How YouTube’s Algorithmic Suggestions Work

YouTube wants to recommend things people will like, and the clearest signal of that is whether other people liked them. Pew found that 64 percent of recommendations went to videos with more than a million views. The 50 videos that YouTube recommended most often had been viewed an average of 456 million times each. Popularity begets popularity, at least in the case of users (or bots, as here) that YouTube doesn’t know much about.

DC Public Arts Funder Requires Grant Recipients To Not Make Offensive Art – Or Lose Money They’ve Already Been Awarded

In a rare step made after millions of dollars in public funding was approved last month, the local arts commision said it would terminate any grant supporting work that the commission deemed “lewd, lascivious, vulgar, overtly political, or excessively violent, constitutes sexual harassment, or is, in any other way, illegal.” Arts leaders who were asked to sign the contract amendment expressed shock at the request, which several described as an attack on their artistic freedom.