> Youtube has no realistic way to tell whether someone producing home-made science on youtube is a phd ex-nasa biohacker who follows best practices or just a complete quack who tries to sell dangerous fake remedies to vulnerable people. In practice the incentive to promote the latter probably far outweighs the former in number given the huge, generic audience on Youtube.
I think that the author would agree with you here- but it’s still worth calling out as something that changes if we move from a centralized content production model like PBS to distributed with moderation like YouTube.
I think that they get the “cause” wrong, attributing too much to the “cult” of mainstream science, when it seems like a logistics problem, but the effect is still that no one is able to do a deep dive on validating content. The best they can do is diagnose how far content seems to be from the mean.