For design, too (in spite of the pedigree that goes with it).
I’m not sure what you mean here. I’m not advocating a return to Lycos or Archie or AltaVista—I don’t see anyone doing that. Treating search results the same way that you’d ever treat search results seems adequate enough. Why not start there?
Or refine them further, by identifying fringe content and marking it as such.
This sounds great, but without vetting of content by actual experts, I think faith in algorithms alone seems magical and unjustified.
And I’m not sure what you mean there, if not that you’d prefer to do away with the use of other users’ browsing history to weigh results, or suggest related content. To me, YouTube feels rudimentary if it’s not doing this. I’ll search for “Welsh lullabies” as a starting point, but I want YouTube to lead me to other music that I never thought to look for. Those same algorithms lead others to Richard Spencer, but I can’t imagine using the site without them.
Vetting by experts would lead to accusations of political bias and censorship, so it would have to be decentralized, but of course features could be added to encourage cross-fertilization. For example, could YouTube show me what’s popular with the users who downvoted a video? Or even what video they’d vote for me to watch instead? A good thesaurus doesn’t just show you synonyms, it shows you antonyms as well.
If people click over to argue with the opposing viewpoint, that’s a lot more useful than if they end up in an echo chamber.
I admit to leaving the room during a YouTube video, and being consternated by what was then autoloaded and playing after the video I wanted to see was done. It pissed me off because it was not interesting, and because I wanted to replay the first video, damn it!
