Re:A man who uploaded 2M videos to YouTube [video]
by dredmorbius on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @11:23AM
(#31493294)
It's the "Market for Lemons" paradox --- itself a form of Gresham's Law.
High-effort and low-effort content receive ... roughly ... similar compensation as YouTube videos. Or, for that matter, much online Web content.
Given the costs of high-effort media are vasstly greater, the market "prefers" low-effort, high-volume crap.
A market solution would be to effectively bid far less for the crap. The problem is that assessing content quality is itself expensive and error-prone. This is amongst the reasons the publishing world evolved toward publishers and editors, who carry a long-term reputation and face reputational damage from fielding crap.
In cases such as YouTube, Google Web Search, and the Amazon marketplace, this reputational harm has been escallating and catching up with the "publisher", in this case, Google's YouTube subsidiary, Google Web Search itself, and Amazon.
Much of the dysfunction of skilled labour markets follows a similar pattern.
High-effort and low-effort content receive ... roughly ... similar compensation as YouTube videos. Or, for that matter, much online Web content.
Given the costs of high-effort media are vasstly greater, the market "prefers" low-effort, high-volume crap.
A market solution would be to effectively bid far less for the crap. The problem is that assessing content quality is itself expensive and error-prone. This is amongst the reasons the publishing world evolved toward publishers and editors, who carry a long-term reputation and face reputational damage from fielding crap.
In cases such as YouTube, Google Web Search, and the Amazon marketplace, this reputational harm has been escallating and catching up with the "publisher", in this case, Google's YouTube subsidiary, Google Web Search itself, and Amazon.
Much of the dysfunction of skilled labour markets follows a similar pattern.
https://viterbi-web.usc.edu/~shaddin/cs590fa13/papers/Akerlo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons