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It does seem to be getting better, for a long while I had to make sure to clear my history of any conservative leaning videos or I'd end up down a rabbit hole.

It does seem to be getting better, for a long while I had to make sure to clear my history of any conservative leaning videos or I'd end up down a rabbit hole. Too many and all of a sudden its bloody flat earth videos and other insane conspiracies. Made it very difficult to try and watch a balanced set of videos.

sametmax 8y ago
Personnally I find those kind of meta informations useful. It's midly annoying to not have better suggestions, but on the other end, it gives you a perspective on what kind of people are fed with what kind of info. Kinda like the old email chains my mother used to send me. It allowed me to understand what were her fears, hopes, and lack in understanding about things I never had the chance to talked about with her before.
Regolitch 8y ago
Yep. I like to watch some videos of varying view points and political leanings to avoid falling into an echo chamber. But more than. One or two conservative videos, especially about European current events, and you are sucked in to the Nazi Propaganda hole. Another inescapable pit of content is electronic music production. I was doing a bit of research on the teenage engineering pocket operators as a possible gift for my younger brother. Now Im almost exclusively recommend music production videos.
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jsheard 8y ago
The way the algorithm pushes steadily more radical content is really concerning. Try making a completely fresh browser profile and deliberately browsing around right-leaning or "anti-SJW" channels and see how long it takes before YouTube starts pushing videos about white genocide and the impending destruction of western civilization by the muslim hordes (not very long in my experience). edit: I just tried this again and not much has changed. Started by viewing Joe Rogan's interview with Elon Musk on a fresh profile. The first suggestion from there is a Jordan Peterson anti-feminist video, from there we get a Jordan Peterson anti-islam video, then "The Suicide of Europe" by PragerU, and from there the floodgates are opened to fear-mongering about "rapefugees". That's less than a dozen clicks on highly related videos to get from Elon Musk smoking weed to videos with an overtly racist agenda, on a profile that's never sought out that kind of content previously.
- tivert 8y ago
  > The way the algorithm pushes steadily more radical content is really concerning. Try making a completely fresh browser profile and deliberately browsing around right-leaning or "anti-SJW" channels and see how long it takes before YouTube starts pushing videos about white genocide and the impending destruction of western civilization by the muslim hordes (not very long in my experience). Seems like they're trying to profile the user for recommendations too early, or just generally suggesting based on too small of a sample of videos. The blank profile is like a knife balanced on edge, where the slightest push will tip it one way or the other. If they'd just hold off the personalized recommendations entirely until you had 100 or 200 videos, it might be better.
  - extrapickles 8y ago
    It sounds like they are overfitting the recommendations. They really need to get the users explict preference, rather than trying to infer it from what videos they watch, as that data is tainted by the recommendation engine. Also they have killed the annotation system that most video creators have used to manually recommend videos to their viewers, which is probably going to cause even more overfitting of recommendations.
- manfredo 8y ago
  Interestingly, YouTube actually recommends liberal content at a rate substantially higher than conservative content. Centrists content links to liberal content about three times more frequently than it links to conservative content. Is there evidence to corroborate the claim that YouTube is pushing people to extreme content? The data seems to indicate otherwise. https://www.thepostmillennial.com/does-youtube-facilitate-right-wing-radicalization-the-data-says-otherwise/ https://www.thepostmillennial.com/does-youtube-facilitate-ri...
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jlawson 8y ago
This doesn't match reality. I've watched lots of conservative videos and I've never seen anything about flat Earth or "insane conspiracy theories". Honestly this comment thread seems like trying to build a narrative bridge between straightforward right-leaning content and bizarre conspiracies. The goal is to use censorship of bizarre conspiracies to justify censoring right-leaning content by conflating the two. I'm very suspicious of YouTube's intent here. Given how vicious Google is towards conservatives inside their organization (see Damore) it's pretty obvious to suspect that they'll use their power to reduce the spread of right-wing ideas of all stripes. Put simply, after that display, nobody can trust them to be even-handed. Most of them are good people but they're totally dominated by the intransigent minority [0] of high-and-righteous recreational witch-hunters in their midst. The first excuse will be they're insane conspiracies. Truly crazy videos will be censored. But that's just the bait, setting the narrative for the switch, where they narrative becomes about "racism" and they start censoring the right-most 10%, 20%, 30%, of the opinion spectrum. Criticism of Islam, support for Western culture, statements against anti-white bigotry, arguments for reduced immigration (even illegal immigration), arguments for equal legal treatment for men, arguments about biological differences between sexes or population groups, arguments about deep differences between religions will all be censored under this ever-expanding umbrella. Even the notion that "conspiracy theories" are a right-wing thing is part of this - there are lots of left-wing "conspiracy theories" and always have been. Some openly racist and sexist ones are quite widespread right now. [0] http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf
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- fzeroracer 8y ago
  Conspiracy theories are, for the most part, a right-wing thing. Unless you can give me examples of conspiracy theories and their peddlers on level of Alex Jones for the far left.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    Every looked into anti-vax (there is some right, but a lot of it is left)? How about the impeach trump stuff? Organic, anti-GMO, alternative medicine. Plenty of left wing nut jobs there. (some of them have a right wing component as well)

sametmax 8y ago

Personnally I find those kind of meta informations useful. It's midly annoying to not have better suggestions, but on the other end, it gives you a perspective on what kind of people are fed with what kind of info. Kinda like the old email chains my mother used to send me. It allowed me to understand what were her fears, hopes, and lack in understanding about things I never had the chance to talked about with her before.

