Of course.
Well, you're wrong. YouTube started with manual curation by their team.
https://lsvp.com/for-social-software-user-culture-is-as-important-as-product-features/
By watching what behavior they see, users learn how to use the product.
When this works well, you get fantastic, coherent experiences and terrific content. Pinterest, Instagram, Whisper are all examples. With Pinterest, early users saw aspirational clothing, furniture, accessories pinned, and so that is what they pinned too. With Instragram they saw beautiful photos and so that is what they posted. With Whisper they saw raw, honest confessionals and that is what they shared also.
When this works badly, you get ChatRoulette, Youtube comments, and Secret. Seeing others exposing themselves drives mean-time-to-penis to zero. Reading racist, hateful, semi-literate commentary makes it OK to respond with more flames and trolling. Scrolling through anonymous character assassination or bullying give users leave to do the same.
[...]
In each case, curation and moderation from the beginning was crucial to setting user culture from the beginning.
No, I am not "wrong". I just described what is to be seen everywhere. Cheap contents. The "either it goes right or it goes wrong" perspective is just that: either, or. While it's both. As cheap content is produced way faster than excellent one (because it takes more time, knowledge and effort), a just starting platform is being tried out with what works. Since both methods work, both methods are being tried. If you formulate what ought to be "excellent" (better, more valuable, more virtuous) then you get inflamed minds.
Tell me you didn't read the article, without telling me you didn't read the article.
Every new platform starts out with an idea what type of content they want. People have been, and are, complaining about the algorithms all the time.
The big difference here is that we're decentralized and transparent, and everybody feels like they have a say. Of course they do, just not as much as they would like.
And yes, you see cheap content everywhere. Here too. It's just harder to monetize. Everywhere.
People get bothered about being lectured.
I beg to differ. It only depends on how you and I define cheap content.
Neither is it a given that cheap content from the retort is less monetisable (this has not only been the case since the internet, take Dieter Bohlen as a long-running success story of mediocre music, for example), just as posting pretty women with a bit of text is very successful, just like recipes, travel reports, etc., which are not very elaborate content. - All of this is not very lavish content. This is mediocre posting, widespread. Plenty of examples on Hive confirm this. With today's technology, mobile devices with cameras, a quick hand on the keyboard, it's done in a jiffy. Nor is the reverse conclusion correct, that a high level of effort necessarily facilitates monetisation.
Whether you are successful, depends not on your content alone, but on how well you can market yourself and with whom you maintain useful contacts. The most successful people are those who know how to be on many platforms at the same time and present themselves effectively, maintain relations with those who push them, etc. I'm certainly not telling you anything new here.
I am so far done with this comment exchange.
There was no officially seen moderation and curation from the founders of yt, fb whatsoever. It started years after the beginner times.
The user culture was creating itself organically.
It was intransparent, yes. That doesn't mean it didn't exist.