Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…Well, yes. YouTube internally went back and forth for years on this. I think we’re in this no man’s land that we’ve landed today. Camp one is, hey, the way to make people most engaged is by getting them to follow creators and they curate the information sources they want. Camp two is in algorithms we trust. It turns out camp two is actually correct, which is unfortunate. It’s a messed up incentive. Most of the time if you show someone something that they’re subscribed to or you show someone something that the very smart computers have figured out, you will watch and then watch another video after that. Usually the algorithmic approach is right. There is this internal conflict there where they say, yeah, of course you should subscribe, but your views are only loosely related to how many subscribers you have. Yep. This is the dark side to the YouTube economy.…

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