They give an example in the article of Logan Paul's YouTube channel being troubling. Apparently his fans enjoy his videos as measured by watch time, the like button, views, and subscribers, but his content also lacks a certain jena se qua that Google calls "quality".

The impulse to tell people what the quality of their entertainment is strikes me as dystopian and deeply authoritarian. In addition, it's also patronizing - suppose I like watching Logan Paul videos, why should dear Mother Google decide they aren't good enough for me and decide that I should watch advertiser friendly content instead?

It seems a bit contradictory to me, though, that here we are on a forum whose entire premise is aggressive curation of "quality," talking about a video streaming platform considered by many here to be a vapid cesspool of inane nonsense and clickbait wanting to improve the quality of what its users see, and the immediate reaction is to cry censorship, and wonder whether "quality" even means anything, rather than say "it's about time."

And if you like Logan Paul videos, you're probably already subscribed to his channel. Be sure to click the bell to be notified. There's also a search bar you can type "Logan Paul" into. He's not quality, though.

Assuming Youtube isn't secretly pushing some left-wing agenda of propaganda and mind-control (I don't believe they are, but a lot of people do) and that their goals are as stated, then I don't see how adding a "quality" metric to all of their other metrics is a bad thing.

Everything has a place. I might it find it odd if the technical library where I work started carrying the National Enquirer. Yet, that publication is perfectly appropriate where people expect entertainment magazines.

YouTube was intended as a place for people to share their videos. Logan Paul and others who create and share videos are using YouTube for its intended purpose and it's perverse for YouTube to try and figure out how to stop them from doing what their service was built to enable.

I think there should be a place for high quality curated content and a place for people to share their videos regardless of content.

YouTube is, of course, free to make whatever curation decisions they like just like I'm free to complain about them. This would be like if hacker news claimed to be a place for tech news but also banned all submissions from authors or views they didn't like, even if that content was high quality tech news.

Th latter puts the users in control of what is trending. The former lets YouTube manipulate the content for arbitrary purposes.

Youtube was always manipulating the platform for arbitrary purposes (and sometimes the content, for copyright purposes.) Users have never been in control of anything.

see: the Youtube "Adpocalypse" and the various other changes to their algorithm that destroyed the profitability of entire genres of content (such as animation.)

Enforcement of copyright is following the law not manipulation. I'm sure their automated takedowns aren't perfect, but that's due to technical limitations.

This rewarding if "quality" content is straight up picking winners and losers. But you're right it's not like YouTube hasn't done this before. Plenty of very rapidly viewed videos (e.g PewDiePie's "Congratulations" and rewind videos) mysteriously didn't appear on trending.

They do sometimes manipulate the audio channel by muting it because of a copyright claim, that's what I was referring to.

People can agree on the definition of 'ad revenue'.

And perhaps more importantly revenue can come from anybody regardless of views - money has no smell. “Quality” will easily turn into “whatever the site maintainers or majority consider good”.

This being said I pretty much agree that so far no big tech company found the recipe for properly and “fairly” curating content.

The problem is that "quality" is going to be enforced by the same algorithms that mark whitenoise as a DMCA copyright violation.

both are pretty bad options. Better to let users curate and allow popularity to dictate visibility, surely?

User curation and popularity are, arguably, just as much forms of censorship as any other, although a "trusted user" curation system similar to Steam might be interesting. The only truly unbiased system would be random.

that only really holds if you consider "not promoting" to be a form of censorship - at the end of the day, as long as they're not actively hiding content that YouTube finds to not be "quality" (while still being reasonable content), it can still be found by someone looking for the subject. I don't see an issue with that - there will always be limited space for "promoted" content.

Then YouTube risks things being popular that aren't aligned with it's collective politcal views.

That's already the case, libertarian and conservative content is more popular than progressive content on YouTube.

One could argue that the former is as well, given the platform's low reputation for quality, and the bad press its recieved for allowing extremist and algorithm generated content. Let's not pretend Youtube is pushing this entirely down the public's throat against their will.