Why Vimeo? ------------ Some of you may be asking why I chose to put my videos on Vimeo, while in the past, I have used YouTube. In many ways, YouTube is a good technology and may be better than Vimeo. However, YouTube uses ads and watch time to generate revenue. As a result, it has an incentive to find and recommend videos that will not only get clicks but will be watched for a long time. As a result, YouTube is not free. We pay for it with our attention. Vimeo on the other hand charges me, content producer, to upload videos. It does not have algorithmic recommendation and does not generate revenue (as far as I know) by monetizing your attention. This is not a judgment or criticism of anyone who uses YouTube for their work or entertainment. I watch things on YouTube all the time. However, I do not want to contribute to you spending more time on it with my course content. This is my personal choice. I have come to my decision through my research and related reading on algorithmic bias and ethical technology. YouTube monetizes attention, what gets attention gets recommended by the algorithms. We are attracted to novel and unusual content. Is this inherently bad? Not really. If I watch a Sea Otter video, YouTube will find other Sea Otter videos or other animal videos that I might like. May be a hummingbird who is snoring or a Sea Otter giving birth. All unusual but cute. But sometimes, this goes in a darker direction. You watch a video about a scientific concept, but YouTube recommends you a video about a crazy conspiracy theory on a related topic. YouTube has found that people who believe in conspiracy theories tend to watch videos for a long time. So YouTube's algorithms are happy recommend these excessively, orders of magnitude more. If you watched anything slightly political, you may be caught in a loop of more and more extreme content recommended to you, because well, they are more attention gathering. We all know that users might be exposed to a lot of content that may bother them. I support the maxim that "free speech is not equal to free reach." My main concern is that YouTube chooses to value such content more than others and I have no say on what my values are. I cannot choose the type of content I do not want to see. This is a system implementation decision on YouTube's part. While YouTube has taken some steps to improve this, there is still a long way to go. So, this is why we are on Vimeo. Even if it does not have some features you are used to on YouTube, hopefully we can help improve it by using it more. If you want to learn more about this topic, you can follow some of the links below. - Listen to episode 4 of this podcast, but all the episodes are quite good: `Your undivided attention podcast (Episode 4) `_ - Blog from past engineer of YouTube `Algorithmic Transparency `_ - One of the best articles on this topic: `YouTube, the Great Radicalizer `_