Regolitch 8y ago

Yep. I like to watch some videos of varying view points and political leanings to avoid falling into an echo chamber. But more than. One or two conservative videos, especially about European current events, and you are sucked in to the Nazi Propaganda hole. Another inescapable pit of content is electronic music production. I was doing a bit of research on the teenage engineering pocket operators as a possible gift for my younger brother. Now Im almost exclusively recommend music production videos.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jsheard 8y ago

The way the algorithm pushes steadily more radical content is really concerning. Try making a completely fresh browser profile and deliberately browsing around right-leaning or "anti-SJW" channels and see how long it takes before YouTube starts pushing videos about white genocide and the impending destruction of western civilization by the muslim hordes (not very long in my experience). edit: I just tried this again and not much has changed. Started by viewing Joe Rogan's interview with Elon Musk on a fresh profile. The first suggestion from there is a Jordan Peterson anti-feminist video, from there we get a Jordan Peterson anti-islam video, then "The Suicide of Europe" by PragerU, and from there the floodgates are opened to fear-mongering about "rapefugees". That's less than a dozen clicks on highly related videos to get from Elon Musk smoking weed to videos with an overtly racist agenda, on a profile that's never sought out that kind of content previously.

tivert 8y ago
> The way the algorithm pushes steadily more radical content is really concerning. Try making a completely fresh browser profile and deliberately browsing around right-leaning or "anti-SJW" channels and see how long it takes before YouTube starts pushing videos about white genocide and the impending destruction of western civilization by the muslim hordes (not very long in my experience). Seems like they're trying to profile the user for recommendations too early, or just generally suggesting based on too small of a sample of videos. The blank profile is like a knife balanced on edge, where the slightest push will tip it one way or the other. If they'd just hold off the personalized recommendations entirely until you had 100 or 200 videos, it might be better.
- extrapickles 8y ago
  It sounds like they are overfitting the recommendations. They really need to get the users explict preference, rather than trying to infer it from what videos they watch, as that data is tainted by the recommendation engine. Also they have killed the annotation system that most video creators have used to manually recommend videos to their viewers, which is probably going to cause even more overfitting of recommendations.
manfredo 8y ago
Interestingly, YouTube actually recommends liberal content at a rate substantially higher than conservative content. Centrists content links to liberal content about three times more frequently than it links to conservative content. Is there evidence to corroborate the claim that YouTube is pushing people to extreme content? The data seems to indicate otherwise. https://www.thepostmillennial.com/does-youtube-facilitate-right-wing-radicalization-the-data-says-otherwise/ https://www.thepostmillennial.com/does-youtube-facilitate-ri...
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jlawson 8y ago

This doesn't match reality. I've watched lots of conservative videos and I've never seen anything about flat Earth or "insane conspiracy theories". Honestly this comment thread seems like trying to build a narrative bridge between straightforward right-leaning content and bizarre conspiracies. The goal is to use censorship of bizarre conspiracies to justify censoring right-leaning content by conflating the two. I'm very suspicious of YouTube's intent here. Given how vicious Google is towards conservatives inside their organization (see Damore) it's pretty obvious to suspect that they'll use their power to reduce the spread of right-wing ideas of all stripes. Put simply, after that display, nobody can trust them to be even-handed. Most of them are good people but they're totally dominated by the intransigent minority [0] of high-and-righteous recreational witch-hunters in their midst. The first excuse will be they're insane conspiracies. Truly crazy videos will be censored. But that's just the bait, setting the narrative for the switch, where they narrative becomes about "racism" and they start censoring the right-most 10%, 20%, 30%, of the opinion spectrum. Criticism of Islam, support for Western culture, statements against anti-white bigotry, arguments for reduced immigration (even illegal immigration), arguments for equal legal treatment for men, arguments about biological differences between sexes or population groups, arguments about deep differences between religions will all be censored under this ever-expanding umbrella. Even the notion that "conspiracy theories" are a right-wing thing is part of this - there are lots of left-wing "conspiracy theories" and always have been. Some openly racist and sexist ones are quite widespread right now. [0] http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf

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fzeroracer 8y ago
Conspiracy theories are, for the most part, a right-wing thing. Unless you can give me examples of conspiracy theories and their peddlers on level of Alex Jones for the far left.
- bluGill 8y ago
  Every looked into anti-vax (there is some right, but a lot of it is left)? How about the impeach trump stuff? Organic, anti-GMO, alternative medicine. Plenty of left wing nut jobs there. (some of them have a right wing component as well)