I think the practice here is to post your full post and if interesting enough, people will end up going to your substack.

Interesting, this makes me think about AI is not Software.

I agree with the premise that the general public understands software can have massive impact due to bugs, most may know that "Software vulnerabilities are caused by mistakes in the code" but beyond there, I'm not so sure. I'm a non-technical (I have a very basic understanding of Python) and most people I know have almost no idea of how computing works.

I would still lean towards something like "Therefore, a successful "Quit YouTube" video would indeed not be promoted in the medium and long term by YouTube but not because it's not good for ads but because it is stopping the user's future interactions that have a chance of being monetized in any manner of ways, including superlikes, memberships, ads, etc"

I think that's a fair assessment, I did not want to make it look like YouTube was a non profit haha, mostly that they have found that by sacrificing some money on the short term, they make sure they're earning a ton on the long term.

They are not really in control of what becomes viral or not. Of course, I'm sure they can push or ban one specific video but how could they be aware that a video is going to buzz about leaving YouTube? There's just too much content and some parts of the ecosystem are completely oblivious to mega hits videos (like videos with 10s or sometimes even 100s of millions of views, are simply never showed to some spectators). My point is that it's the algorithm deciding at scale and not YouTube. In its current state I also believe it would likely push it at first but then the video would plummet if it worked and could even be negative for the creator long term. Of course there's also the possibility that people watch videos but never follow through with them however good they are to making people act. (that's actually the base behavior lol, watching content has become a drug nowadays)

As for "make sure the viewer is satisfied with time spent on YouTube" I'm not sure how they measure that? It could be anything from survey results, to a predicted score based on certain behaviors. If they were really sneaky, they could use time spent watching as a proxy metric for satisfaction.

You're not far away from what they do! Through the years they have tried several ways to measure what's good, first with click through rate and % of video watch, then moving more towards total watch time (which is when longer videos started becoming the norm) and more recently towards watch time in session. (meaning the best behavior is people coming to YouTube for your video and then watching other videos after that) If you come to YouTube to watch a single video, the watch time better be very significant or it will be negative for the content you watched because they would rather have you longer on the platform.

About two years ago they have started saying that they were aiming for viewer satisfaction which is indeed pretty hard to describe but a mix of the different type of watch times is likely already good, to which they indeed add regular viewer polls to ask how you felt about recommandations and videos.

Nowadays, it's obviously become a mix of many different signals, with different values given to each. Contrary to popular belief, likes and comments are pretty much worthless to the algorithm. (although likes may have gotten a tiny bit of value back)

There is growing competition (even in long form videos which is much harder to setup than short form for a platform) so despite them being pretty much a monopoly, I don't think they are going for a full profit strategy. I think the AI debacle will keep Google in a competitive mind for sometime. On the other hand, when you're already so profitable, it may be a viable strategy to leave some money on the table in order to remain a de facto monopoly by making any competitor bleed money.

Also, from what I gathered, the shorts algorithm is very much different from the normal videos because the people watching short form and long have very different usage of the platform. Not sure if there's something different in how YouTube makes it work though, might just be because of audience behavior.

I'm not that surprised because this seems to have been the human state for pretty much all of humanity until the 20th century in the west? In places in which you do not have to wage war or fight (in the literal sense) to make your condition better, it seems to become normal for the schadenfreude to decrease?

In France at least it was seen as a terrible incident and I don't know many people who rejoiced, although I have heard more about it in the last decade from some groups.

Click here to create a Petrov Day event for the frontpage map.

no link?

Disclaimer : I was short on time but I think I got most of it, sorry if I'm missing something or if my comment is a bit lacking, I had to do this fast.

I agree that YouTube's end goal is revenue generation but it seems to me you're considering that YouTube's content recommandation algorithm is optimized for revenue generation via advertising, which I believe to be untrue. From what I have gathered following the ecosystem (I'm interested in it because I have a relatively successful YouTube channel) along the years, that is not the case.

The recommandation algorithm is not a monolithic system : each YouTube account has its own personal algorithm which mostly relies on the 1000 last videos watched by the account. The current goal is said to be "make sure the viewer is satisfied with time spent on YouTube". Like you said, YouTube wants people to stay on the platform and that's because over time, people will spend money on YouTube : this option has been growing significantly in the last 10 years with live options, superlikes, Boost, memberships, YouTube Premium, among other possibilities.

The advertising algorithm is completely decoupled from the content recommandation algorithm. The only relation with it is the fact that specific videos (+18 content for instance) will show only specific ads.

With time, YouTube is trying to decouple AdSense's revenues from YouTube's viability as a platform like I outlined earlier. Of course, ads will always pay more because they are that valuable but there is now a very much growing YouTube economy outside of ads. I could go look at the financial results to see if there's more info there.

Therefore, a successful "Quit YouTube" video would indeed not be promoted in the medium and long term by YouTube but not because it's not good for ads but because it is stopping the user's satisfaction with YouTube.

Well we'll have to disagree on that. I have not said that there were no other benefits but that they were nowhere near communication and reading. Saying that those were not very largely the main benefits of language learning simply seems untrue to me and your examples are only comforting this view.

Both are nice things that come with a new language but definitely not something that would motivate the immense majority of people (and people on lesswrong are definitely not normal people) to learn a language if they were the only reason. I'm sure that's a thing in lesswrong adjacent communities.

I do agree that "many" people benefit from the first example but that is almost always a side effect : what they want first and foremost is access to the content itself. You could not read the sequences in italian 10 years ago so you learned english, had they been translated you would not have learned it.(terrible example but you know what I mean)

What are they then? I'd say there were two massive advantages : reading text and talking. The rest is extremely marginal. Sure, there are a few people with specific cases where they have other interests in learning languages but when internet people all started to learn english, that was because everything good on the web was in english. They wanted to understand and communicate with others and that's pretty much it.

But you're already able to do both with current technology? Text translation is solved already and in most cases better than a human knowing the other language. Granted, voice translation makes for a janky conversation but you can already understand anyone anywhere anytime as long as you have access to a device. And this won't be a problem for long with the speed of progress and the new types of AI first devices that are coming in.

Is there artificial honey that is almost indistinguishable ?