Thanks for writing this. I haven’t (yet) listened to the podcast and that’s perhaps why your post here felt like I was joining in the middle of a discussion. Could I suggest that at the top of your post you very briefly say who you are and what your main claim is, just so these are clear? I take it the claim is that YouTube’s recommendations engine does not (contrary to recent popular opinion) push people towards polarisation and conspiracy theories. If that is your main claim, I’d like you to say why YouTube doesn’t have that feature and why people who claim it does are mistaken.
(FWIW, I’m an old forum hand and I’ve learnt you can’t expect people to read papers you link to. If you want people to discuss them, you need to make your main claims in the post here itself.)
In general I agree, but the forum guidelines do state “Polish: We’d rather see an idea presented imperfectly than not see it at all.”, and this is a post explicitly billed as “response” that were invited by Rob. So if this is all the time Mark wants to spend on it, I feel it is perfectly fine to have a post that is only for people who have listened to the podcast/are aware of the debate.
Thanks for writing this. I haven’t (yet) listened to the podcast and that’s perhaps why your post here felt like I was joining in the middle of a discussion. Could I suggest that at the top of your post you very briefly say who you are and what your main claim is, just so these are clear? I take it the claim is that YouTube’s recommendations engine does not (contrary to recent popular opinion) push people towards polarisation and conspiracy theories. If that is your main claim, I’d like you to say why YouTube doesn’t have that feature and why people who claim it does are mistaken.
(FWIW, I’m an old forum hand and I’ve learnt you can’t expect people to read papers you link to. If you want people to discuss them, you need to make your main claims in the post here itself.)
In general I agree, but the forum guidelines do state “Polish: We’d rather see an idea presented imperfectly than not see it at all.”, and this is a post explicitly billed as “response” that were invited by Rob. So if this is all the time Mark wants to spend on it, I feel it is perfectly fine to have a post that is only for people who have listened to the podcast/are aware of the debate.
Oh, what I said wasn’t a criticism, so much as a suggestion to how more people might get up to speed on what’s under debate!