Quite a flawed article. To think you can shape people's watching behavior towards second-rate content is to be confused about how people actually spend their scarce time. Sure, people can use help finding things they like, but how were these large yet new creators discovered in the first place? Clearly there are mechanisms for rising to the top in each category... but perhaps there is just too much stickiness at the top?
Realistically, the largest creators are the most valuable to the places where content is consumed, so it's in the platforms' interest to keep them big and keep them being watched. These means less burden on content review. If 90% of view time goes to 1% of producers, content review a challenge. If 90% of views go to 10% of producers, now content review is a disaster. This "brand-safe" content is taken extremely seriously right now and it's not the time platforms will do anything except double down on this.
I disagree with this, mainly because it is the recommendation algorithms that have a huge impact on who rockets to the top, and those algorithms pretty much by definition will have some type of bias, so why not bias them to a more equitable distribution of views and revenue?
For a good example, see this video by "How to Cook That" author that laments how all the content farms around baking have gamed YouTube's algorithm so that real bakers (who show recipes that actually work) have been pushed out by content farms showing eye candy on loops with impossible recipes: https://youtu.be/6abePkXncCM
And in the music business - and probably also the movie business, and to some extent the writing business - there's been a strong subculture of payola and industrial promotion.
The major labels hire pluggers - as they're known - who used to deal with radio DJs and now deal with playlist curators.
Sometimes money changes hands and marketable but otherwise not very interesting music suddenly appears on hundreds of playlists - in the hope that it will break through into mass appeal.
You can only push this so far because ultimately listeners still decide what's hot and what isn't. But they're forced to make their choices from a limited and crafted pool of suspected high-performing product, and not from a much wider pool of more varied styles and less homogenous artists.
Someone above brought up a very good point that YouTube really only has to do content reviews on videos that get watched. It's cheaper for YouTube for everyone to watch the same 30 videos than it is to spread those out, because then they have to brand safety reviews on each video.
There's also going to be pushback from creators (and especially large creators) when they find out that YouTube is adding backpressure to their success. It's going to mean the algo helps you get some level of popular, and then it fights you getting really popular.
> For a good example, see this video by "How to Cook That" author that laments how all the content farms around baking have gamed YouTube's algorithm so that real bakers (who show recipes that actually work) have been pushed out by content farms showing eye candy on loops with impossible recipes
That author is misunderstanding the market. I know a lot of people who watch those; they have 0 intentions of actually cooking the things they see. To them it's closer to art than it is cooking, where they appreciate the end result and don't really care how the creator got there. I don't know why it doesn't seem obvious from the format. Those quick clips are an awful way to give cooking instructions, and they give none of the usual tips like "when you're done whipping, it should have the texture of...".
I think the style is inherited from Pinterest, where people constantly pin things they have no intention of actually doing. I had an ex that loved Pinterest, but her whole feed was pretty much just "Here's 1,000 things you don't have time to do unless you're a professional creator".
'confused about how people actually spend their scarce time'
Nothing in your post back this up with experience or some data
But the bigger problem is that you have a circular argument - you already assumed spme content is second-rate before anyone has viewed it or reviwed it. Sony's 23'rd remake of spiderman and endless marvel movies are allegendly first-rate content, despite having zero emotinal intelligence, relevant issues or plot.
Meanwhile there is probably some great plotwriting languising somewhere, waiting to be discovered
They’re first rate in the sense that they spend first rate money on it.
The major issue WRT Hollywood is that everyone is playing it mega safe, fixating on a genre or niche for years before changing tack. Before superheroes we had zombies, rom-coms, 3D, to name a few. Superheroes is mostly only notable because it has made so much money for such a long time, but it will eventually peter out; I’m not the only person I know who thinks there are too many supe movies to catch up with.
>"They’re first rate in the sense that they spend first rate money on it."
If this is your metric, they you are creating a world where the biggest players are guaranteed to succeed, and upstarts are guaranteed to fail. This is some serious perversion of both free market and of equality of opportunity, and creates massive potebtial for corruption
This is the quintessential middle-brow dismissal. Sure, what the article is proposing is hard, platforms have to think hard about how to make it work, however I think it successfully makes the case that this would be mutually beneficial for creators and platform robustness, and lays out some potential mechanisms to move in that direction.
Your comment, by contrast, hinges on the assumption that platforms today are perfect at elevating the best content, and everything else is second-rate.
The content platforms are designed to sell ads so they focus on engagement and yes they are very good at doing that. The "best" content is not usually the most engaging. The popularity of Qanon crap and commentary on Qanon crap is evidence of engagement being promoted over quality to the platform's advantage.
QAnon is carefully and cynically designed to be engaging. It's a package of shock-value emotional hooks known to be sticky with low-information voters who slant towards moral narcissism and authoritarianism.
The arts have to work harder. There are certain stock tropes and narratives musicians and movie producers can draw on, with varying degrees of deliberate awareness. But the target demographics are more varied, and some are even mutable. So it's harder to hit the bullseye with any consistency.
Realistically, the largest creators are the most valuable to the places where content is consumed, so it's in the platforms' interest to keep them big and keep them being watched. These means less burden on content review. If 90% of view time goes to 1% of producers, content review a challenge. If 90% of views go to 10% of producers, now content review is a disaster. This "brand-safe" content is taken extremely seriously right now and it's not the time platforms will do anything except double down on this.
edited: for typos