I tried to navigate youtube search by simply sorting by view count, since I figure that's at least moderately more difficult to game, and not subject to the algorithim.
But it turns out that for more general search terms youtube will simply not show lots of high view count videos, and which ones specifically can change with each search. (It does always does show a large amount of music videos, Indian media, disturbingly repetitive gaming/meme stuff, children's videos, etc...)
So even a ranked list of which video has the most views apparently is algorithmic to some extent.
That would seem like a way to deliberately cream off the most algorithmically pushed videos!
I wonder what might be a good anti-algorithm indicator - maybe a mismatch between two metrics that normally correlate with highly pushed content. View count over time might be interesting. Big spikes might be bad sign indicating external push. Playlist inclusion might be good to pick up on some human curation. Some measurement of link sharing on other social sites might be helpful... like what google used to do. Sigh.
Well that's of course the case but I meant it in the sense of algorithms used to pick what shows up on my screen as opposed to others entering the same search query.
Ideally there would be such a facility to allow for the removal of at least one layer of algorithmic suggestions.
PageRank for videos is a neat idea though, maybe call it VideoRank?
But it turns out that for more general search terms youtube will simply not show lots of high view count videos, and which ones specifically can change with each search. (It does always does show a large amount of music videos, Indian media, disturbingly repetitive gaming/meme stuff, children's videos, etc...)
So even a ranked list of which video has the most views apparently is algorithmic to some extent.