Reply With Quote"the internet is bad and i am scared of strange uncanny valley videos"Originally Posted by bbobb
that's all you need to know, the more interesting points are lined out in Cow's post.
Separate, but related-
I inherently believe this is the opposite of a dark age. However, I do believe that we are doing a very, very poor job of archiving the vastness of current information with any reliable accuracy. These pieces of culture, whether it be binge shows, youtube poop, etc. - they are annihilated from history as quickly as they pop up. That is where the danger lies, to me. When entertainment is destroyed/blocked/shut down en masse, say when a group of sites or videos or shows gets obliterated off the internet for whatever reason - that is where the true danger lies. Our culture and entertainment has always, always evolved at a rapid pace. But when it is rapidly firing at us, *AND* we cannot access it at a later date, that's when the system starts breaking down. Can't learn from what isn't there, etc.
"the internet is bad and i am scared of strange uncanny valley videos"
that's all you need to know, the more interesting points are lined out in Cow's post.
Yeah, as for the article, I don't have much to comment, but the general issue surrounding is something that is very important.
What really gets to me is how content is consolidating onto a few major platforms, but so much is automatically created, and more importantly, automatically curated. There have been better articles written about how Facebook and Google steer you into an echo chamber. I personally noticed it when I went on YouTube to learn about diet management (calories in, calories out) and pretty soon I was watching people swear by month-long water fasts (and hey, they sounded like they knew what they were talking about). You end up with a few issues:
1. User Generated Content
This has been such a boon for creative people who now have the technology to create videos/art/music and they have a method to find an audience post-broadband internet. That is good. But a lot of it is bad. How do you sort through it all?
2. Automated Curation
There have been some good ideas here, trying to track user engagement, likes/dislikes, watch time, to try and identify when a video is democratically validated. But who's to say the audience actually wants what is best? Who's to say the data is even genuine? Automation doesn't mean the system is picking good stuff, it means it picks the stuff tailored to trigger the win criteria.
3. Content as Advertisement
Part of what I mentioned above, and not an exclusive problem to new media, but even Netflix's Reed Hastings said "We’re competing with sleep." The ultimate goal of these companies is to increase engagement time with the viewer. Google and Facebook don't win by giving you quality content, they win by clickbaiting you into more engagement. Maybe they hand pick a few of their top headlines, sure, but there's no reason to block crappy content. It's being provided to them for free, why not leverage it all? None of this automated curation takes into account the human quality of the product, it's all geared for clicks. So you end up with content that is increasingly polarizing and over-the-top, whether it's vlogs, cooking giant food, political ideologies, fake news, or whatever.
I think the YouTube Kids thing is the most clear example for people to see that this model of curation is deficient. With so much good educational content out there, it makes no sense to me why any parent would see their kids open kinder eggs and think that's good. So, Cowutopia, and other parents here: why do you let your kids on YouTube Kids instead of a curated platform, like Netflix or Disney? Even the straight entertainment on those platforms set ups coherent stories.
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As for the article, I liked the point brought up about Branding being a sign of quality, and that there is a divorcing of content from creator by mixing everything up on the site. Also, the blatant disregard for copyrights adds to how untrustworthy the content is on YouTube.
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My kids watch lots of Netflix, but YouTube is king just because of the sheer amount of content. Emily likes those Elsa/SM videos, and what I've seen has been stupid as hell but not inappropriate. Granted, I haven't seen every one of them, so I can't be 100% certain. Also, there's the problem of the videos it links to afterward. Those constantly change and are hard to police. There's just an avalanche of dumb content on YT (my kids love Wassabi Productions, for some reason), so I have to constantly be checking what they watch. It's scary, because it can be overwhelming sometimes.
It disturbs me that YouTube made a kids-specific app in an attempt to gate mature content, somehow looked at the content being served to kids by the algorithms, and thought "this is fine."
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It's probably foreigners phoning it in for a check.
Dunlap, your whole post is hitting the nail right on the head, but I wanted to specifically reply to this.
I personally put a lot of effort into prescreening YouTube content Brie watches, and then I watch it with her so we can interact with it together. I installed YouTube kids but I do not use it s an automatic moderator, I invest a lot of time into filling that role myself. I do the same for any video service.
I don't mean to come across critical with any of this. It's just the nature of YouTube content is like any other user-generated platform, it's one part content and one part social media. I think a lot of parents would look at YouTube and think it's just TV and if they have a filter they'll be fine, but your kid is effectively interacting with strangers. It's up to you to decide when that's acceptable and if you feel you're able to stand in as content moderator effectively.
It's not like these discussions weren't happening when we were kids. I could have watched MTV as easily as PBS, and the "librul media" could have been desensitizing me to gay people or whatever.
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Back when I was my daughter's age the argument was that the cartoons we watched were too violent and or just 30 minute toy commercials. They were right, but I would have hated my parents if they told be I couldn't watch Transformers.
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