Is it what we want?

I do confess. I'm not a youtube user in the sense I don't usually use it for browsing and searching. That brought me to not take much into consideration a real issue. It happens to watch videos on it referred from external sources such as blog posts, news articles and news feed.

In "Something is wrong on the internet" article that spread pretty well lately over the web, the author tries to alert about a danger for children present in Youtube platform.

Besides the questionable scream of danger, I agree with the fact there's something really wrong with that system. If you do care about the online reality, you should read it and put the topic on your radar to track its evolution

The author even begins the article with this kind of disclaimer which I find interesting:

I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhere near my own site.

Side note: interesting enough because platform such as Medium are used to build proper audiences while the author is using it as a throw-away notepad.

Besides that, the author is very clear about the danger for children the system exposed them. Basically, there are thousands of 'entities' that learned a quick way to earn some money on Youtube.

The trick

If you upload a lot of videos on a Youtube channel, tricking the views, comments, likes using bots, exploiting the YT algorithm using fake title/tags to get exposed on 'related' videos, you'd probably end up to earn some interesting money via the builtin advertisement system.

Even better, if you are able to generate thousands of videos by means of other bots, the potential of exposure growth by some magnitude order.

The problem here is the video quality. But what if the target of these very low-quality videos is not able to understand this trick nor distinguish between this garbage and the official materials? Let's say.. very young children.

It's true this sentence, though:

This is content production in the age of algorithmic discovery — even if you’re a human, you have to end up impersonating the machine.

I can only say what a waste! Thousands of videos generated and uploaded every day, garbage that consume energy, resources and time for what?

Is it the web we want to live with? I don't think so.