Case StudyThe power of the algorithm: Intensifying inequality on Youtube

Despina Skordili
In the Web 2.0 era, internet users are given the ability to actively participate in the production of online content. Tim O Reilly, free software supporter and founder of OReilly Media company, talks about an architecture of participation (2005), where websites are designed using certain defaults, which engage the users to this active creation of content. This development has turned the digital age into an era of information overload, where users are dealing with an explosion of data, having to constantly browse for content which is valid or suitable to their interests. Recently, several websites have attempted to solve this problem by developing their algorithms in order to create a personalized experience for the user. Search engines and recommendation systems suggest personalized findings to users who are browsing for content, based on their previous activity on a website. One significant example is the recommendation system of Youtube, which suggests related videos in order to provide the individual with content which is recent and fresh, as well as diverse and relevant to the users recent actions (Davidson et al, 2010: 294). The question which arises is: should this recommendation system be seen as a useful development which improves our online experience or as a process limiting our online space? This essay seeks to analyze the role of the Youtube recommendation system in the creation of a scale-free network of online videos, following the analysis of AlbertLaszlo Barabasi and Eric Bonabeau (2003). Significant network theory researchers, who are going to be referred to later on, attribute the creation of such networks to the freedom of choice. This research will examine the personalized recommendation algorithm as another factor in intensifying the unequal distribution of videos on the popular video platform. Its aim is to function as a starting point for further analysis examining the influence of recommendation personalization in the users online experience. According to Barabasi and Bonabeau, the internet is a scale-free network. The two researchers were led to this finding when they attempted to map the World Wide Web. As they explain in their 2003 essay Scale-Free Networks, although they expected to end up in observing a randomly distributed network with most web pages having a similar amount of links, based on their assumption that people follow their unique interests when deciding what sites to link their Web documents to (52), they discovered that a small minority of web pages had a very large number of links, while more than 80% of web pages had very few. They realized that the Web is one of many networks, from different fields, which are dominated by a very small amount of nodes which have a tremendous amount of connections, while the vast majority of the other nodes have very few links. Those networks are characterized as scale-free, in the sense that the dominant nodes have the potential to a seemingly unlimited number of connections, and they are distinguished from random networks, where the distribution of links is more democratic. In contrast to the mapping of random networks, which
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follow a Bell curve distribution, scale- free networks follow a power law distribution, where the big amount of nodes with very few connections shape the long tail. The concept of the long tail is described in Clay Shirkys essay Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality (2006), where the internet theorist notes that a small amount of weblogs have a huge amount of connections leading to them, while a long tail of the vast majority of weblogs have very few links (41). An important point that needs to be emphasized is how the distribution of scale-free networks came to be. According to Barabasi and Bonabeau, when people are choosing where to link to, they seem to have a preferential attachment towards nodes which already have a large amount of connections (2003: 54-55). Clay Shirky also attributes this scale-free distribution to a freedom of choice: [t]he very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution (2006: 36). In analyzing the Youtube recommendation system, I will argue that the recent development of its algorithm functions as an additional factor, together with the factor of the freedom of choice, in the formation of power law distributions. In their paper The Youtube Video Recommendation System (2010), Google software engineers James Davidson et al. explain that the recommendation feature of Youtube is based on the users activity on the website, which consists of watching, rating and sharing videos. Those videos function as seeds for the formation of a set of similar videos, that the user would be likely to watch after the seed videos (294). The authors refer to the main factors which define this likelihood that the recommended videos will be appreciated by the user. Here, two points will be emphasized on: first, the algorithm of the recommendation system considers the view count and ratings of a video from previous users, the activities of commenting, favoriting and sharing, as well as whether the video has been watched in its entirety (295). Second, Davidson et al. mention that the aforementioned process is facing certain limits, for example, some videos have a very low view count and, therefore, the algorithm is not able to compute a reliable set of related videos for them (294). As it becomes apparent from the description of this process, the Youtube video recommendation system for an individual user is based on data retrieved by the choices of previous users. Connecting this information to Shirkys freedom of choice on the web, we can observe the formation of an unequal distribution in the network of Youtube videos. A high view count from previous users results in more connections to recommended videos, while videos with a very low view count are not taken into consideration from the system and, thus, are not connected to other videos as recommendations. This process intensifies the power law distribution, drawing the long tail further away from the head of the few most popular videos. As Barabasi and Bonabeau put it this "rich get richer" process will generally favor the early nodes (55). As this essay has attempted to show, the mechanism of preferential attachment in Youtube is reinforced by the recent development in the websites personalized recommendation system. It could be argued that recommendation personalization, a significant development of the Web 2.0 online experience, shrinks the users online space, limiting the content they have the chance to stumble upon. This finding highlights the importance of the awareness of how recommendation algorithms function, as it could enlighten us on how democratic these recommendation systems are.

References
Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo, and Eric Bonabeau. 2003. 'Scale-Free Networks'. Scientific American (288): 50-59. Davidson, James, Benjamin Liebald, Junning Liu, Palash Nandy, and Taylor Van Vleet. 2010. "The YouTube Video Recommendation System ." Proceedings of the fourth ACM conference on Recommender systems: 293-296. O'Reilly, Tim. 2005. 'What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software'. O'Reilly Net. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web20.html. Shirkey, Clay. 2006. 'Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality'. In Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society, ed. Jon Anderson, Jodi Dean, and Geert Lovink, 35-42. New York: Routledge.