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I've seen videos analyzing the YouTube trending tab and suggesting that human moderation suppresses videos from 'controversial' creators like Joe Rogan and PewD

I've seen videos analyzing the YouTube trending tab and suggesting that human moderation suppresses videos from 'controversial' creators like Joe Rogan and PewDiePie. It's dangerous to become the arbiter of taste, I can understand Google's aversion to more human involvement beyond just the problems with scale.

cowpig 7y ago
The algorithms are a proxy for some youtube engineers' tastes
- majewsky 7y ago
  That's a popular conspiracy theory, but it doesn't hold up to Occam's Razor. The simpler explanation is that content from all sides gets buried to some extent, but it appears biased to people because they only notice when their own content is buried.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    Why is it hard to believe that an engineer would engineer something that agrees with their own beliefs?
    - true_religion 7y ago
      It’s because of the way the conjecture is structured. It proposes that we believe a multi billion dollar corporation would risk their profit margins on the tastes of one engineer in the shadows.
      - SkyBelow 7y ago
        Occam's razor would say that such a large corporation does not have the direct controls to monitor every single actor. Is it so hard to find actors acting against the interest of their employer? I've even personally experience cases where the actors are rewarded for such actions due to flaws in the incentive structure.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - dcole2929 7y ago
      Because most people don't work in silos that allow them to operate with impunity. I'd assume at a company the size of google any feature is going to have minimum of 3-4 different sets of eyes on it between Engineering, QA, UX, and Product.
    - scj 7y ago
      Saying AI does funky things from time-to-time is hardly an extraordinary claim. Meanwhile, an individual injecting bias without the hack's true purpose being obvious to co-workers would be difficult. The more subtle and circumstantial the hack, the more likely it will be broken/ignored by someone else's changes. A hack is still possible, but I'd want evidence of intentional bias before entertaining the claim.
      - 50656E6973 7y ago
        Algorithmic bias does not have to be an intentional "hack" to have drastic effects.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    > That's a popular conspiracy theory, but it doesn't hold up to Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor isn't some sort of physical law that governs human behavior. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor > Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor) is a principle from philosophy. Suppose there exist two explanations for an occurrence. In this case the one that requires the least speculation is usually correct. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation. Occam's razor applies especially in the philosophy of science, but also more generally.
    - majewsky 7y ago
      That doesn't refute my point. A razor is a tool for working with limited evidence, which is exactly what I'm doing.
      - mistermann 7y ago
        Statement #1: > That's a popular conspiracy theory, but it doesn't hold up to Occam's Razor. This comment is open to interpretation. A reasonable interpretation is that something must hold up to Occam's Razor, or else it is not true, especially with the inclusion of "That's a popular conspiracy theory". In fact, the "conspiracy theory" charge is also flawed. The speculative claim "The algorithms are a proxy for some youtube engineers' tastes" may actually be true. We do not know. Statement #2: > The simpler explanation is that content from all sides gets buried to some extent, but it appears biased to people because they only notice when their own content is buried. This persuades the reader, perhaps based on a presumed knowledge of the phenomenon of confirmation bias, that any such beliefs are likely an example of such confirmation bias. Again, the truth is not known. If you don't like your comments being interpreted, you could tighten them up to minimize the need or possibility for interpretation.
      - Covzire 7y ago
        I think he's saying that positing Occam's Razor isn't proof of anything. If he's not, then I'm saying it, and that it gets over applied to the extreme.
  - batty_alex 7y ago
    It's no conspiracy, we all encode our beliefs into what we do. I don't think the poster is suggesting it's on purpose. Occam's Razor would suggest it's more work to take bias out, I would think.
    - teddyh 7y ago
      “You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from the system, but we helped create it. And our spirit remains in every program we designed for this computer.” — Dr. Walter Gibbs, Tron, 1982
  - 50656E6973 7y ago
    Have you never heard of algorithmic bias? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_bias It's quite real, and it is not illegal (in the US), so asserting this is a "conspiracy theory" is silly. Software engineers are human beings, so of course they have inherent bias.
