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At YouTube Stats, a meeting Mehrotra held every Friday, they presented the befuddling results: the machines found a way to show more ads and improve watch time.

There’s no evidence anyone warned her about a different strain these goals placed on YouTube, how prioritizing engagement and spreading commercial funds as widely as possible paved the way for the trainwrecks to come.

Lawmakers governing the modern internet were so obsessed with threats of sex and violence that they ignored other concerns, such as the balance of educational content in media and the potential developmental impacts of unchecked consumerism.

This is totally different, he thought. Come in and never leave. The more people watched certain videos, the more YouTube fed it to them.

Zunger proposed adding a third tier for these debatable clips: keep them up but note internally that they were close to the line. If accounts came close too often, pull them from video recommendations.

By 2013, YouTube had become enmeshed in wearying fights with practically every other part of Google.

Some saw it as a dire turn for the wider internet, which had begun to put growth above the concerns of everyday people. (Facebook would later become a case in point.) “That’s the fate of all social media,” said Julie Mora-Blanco, an early YouTube moderator who went to work for Twitter. “You start with a small group, you cultivate a community, you g

Silicon Valley had long had a widespread, ironic parenting philosophy rooted in avoiding its own inventions.

began one of YouTube’s most beneficial business moves and a telling sign that the company often had no idea what its machines were doing.