Beware the populist mash oozing out of Facebook and YouTube
Watch online now - The findings of The Register's Virtualization Study — And Ninthly Yep. It felt just like that, didn't it? — For scenario one, place your tongue between teeth. Let your tongue relax and give …
Context & Ripple Effects
This Register column lands mid-argument about what social platforms are becoming. Kottke had already framed Facebook in June 2007 as the new AOL — a walled garden whose convenience costs users control — and by January 2008 the walls were straining: Facebook's news feed had proven hugely popular while Beacon's ad-tracking misstep made commentator Bill Thompson predict an 'uncomfortable' year ahead, and users were scattering their activity across rival sites rather than living inside one feed.
Against that backdrop, the warning that Facebook and YouTube are incubating a 'populist mash' is less about any single video than about distribution: feeds built to surface whatever friends engage with have no editorial filter, and the same mechanics that make the news feed sticky also give lowest-common-denominator content a megaphone. The same week, Google, Facebook and Plaxo joining the DataPortability Workgroup showed even Facebook acknowledging users want leverage over their own data.
First-order effects
- Facebook enters 2008 squeezed between two confirmed dynamics — a news feed users love and privacy stumbles like Beacon — with rumored fixes such as Q1 Friend Lists controls positioned as its answer to trust erosion.
- YouTube faces the mirror-image problem: its open upload model means the populist content the column warns about reaches audiences precisely because the platform optimizes for engagement, not judgment.
Second-order effects
- Users already spreading activity across many sites limit Facebook's feed reach, which opens space for aggregation rivals like Plaxo and FriendFeed to position themselves as the neutral layer across networks.
- If trust in feeds keeps eroding, privacy and data-portability features stop being back-office plumbing and become competitive weapons — the reason Facebook, Google and Plaxo all moved to join the DataPortability Workgroup within days of each other.
Third-order effects
- If populist content keeps compounding through unfiltered feeds, the pressure shifts from individual platform choices to whether recommendation-driven distribution needs editorial standards or external regulation at all — a question commentators like Bill Thompson are already framing as Facebook's defining 2008 risk.
- Platforms that monetize attention through algorithmic surfacing will find that every engagement optimization doubles as an amplifier for the least discriminating content, making curation-versus-reach the structural trade-off of the social web.
The trend: Social feeds are evolving from curated friend updates into mass broadcast channels, forcing platforms to confront an accountability gap between engagement-driven distribution and editorial responsibility.