Changes at YouTube

I really like the new feature on YouTube where you can vote up or down for the comments. It is exactly the kind of information engineering that will eventually make an internet-based democratic government possible and concentrate attention on important matters. Information engineering has been on the top of my mind for a while, and I am synthesizing some of these ideas into my latest art projects.

However, what the hell? You can only vote a couple of times and then it asks you to come back later. WTF? Stupid! Obviously the best thing for the system (and also the most interesting/amusing/addictive thing for the viewers - and thus the genius) would be to allow unlimited voting. If this is the best way they have come up with to deal with spam and self-promotion, well, that's too bad. I thought there were a bunch of smarties at google - I can think of at least a handful of ways to engineer the process so that there can be unlimited voting that regulates certain types of voting. Too bad indeed! Humans are going to have to be smarter than this if we are to overcome our challenges!