Curation and YouTube
Rather than sign up for another website account I would never use, I have instead chose to focus this on my personal experiences I have from using curated youtube playlists and creating my own.
By using the above youtube channel as an example and looking at their playlists tab we can see they have created a large amount of curated playlists for their content. By doing so it enables myself and other people to consume their content.
The above image shows one such playlist of the channel currently airing show “The panalysts”. To try and find the episodes generally on the channel would require scrolling through days and weeks of videos whereas this playlist which is updated as each episode “airs”. In the current ecosystem of youtube, the playlists creators make are invaluable to consumers as often videos from subscriptions are either lost amongst all the other videos when scrolling or do not show up at all. A playlist means I have a reliable source to go to for the content I want.
Moving onto my personal curation, I use the sites “watch later” function to curate my own steady source of content that I can (as the function is aptly titled) watch later.
As there is no limit to what you can add to youtube playlists (obviously providing it’s on their site) this means over months and years, I can have potentially infinite videos in this playlist all curated to my tastes as I saved them myself.
This is from my own curation and curation of channels I follow. Youtube itself has it’s own form of curation based on an algorithm which “recommends” (using the term loosely there) videos based on your watch history or what interests it can gather you have from what you search (amongst other things google will know about you).
To explain some of these recommendations, theycome from the fact I have watched a tiny amount of star wars and transformers videos from shows in my younger days. I have also been watching videos of reddit threads, pokemon videos and some videos from tomska. This automated curation is both good and bad. The good is that it will recommend me videos I have yet to watch or have not watched in some time but the bad is how it will flood the section with multiple videos of the same topic. This leads to a very narrow curation rather than the site recommending larger variety of videos.
