> I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world and the monetization of Youtube has incentivized and amplified mediocrity, stupidity, and social decay.
Interesting that you say this regarding YouTube. I've been saying this regarding Twitter for awhile even though I consume quite a bit of YouTube content. However, I've curated my YouTube feed to be almost entirely stuff that is interesting, educational, and that I think I'm getting value from. I've learned tons of useful stuff from YouTube such as how to dress better and tailor my own clothes, how to fix things that break around my house, more effective training methods to accomplish specific fitness goals...I could go on and on. When I go to YouTube in incognito mode, I definitely see the bottom-of-the-barrel content that you're talking about. But it doesn't have to be that way.
> Those creators are still making orders of magnitude less money than people who make zero content attention grabbing controversy meme slop videos.
Off the top of my head, Gamers Nexus is a counterpoint. Obviously not Mr Beast-scale, but we're also looking at a huge difference in target demographic breadth.
Besides, is YouTube any worse in this regard than what came before it? Substance-free reality TV predates YouTube. For as long as cheap printing and mail services have been around, artists have had strong incentive to go design ads rather than pursue their art independently.
YouTube definitely has a race to the bottom going on, but it's not all-consuming and well-researched, high-quality material is still profitable for creators as long as you know how to play the thumbnail game.
> Besides, is YouTube any worse in this regard than what came before it? Substance-free reality TV predates YouTube.
I extend the same criticisms towards traditional television as well.
They're both just symptoms of the advertising problem. Advertisers are the enablers of this stuff. They'll back any content that draws attention, and the ones which draw the most are memes, controversy, generally negative value slop. People endlessly scrolling apps with infinite content being fed instant gratification with product offerings in between. Algorithms that actively push them towards controversy and hate because it maximizes "engagement".
> If so, then what difference does it make how much cash YT hands to Mr. Beast?
I think it matters a lot. It creates massive distortions in society's perception of value.
Because of YouTube's advertising, you have people becoming multimillionaires by making total nonsense videos where they do things like react to other videos. Literally a YouTube video of a guy watching other YouTube videos, pausing and saying whatever pops into his head. Like this comment section. And he gets millions of dollars for it.
There's something deeply wrong with a society where you are rewarded for nothing. The people who actually do something tend to feel cheated when they see it happen. Imagine being a professional, a trades person and seeing a random dude get 1000x richer than you because he said stupid shit on the internet. And if you point it out, some startup founder accuses you of sour grapes.
Society should think deeply about the incentives it offers to people. Because people will respond to them.
I think the general concept here is putting in place restrictions on what code can do in service of making software more reliable and maintainable. The analogy I like to use is construction. If buildings were built like software, you'd see things like a light switch in the penthouse accidentally flushing a toilet in the basement. Bugs like that don't typically happen in construction because the laws of physics impose serious limitations on how physical objects can interact with each other. The best tools I have found to create meaningful limitations on code are a modern strong static type system with type inference and pure functions...i.e. being able to delineate which functions have side effects and which don't. These two features combine nicely to allow you to create systems where the type system gives you fine-grained control over the type of side effects that you allow. It's really powerful and allows the enforcement of all kinds of useful code invariants.
> I think the general concept here is putting in place restrictions on what code can do in service of making software more reliable and maintainable. The analogy I like to use is construction.
The concept is quite old, and it's called software architecture.
All established software architechture patterns implicitly and explicitly address the problems of managing dependencies between modules. For example, the core principle of layered/onion architecture or even Bob Martin's Clean Architecture is managing which module can be called by which module.
In compiled languages this is a hard constraint due to linking requirements and symbol resolution, but interpreted languages also benefit from these design principles.
The goofy thing is that “software architecture” was killed by YAGNI dogma and yet the need for properly layered code hasn’t disappeared, so people are inventing tooling to enforce it.
Offtopic, but this reminds me of a plausible tech support gore story.
An office was experiencing random Internet outages and they were struggling to figure out why. They traced it back to their router rebooting randomly. Tracing it back further, they found the outlet was experiencing big voltage drops. They then realized it was on the same circuit as a pump used to flush a porta potty for a construction team onsite. Everytime they'd flush the toilet, the router would lose power and reboot.
