If COVID, and stay at home policies did one thing -- it was to show how much of a sham working from office buildings was. For the majority of jobs, it is not required. People have been saying it for decades, and COVID showed the world that you can, in fact, successfully work from home.

I'm sure there are some industries that function better with in person interaction, but there are a ton that simply don't need it. My office is battling this issue with requiring different positions, different required days in office.

While true - that doesn't mean that local communities/cities still want/need that revenue to operate.

YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, just about all of these "general services" that allow third party participation are on the chopping block. If the protections granted by Section 230 are removed/diminished we have a far more restrictive internet.

Another unintended consequence would be making it harder to track the "bad people." If you remove their presence from social platforms, they will continue to operate -- just harder to track. Which was one of the unintended consequences of the law against websites that were targeted for human trafficking. They became a lot harder for law enforcement to track down.

But they aren't a normal publisher. They aren't the creators of the content. You are asking them to be responsible for millions of people who upload content daily. And no algorithm is going to fix removing all instances of "bad" suggestions. It would require staff from just about every language on earth curating/moderating every single video posted. Because that is the only way to remove videos before they "fall" in the algorithm.

Or remove the algorithm, and search videos by "newest first" or "most watched" etc.

Most are already curated/moderated to the best of their ability/capacity. And, that still isn't enough.

And most would just shut down. Sites like YouTube would become unusable without an algorithm -- and curation/moderating costs could skyrocket to the point of no longer being profitable. Millions of minutes of new videos are added to YouTube daily. I assume most of these social media sites are the same.

Except from my understanding, YouTube/Google didn't expressly "promote" it. The algorithm suggested it. Under that, your analogy doesn't exactly hold up. Unless, you add to the cashier "I see that you've been attending and checking on a few of these meetings -- there's one in the back if you'd like to go check it out."

The problem here is that they're taking a flame thrower to solve the problem, when all they need is a match. And the reaction from the internet will be to simply curtail anything/everything that could get them a lawsuit. Many sites would simply cease to exist because they can't moderate millions of interactions.

And sites like YouTube would become unbearable without an algorithm.