You'll note that this didn't use to happen in advertising-based business models; it is a second- or third-order impact of having data on individual users. The amount you could justify to have a casual fan versus a serial consumer of Law and Order were basically the same number.
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But it is very, very probable that one can identify two demographically similar 37 year old US-based men, one who has seen five minutes of one Youtube video and one who watches 12+ hours a day, and Google optimizes monomaniacally in whatever it takes to bring #2 back tomorrow.
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I'll note that Youtube is recruiting armies upon armies of people who are essentially paid to perform anthropological research and community management of hingefluencers, which is a dynamic that talk about The Algorithm often misses.
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Google search was a symbiosis between the borg and SEOs who it incentivized to solve their ML and product problems by filling in the gaps in the Internet and making them maximally discoverable by whatever technology Google had. Youtube similarly uses/employs/etc Youtubers.
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Sometimes this is great. Youtube cuts materially sized checks, daily, to a creative middle class the world over, including funding some extremely quality programming. The consumer surplus for e.g. parents is pretty incredible, if you carefully curate what your kids watch.
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Sometimes, it is less great. Google very obviously pays some people who have great challenges in life to bind together a community of other people who have great challenges in life, and it is not obvious that the binding is net-positive to any member of that community.
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"Give me an example." Examples are plentiful. I'd prefer to leave it ambiguous because I do not like piling onto people who have great challenges in life already, and because being seen as pronouncing a moral judgment is one of the ways to stir the ravening hosts on Twitter.
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Replying to @patio11
I know all about the ravening hosts of Twitter, but is it possible to be a little more specific? I can't tell what you're talking about.
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Replying to @paulg
Consider any severe problem people are likely to have or perceive themselves as having. Videos about that problem have high product-market fit on Youtube. If the problem is chronic in nature and not amenable to solution via video, the user may now have more problems.
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People have talked about the recommendation engine causing radicalization, etc, but neither Youtube nor individual creators on Youtube are incentivized to fix the things in this class of problem. They're incentivized to increase the number of hours watched of engaging video.
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"Got $PROBLEM? Tried everything? Consider that you may have $DIFFERENT_PROBLEM, too; I interview fellow Youtuber in the biggest crossover event of the season."
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Replying to @patio11
E.g. depression and insomnia? You can confirm by not replying ;-)
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Replying to @paulg
Right general area, or things which have similar impact on life but which do not have diagnoses available, either because they're rare, because they're insufficiently concentrated in impact on life to raise to medical attention, or because world broadly considers them positive.
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