Thanks for the comments. I think you did represent your ambivalence about “connection without constraint,” and I very well may have mischaracterized this. Apologies. But to your point above about the freedom to turn on and off that this enables: I’d love to hear you pursue more about the nature, ethics, responsibilities and powers of such a community, and what other (if any) previous structures of community this might resemble. I can’t choose to turn off my Mom or children or even my Jewishness, for instance. On the other hand, I do choose to turn on and off my feminism or queerness.

Thanks for the “pwn”!

I have written extensively about what I see as the corporate driven limits on the site including its aimless structure, its needlessly impovrished search tools, the inability to create context and community (as you mention above), the use of popularity as the primary organizing structure, and the ongoing problem of censorship and role that corporations take within this. I have met one on two employees, and like you, do not believe they are involved in an evil conspiracy. However, while they still do not make money, they certainly need to strive to do so, which is their right and mission. Many things we might need from networked video will be lost as they follow their corporate mandate. Of course, we can build them elsewhere, but YouTube is the gold standard, and everything (digital video) must speak against and to its dominant language.

As for the specific constraints of YouTube and other corporate sites, don’t you find it equally interesting the ways in which people find to “hijack” those constraints or to work around them? (e.g. type “pwn” in front of YouTube in the address bar next time you are watching a video) – or the fact that YouTube exists as much as embeds elsewhere as on the site itself.

It might also be important to unpack what you mean by “corporate structure” (which seems to stand in for the evils of the profit motive). YouTube’s corporate structure is fairly unique right now, in that they are owned by a ridiculously wealthy company that can afford to allow YouTube to run for several more years without making a profit. While there certainly are some divisions of YouTube racing to figure out exactly how to turn a profit, other divisions (and most people working there) are trying to (among many other things) build better structures for community, personalize content distribution (vs. the “most viewed, most favorited, etc.” model of the past), etc. — all of which will have significant effects on how people connect in that space (for better or for worse). The main point is that YouTube is not entirely profit driven. There are lots of very creative people there who have similar concerns that you and I do, and who actually have some room to work with. If you have specific suggestions for how they can make the site better for the future of the world, you should make those known to them.