Video essay about platforms (Sebastian)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI 

    In light of the readings on “Platform,” I thought it might be interesting to share this video essay, “VidMe or Why Platforms Aren’t Your Friends,” from Dan Olson. In the essay, Olson reflects on his own experiences as a YouTube “content creator” to explore the tensions that invariably arise between creators and platforms like YouTube. He ultimately concludes that VidMe – at the time, an aspiring YouTube competitor – is destined to fail because it does not address the actual complaints about YouTube that prospective VidMe users and content creators have. Indeed, VidMe did officially close mere months after Olson posted this essay in 2017. 

    I find Olson’s remarks about YouTube’s shortcomings especially compelling in relation to Tarleton Gillespie’s article, “The Politics of ‘Platforms.’” Gillespie is interested in the ideological work done by the term “platform” when it is mobilized by companies like YouTube and its owner, Google. For instance, he explores the architectural connotations of the word “platform,” arguing that it implies that a site like YouTube is an “open-armed, egalitarian facilitation of expression, not an elitist gatekeeper with normative and technical restrictions” (Gillespie 352). YouTube relies extensively on this connotation when it attempts to justify its supposed neutrality vis-à-vis the content it hosts. But, as Gillespie observes, this is a fiction. He writes, “YouTube and Google have pursued a specific business model that, while it does not force them to emulate the traditional gatekeeper role of broadcasters and publishers, nevertheless does have consequences for what they host, how they present it, and what they need from it” (Gillespie 358). YouTube favors the terminology of the “platform” precisely because it effectively disguises its incentives and penchant for intervention.

    Olson’s essay acknowledges these interventions but does not call for a video hosting service that resurrects the ideal of neutrality. Instead, he criticizes the lack of transparency surrounding these interventions and the subsequent injustices they produce. He demands that YouTube do a better job of moderating comments and equitably applying community standards so as to combat the site’s current toxicity. In other words, Olson wants YouTube to drop the veneer of neutrality implied by the term “platform” and take a more active – and, arguably, more politically considerate – role in shaping the culture of the site. Although certainly not a content creator myself, I suspect that Olson’s arguments probably make a great deal of sense for that community. Per his critique of VidMe’s lack of moderation, I have no doubt that a truly “neutral” platform would quickly become a cesspool of far-right bigotry. Regardless, I can’t help but wonder if the ideal of neutrality is functionally impossible in the way that platforms are currently conceived. Is it possible to build a platform that is neutral in the most optimistic/idealistic sense of that word? Or, in keeping with Gillespie, will the very concept of a “platform” always hide interventions? Moreover, is the notion of neutrality that the term “platform” evokes truly worth aspiring to in the first place?