alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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I don’t see how it’s is a statistical fact. There’s nothing I’ve seen on YouTube that compares even slightly to a high quality movie or TV series (unless it’s an unauthorised copy of a movie or TV series…).
YouTube I'd grant you, not Shorts/Reels/TikTok - the format of the media simply isn't amenable to output matching longer-form work, no matter how much gets produced. To me that reads akin to "there are so many tweets that for any criteria a [set of tweets] demonstrate quality similar to any long-form written piece."