Filters: Part 2: Thinking about the network as filter

Many of these filters are traditional and still serve well: We filter by gatekeepers:

The job of filters is to screen out that noise.

To me, the key learning from the YouTube story is the journey that every networked product has to take. When they started out, they needed very little organization, but as the network grew, more and more structure was applied—first by editors, moderators, and users—and then by data and algorithms. The earliest iterations weren’t sophisticated, just