually friends of the host. Or where the host pretends contestants are doing something dangerous, but actually it's CGI, (misleading young viewers into thinking the dangerous stuff is real / fun). Morons making content that's attractive to kids who don't know better. Etc.

While there is some quality content on there, the amount of terrible content getting vast amount of views is pretty high.

I guess one question is whether TV is much better.. I would say on average it probably is less bad, although there have also been / are questionable unethical tv shows. But at least with TV shows there's more likely to be a few more layers of questioning / analysing / looking at the ethics, with responsible people involved.

Maybe a business/layer would be needed (if that doesn’t exist yet) that pick « best quality » content and provide a curated list as a channel ? YouTube is just the whole catalog. I would definitely like that, channels and curated content from YouTube because I lost so much time finding great content sometimes that it’s sad.

The fundamental way how youtube content is organised is channels. You find a few channels you like, you watch their back catalogue and you subscribe to their new content.

And it is indeed a business layer too. The people making the channel gets paid for their trouble per views. Each channel is a little brand with their own idea of what kind of content they will give to the viewers and in what shape and what kind of quality.

I’m sure what you describe is different from this in some way, but it is weird reading that you wish youtube had channels without mentioning that it already has them.

> because I lost so much time finding great content sometimes that it’s sad.

Idk if you are pickier than me, or have even more niche tastes than I do, because in my experience youtube is full of great content.

Usually YT channels are per creator so it’s usually the same vein of content. But TV has channels from many sources and it’s a manually curated list of content. I was referring to the same way of aggregating content. TV is old and we don’t need a 1 month program of planned content I guess because everything is on-demand but still. Being able to make a specialty like curated channel and share it to watch it like TV might be a thing.

The internet itself is no different, its whether you choose to engage with that content or not. I have been watching Youtube for well over a decade and still have my channel subscriptions which drives the extent of the content I watch.

Everything was fake and centralized now it is fake and decentralized. I’m not entirely convinced it’s better. Maybe.

You don't like conspiracy theories?

You prefer everybody agrees with the truth?

Conspiracy theories nowadays are about a year away from being conspiracy fact. Digital ID is being HEAVILY pushed by the Labour government in the UK. Scary times.

If I was a billionaire I would prioritize identifying, monitoring and controlling the underclass.

But that's a conspiracy theory! Why would they ever do that?

... come back to this comment in a year.

I think that's a fait accompli -- it's merely a matter of who has access to the data.

The funny thing is that the clear anti-democratic leanings of our technolords are based upon not trusting the vote of the masses has unfortunately been somewhat validated (case in point: the current admin). There's just one small problem: the technolords themselves have only one vision and skill: enshittification in the quest of personal enrichment.

China has a very scary model of societal control, but at least they know how to invest in the country as a whole.

If you were a billionaire, what practical reason would you have for promoting democracy?

I'm not convinced something that's been tried multiple times on and off in the UK (last time ID cards were being brought in - by Labour and the 2006 act - it was cancelled by the coalition), and happens in many countries, is a "conspiracy theory"

Who exactly is conspiring and what exactly are they conspiring for?

I mean, it depends a lot on the conspiracy theories.

The common right-wing conspiracy theories in the US are, like, one or two hops and skips away from "jews are running the world and we need to kill them".

Guys, why does everything come back to something hitler-y? Can we stop that please?

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