Thursday, June 13, 2019

Could YouTube be democratized?

Seeing that YouTube is capable of censorship, one wonders what kind of distributed capability would truly be "free" to content providers and consumers - without censorship?

The best parts of YouTube are the public eye-share it provides through its "recommended" and "trending" functions. As mentioned in the previous post, to create a filter that re-enforces the viewpoint from "authoritative" sources is a pretty slippery slope.

But these sorts of considerations come up because YouTube not only provides the free (or inexpensive) video storage capability, it also provides the browser and the advertising channel (is there one?) on top of it. In some ways those considerations are a biproduct of YouTube being a monopoly. A little monopoly inside a much larger one - functioning to monetize peoples private behaviors and -now- to reinforce someone's status quo.

To democratize YouTube, the company would need to open source its video classification (labels? AI?) and encourage external vendors to build alternate browsers - some with ads, some without.

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