[choo-t]

> Sure, there’s a lot of crap. But you don’t have to watch that.

But even non-crappy content will be steered toward some direction by the advertisement, most videos are made just long enough to fit whatever is the new optimum time for revenue per view. And some subject will be censored to not displease advertisers.

Some people are not doing that, but it's simply because they don't rely on YouTube revenues.

[wat10000]

The people who aren’t doing that still produce way more than 24 hours of quality content per day. And for those who do, I’ll judge them based on what they make, not how I imagine they decide what to make.

[choo-t]

So your whole argument is just cherry picking? Sure if you ignore everything wrong, you can say the system is alright.

[haswell]

By way of analogy, large portions of Reddit have turned into every other social media hellscape.

Reddit is still awesome if you curate your subscriptions and avoid the big subs.

Is it cherry picking to say Reddit is awesome because I’ve carefully made it that way?

> Sure if you ignore everything wrong, you can say the system is alright.

This framing doesn’t make sense. It’s an ecosystem, and it’s not so much about “ignoring” things as much as it is about making active choices. If you go to a shopping district, there is nothing forcing you to shop at every store. If the district still has the stores you care about, shop at them.

[choo-t]

> This framing doesn’t make sense. It’s an ecosystem, and it’s not so much about “ignoring” things as much as it is about making active choices. If you go to a shopping district, there is nothing forcing you to shop at every store. If the district still has the stores you care about, shop at them.

There ton of people that won't go to some shopping districts because the rest of the area is an intolerable mess.

In the same spirit, look a Twitter/X, sure, there still plenty of people making good content there, but you can't deny that the website policies are steering it in a peculiar direction, and lot of users choose to leave Twitter entirely to not be complicit.

[haswell]

> There ton of people that won't go to some shopping districts because the rest of the area is an intolerable mess.

But there is still a major difference between “this shopping area is mostly stores I don’t care about but has a few that I care about significantly” and “this shopping center is a complete nightmare and not worth wading through the nightmare for the the few stores I care about.”

I can easily think of a few real places in my city that fit into each category.

YouTube is still arguably in the first category.

[wat10000]

A better analogy would be the internet. This place has enormous mountains of crap. And yet there's more than enough good stuff for it to be worth it to me to pay a decent amount of money for access.

I'm not paying for YouTube, really. I'm paying for access to the output of various creators. The service also includes access to a bunch of other creators I'm not interested in. And that's fine, I don't access them, just like I pay Verizon and T-Mobile but don't use their service to access instagram.com.

[wat10000]

My gob is properly smacked by this reply.

I mean, yeah! Cherry-picking is the entire point of an on-demand video service. Are you just watching whatever it gives you in order? I seriously cannot comprehend what would possess someone to write this.

[carlosjobim]

Do you not choose what to buy when you go to the supermarket?

[dmonitor]

You get to pick the cherries that you eat.