It's impossible for everyone to verify the veracity of everything on a daily basis. We absolutely must decide for ourselves on a few arbiters of truth on important subjects. That way we can focus on verifying their understandings of and dedication to the facts. Reducing our load. There's nothing wrong with that. However, when they've shown to be a faulty in their representation of the facts, there have to be consequences.
For instance, on YouTube, I watch an ungodly amount of science and computing content. With a few video essays or let's play YouTubers thrown in to fill in by watching the content. PBS, SciShow, and Space Time are favorites. When it comes to astrophysics, et etc, Matt Odowd definitely knows his stuff and is committed towards representing things fairly. Similarly, with SciShow, Hank Green is all in for testing his hypothesis and admitting or fixing his mistakes. Recently on his own channel, putting up a video about the gros michel banana and banana flavoring. And upon testing his hypothesis and finding it wrong committed towards fixing the mistakes he made years ago.
Contrast with Sabine Hossenfelder. Who as a then particle physics researcher at CERN. Decided to bless everyone via her platform with her misunderstandings on poly sci and biology. Which to the best by knowledge she has never recanted or apologized for. Her content is blocked in my feed, and she is no longer with CERN to say the least.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
Of course there might be shining exceptions on YT, not arguing here. But a platform where people post content simply to get money (or fame or both, why else use youtube at all?) is maybe not the best start to get good info. Or weed the crap out to find actual good content. I gave that up a long time ago.
It’s just tiresome to seek for pearls in a vast ocean of dullness. Especially if it’s a topic i don’t know much about but WANT to. On those topics where i’m already expert at, it’s easy to separate, but there i don’t need it :)
Eldritch@piefed.world 7 hours ago
People often make content for the love of it. But it still takes a lot of work, effort, and resources. It has a cost associated with it. I would love it if tomorrow everyone left YouTube for peertube. The problem is rewarding and supporting those that do. Patreon works for some, but not all of them. That's what YouTube is currently providing and why they stay. There's also things like nebula, but again, that's not available to everyone.
Perhaps a not for profit needs to be formed that will collect funds to maintain several instances of peertube or something similar. And all funds gathered above and beyond that would then be put in a pool to be doled out to the creators whose content was viewed the most. Up to a limit of a liveable wage for their area?
Yes, finding valuable content is a hard thing to do and no amount of AI or algorithms will really help with it. We honestly need to get together and crowdsource a directory of informed presenters as judged by others informed on the subjects.
SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
Algorithmic clickbait media will always break truth.