alt Hacker NewsThat reasoning doesn’t make any sense. Half a billion litres of Coca Cola are produced every single day, but the chance of a bottle of Coca Cola being made whose quality is similar to that of a good imperial stout is exactly zero, even though they’re both brown carbonated beverages. No amount of quantity can overcome a process intended to standardise for something other than quality. If the algorithm aggressively selects for mediocrity, mediocrity is what will be produced.
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Why is stout a higher quality than coca cola? Are they not just different? Its not like stout is an objectively superior product or something
The quality of Coca Cola can only be compared to other colas. Comparing a soft drink to an imperial stout makes no sense. In my book, the imperial stout always has zero quality, because I would never see a reason to voluntarily drink it, whereas I might indulge in a diet coke every now and then.
But that’s why comparing subjective qualities of different things is a waste of time.
YouTube has many highly educational videos that are better than most professional production tv, especially for the hard sciences.
I'm not sure I understand your analogy. YouTube has both diversity and quantity at levels tens of orders of magnitude higher than any high-quality-low-quantity good. Given the subjectivity of quality and amounts considered it's simply statistical fact that YouTube will always have things at the highest ends of subjective quality for any category.
The algorithm doesn't select for mediocrity - it selects for viewership, but regardless there are millions of creators at there that aren't optimizing for views anyway. It's the same reason some set of random blog posts or comments on sites such as this one will have quality similar to snippets of the highest quality technical documentation. Sheer diversity and quantity will always win.