YouTube was first launched in 2005, and now has become one of the most visited websites in the history of the internet.
Before 2012, YouTube paid content creators based on the number of views. Even though a 5-second video was deemed successful depending on the view count, which posed the problems of “clickbait” titles and thumbnails. Since 2012, YouTube started measuring “View Duration” and used that as the metric. For those videos being viewed longer, they were likely to be promoted in search engines and have more financial rewards to the content creators. This decision has changed how YouTube videos were recommended and rewarded.
YouTube’s recommendation algorithms connect the existing channels based on users’ watch histories, preferences and overlap. Harvard’s researchers claimed that the pre-selection factors remained unknown. With all of those suggested videos in the sidebar, people tend to click into unfamiliar topics due to curiosity. YouTube has long been criticized for spreading misinformation. Jonas Kaiser, the affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, described the recommendation progress as a “rabbit hole effect” in which leading viewers to more extreme contents.