I agree, and in fact that's the basis of my Haskell library Bluefin[1]. If you look at it from one angle it's a Haskell "effect system" resembling other Haskell approaches for freely composing effects. If you look at it from another angle it's a capability-based security model (as also mentioned by quectophoton in this dicussion[2]). There's actually quite a lot of similarity between the two areas! On the other hand it's not really a "firewall" as described by this article, because it doesn't do dynamic permission checks. Rather permission checks are determined at compile time. (Although, I guess you could implement dynamic permission checks as one of the "backends".)
I know that TuckerCarlson is a polarizing character. My posting of this link is not any kind of statement for or against him or his politics. That being said, the interview really gives an interesting picture of Pavel Durov IMO. If you can ignore Carlson's annoying tangents into American politics, you get to hear a good bit of Durov's life story straight from his mouth in reasonable detail. I came away from it with a more positive picture of Durov and Telegram.
I really like an expansion of this idea that I heard somewhere awhile back:
Keep a few significant problems in your mind...and also keep a few significant solutions / problem solving techniques in your mind. Then when you encounter new problems, check them against your set of solutions and see if any of them apply. Also, when you encounter new problem solving techniques, check them against your set of problems to see if they're applicable. Whenever you encounter a new problem or solution that seems unusually significant, add it to the list that you keep track of
Hamming's _You and Your Research_ (another HN perennial) has a variant on the theme too:
"Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say ``Well that bears on this problem.'' They drop all the other things and get after it. "
Yes, this post is classic. My answer to Brent's "monad tutorial fallacy" is https://mightybyte.github.io/monad-challenges/. It was inspired by The Matasano Crypto Challenges that Thomas Ptacek & others created awhile back which, instead of trying to teach you cryptanalysis, guides you down the path of actually doing realistic cryptanalysis with a series of challenges.
Thanks for the reference. I downloaded the book, and looked up the parts that talked about newspapers, in particular. I found the arguments to generally be counter to what the industry has figured out, in terms of actual survival.
From the late 90s to the early 2010s the news industry was very pro-active about making their work freely available to everyone. This made enforcing copyright on news articles not really a thing. Coinciding with this the news industry rapidly shrunk, and is now a shell of what it used to be.
Interestingly, the trend of "free" reporting is now strongly reversing. Many publications now put most of their work behind a paywall, no longer freely giving away the material they produce.
From the book:
"The distribution of news on the Internet makes an interesting contrast to
the distribution of music. While the RIAA has used every imaginable legal
(and in some cases illegal) strategy to keep music off the Internet, the news
reporting industry has embraced the Internet. Most major news agencies
have a Web site where news stories may be viewed for, at most, the cost of
a free registration. Far from discouraging the copying of news stories, most
sites invite you to "e-mail a copy of this story to a friend." In fact, news
is available so freely over the Internet that it is possible to create an entire
newspaper simply by linking to stories written by other people. An example
of such a "newspaper" is the site run by Matt Drudge, which consists almost
entirely of links to stories on other sites. Yet the incentive to gather the news
has not disappeared. According to intellectual monopolists' preaching, this
should be impossible: to report from the Sudan requires the huge cost of
going there in person, but copying that same report is as cheap as it can
possibly get. So, why are highly paid journalists traveling to the Sudan to
get the news?"
What the authors of this book don't state is that, the ramifications of this shift to "freely shared" news has meant that far fewer journalists are out there actually reporting. (The layoffs have been massive.) They go on to say, just a few sentences later that "the news industry has been thriving, profitable."
Obviously, this is just not true. The news industry is struggling. The layoffs have been massive. This type of pain in the industry was happening in 2008, when the book was published, and continues still.
With the authors missing such glaring (and important) facts, it's hard to take their arguments seriously.
Yes, I have similar thoughts. Getting older, traveling more, seeing the hustle and bustle of large cities, becoming more aware of all these details that many people don't think about, etc...has all greatly expanded my world view. One of the big thoughts that these kinds of realizations have left me with is how vanishingly small each human's view is compared to the total scope of the universe. None of us is able to escape the confines of our skin and our personal perspective. However, we all tend to extrapolate this vanishingly small slice of ours to the whole universe. Problem is, it's very difficult to figure when that extrapolation is valid and when it is over-fitting, which is probably the root of a lot of human conflict.
See also https://ncase.me/trust/ for a really nice 30-min interactive summary of the ideas presented in the book.
My rough definition of "best" here is "most potentially impactful to humanity" (see also Andrew Breslin's Goodreads review).