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by spaced-out 1220 days ago
>Personally I'd find it delightful if the rage-engine got smashed with a legal hammer and my Youtube recommendations were as useful as they were fifteen years ago.

Why would it be safe for them to use an older recommendation system? It doesn't solve the problem, if their older system recommends a terrorism video, even if it only did so because that video came up chronologically, they're still liable.

I would think they would need to just stop allowing the general public to upload videos anymore and only permit trusted media companies and influencers (ones known to not create controversial content) to do so. Probably after being approved through a vetting process where their lawyers can look through at least some of the content first.

1 comments

>Why would it be safe for them to use an older recommendation system? It doesn't solve the problem, if their older system recommends a terrorism video, even if it only did so because that video came up chronologically, they're still liable.

A system that keyword matches isn't making recommendations, it's just keyword matching based upon the user's request. The law actually cares about intent and how things function, not just hypothetical possibilities that can occur, i.e. the law cares about what does happen and why it happens that way. So it's pointless to characterize a non-recommendation system as a recommendation system as a means of end-running an argument.

If there are 150,000 results that match your keyword, which results show up first?
If the answer to that is "results that the search engine thinks is most relevant to you", then that's probably a recommendation engine. If the answer is "results that are most recent" or even "results that many people have watched", then that probably isn't a recommendation engine.

You're acting like any kind of algorithm is automatically a recommendation engine that should terminate Section 230 protections, but I don't think it's that simple.

The most recent, the oldest, the closest match? That doesn't make it a recommendation system. Maybe try and read my post and make an effort to understand it rather than just responding with the first thing that comes to mind, because it is as if you have not understood my post at all and you seem to have not made any effort thereto.
>The most recent, the oldest

Do you not recognize how lousy of a video sharing website this would be? Spammers are going to be constantly uploading marketing and other low-quality content with irrelevant keywords, while users that actually put work into making good quality videos will see their results pushed to the bottom quickly. How will you deal with that without implementing a system that can identify and recommend non-spam videos? Even the oldest versions of Youtube were boosting videos that got lots of likes.

>the closest match

How is deciding the "closest match" not considered a recommendation? They all have the user's keyword, what other criteria will you use?

>Do you not recognize how lousy of a video sharing website this would be? Spammers are going to be constantly uploading marketing and other low-quality content with irrelevant keywords, while users that actually put work into making good quality videos will see their results pushed to the bottom quickly. How will you deal with that without implementing a system that can identify and recommend non-spam videos? Even the oldest versions of Youtube were boosting videos that got lots of likes.

Not sure why that's my problem, I'm not the one making money by promoting reactionary videos to reactionaries.

>How is deciding the "closest match" not considered a recommendation? They all have the user's keyword, what other criteria will you use?

Because it's not a recommendation, some are better matches than others, thats' all. Some match the entire keyword, some just parts, some in different places... I don't understand what is difficult about this for you.

And what do you do when there's 10,000 exact keyword matches, how do you sort them? If it's newest the entire thing is just going to be spam accounts reposing the same video(s) on any major keyword. "top", or anything notable is also likely to be gamed and abused too, especially if you fuzz "top" sorting because then its not really neutral, you're deciding the order and therefore making a recommendation.
>Not sure why that's my problem, I'm not the one making money by promoting reactionary videos to reactionaries.

The reason I think we should see it as our problem is because I think the solution companies arrive at is just to turn the internet into cable TV, where only approved media organizations are able to share content because of liability concerns.