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To Answer Critics, YouTube Tries a New Metric: Responsibility (bloomberg.com)
YouTube is changing the way it measures success on the world's biggest video site following a series of scandals. There's just one problem: The company is still deciding how this new approach works, Bloomberg reports. From the report: The Google division introduced two new internal metrics in the past two years for gauging how well videos are performing, according to people familiar with the company's plans. One tracks the total time people spend on YouTube, including comments they post and read (not just the clips they watch). The other is a measurement called "quality watch time," a squishier statistic with a noble goal: To spot content that achieves something more constructive than just keeping users glued to their phones.
The changes are supposed to reward videos that are more palatable to advertisers and the broader public, and help YouTube ward off criticism that its service is addictive and socially corrosive. Creating the right metric for success could help marginalize videos that are inappropriate, or popular among small but active communities with extreme views. It could also help YouTube make up for previous failures in curbing the spread of toxic content. YouTube, like other parts of Alphabet's Google, uses these corporate metrics as goal posts for most business and technical decisions -- how it pays staff and creates critical software like its recommendation system. But the company has yet to settle on how the "quality watch time" metric works, or communicate how the new measure will impact millions of "creators" who upload videos to the site.
The changes are supposed to reward videos that are more palatable to advertisers and the broader public, and help YouTube ward off criticism that its service is addictive and socially corrosive. Creating the right metric for success could help marginalize videos that are inappropriate, or popular among small but active communities with extreme views. It could also help YouTube make up for previous failures in curbing the spread of toxic content. YouTube, like other parts of Alphabet's Google, uses these corporate metrics as goal posts for most business and technical decisions -- how it pays staff and creates critical software like its recommendation system. But the company has yet to settle on how the "quality watch time" metric works, or communicate how the new measure will impact millions of "creators" who upload videos to the site.
I'll believe it when it when they give **users** better tools to flag clickbait when content creators pull shenanigans like hiding the number of up/down votes or just outright disabling comments.
*Cough* Verge PC Building "Guide" created by an idiot then blames the community for being "toxic" when they are called out on their ignorance.
"The changes are supposed to reward videos that are more palatable to advertisers and the broader public..." Because the bandwagon fallacy is how everything should be decided?!? Popular lies are way more palatable than uncomfortable truths. This will not be an improvement.
It could also help YouTube make up for previous failures in curbing the spread of toxic content.
Toxic content is newspeak for facts or opinions that we do not like.
So, YouTube is going to no-platform ideas snowflakes find triggering.
How "progressive" of them.
Descartes is spinning in his grave.