    - liability 7y ago
      The very term "conspiracy theory" is frustratingly flawed in the first case, in practice being nothing more than a perjorative for anything that runs contrary to the official narrative, where 'official' is highly context sensitive. In practice it means 'a theory about a conspiracy' with the implication that conspiracies aren't real and therefore the a theory involving a conspiracy is wacky bunk. But sometimes the official narrative is that there was in fact a conspiracy, and in those cases the term 'conspiracy theory' is not typically used. A prime example is the 9/11 Commission Report which describes in great detail a conspiracy to commit mass murder. When it comes to 9/11, everybody agrees there was a conspiracy. I've yet to even hear rumor of anybody who believes that day was a series of unlikely coincidences. Whether you think it was bin Laden or Dick Cheney, it's obvious somebody was doing some conspiring. I think the difference between the logical and practical meanings of the term is rooted in a specific case in which popular theories were theories about conspiracies, but for which the official narrative is that the guilty party didn't conspire with anybody. Obviously I'm talking about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
  - moate 7y ago
    Sure it does. I'm hypothetically designing a filter that checks for objectionable content on my site. You find any use of skeletons objectionable. I don't, if they're cartoon skeletons. My filter will not prevent cartoon skeletons from being posted, but will post real skeletons. Bias has been introduced. The fact that "both sides" are affected doesn't mean there's no bias, it means there's > no bias. It's literally impossible to censor something without SOME bias, because somewhere, someone doesn't find the thing you censor objectionable.
  - asdfman123 7y ago
    My right wing friend argues that Google straight up manipulated search results to harm Trump and I don't have any evidence to argue against him. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%20Testimony.pdf https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%20Tes... I wouldn't be surprised if there's an anti-alt right bias (which frankly I don't feel so bad about because many of those folks are toxic). Also, to be pedantic that's a misapplication of Occam's razor. The simplest explanation to explain nature is likely true. Nature likes simple laws. People and organizations, however, can be endlessly complex.
    - nfrbc 7y ago
      That's funny, because the only political video recommendations I get are right wing videos, despite actively avoiding them for years. I guess when it comes to politics the Youtube algorithm just shows whatever the user doesn't want to see.
      - p1necone 7y ago
        Youtubes PS4 UI "breaking news" section is exclusively videos about brexit/boris johnson (this was even before he became PM) for me despite me not living in the UK and having zero interest in the topic. It's weird.
    - zimpenfish 7y ago
      Although bear in mind here that Epstein has a long-standing beef with Google that may be introducing a bias here. > In 2012, Epstein publicly disputed with Google Search over a security warning placed on links to his website. [...] Several weeks later, Epstein admitted his website had been hacked, but criticized Google for tarnishing his name and not helping him find the infection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Epstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Epstein
    - caconym_ 7y ago
      Here is a thought experiment: there are two political parties vying for control over the government of a country. Ahead of an election, leaked documents are published on the internet describing a plan by one of these parties to tear down the institutions of democracy in that country and install themselves permanently as a dictatorial elite. This party's political enemies will be rounded up and killed on an ongoing basis by a militarized police force, women will be stripped of their rights and property and reduced to chattel, possession of subversive materials will be punishable by torture and death, and so on. This is all outlined in the document, which was written and reviewed by the leaders of that party. They've been caught red-handed! The other party has its skeletons-in-closets, but no analog to the above-described document exists. So, people using popular search engines to research their options ahead of election day find this horrifying information about party A and nothing comparable for party B, and they end up voting for party B mostly on this basis. So, those search engines, despite providing results that faithfully reflect reality without a priori bias toward either party, will (hopefully) greatly influence the outcome of the election. Is that bad? Should they have censored this document in results so that nobody comes away from a web search with different opinions than they had going in? Is finding the truth an unacceptable thing for "big tech" to facilitate? It's like when politicians like Steve King complain that search results for their names make them look bad. To me, if you conduct yourself as a racist, bigoted lunatic on the public political stage, that's what a web search result about you should say. I recognize that statements like "racism is bad" are subjective value judgments, but that's rolled up in all of this too: if as a society we don't think racism and other bigotries are bad, then this sort of search result won't be seen as negative. So there's some admission here that Steve King and his ilk know their words and actions are viewed negatively by a large segment of the population and so they would like them to be suppressed. By not suppressing them, are major search engines exhibiting a bias? No, not really. I don't think so. P.S. The burden of proof falls on the purveyors of conspiracy theories, not the other way round.
- RickS 7y ago
  I've always found this argument strange. Your comment isn't specific enough, so I don't want to put words in your mouth, but in general – Do people really believe youtube engineers are encoding their values into the algorithm, intentionally or unintentionally? Intentionally, I just can't imagine. What might this look like? How does it get through code review? Is it broad enough to apply to the entire ranking algo, or does it only act on tiny pockets that the offending engineers specifically care about? In the unintentional case, certainly they're twisting specific knobs like engagement time, ad revenue, vids watched per session, etc... but is that encoding a specific person's taste, or a broader company's thirst for revenue? Do they even care about taste, or just metrics? In other words, I find it suspect that youtube's policy is "More Jordan Peterson conflict vids", and more likely that it's "float high activity posts to the top", creating an echo chamber. To be clear, I think there's some blame that rests on youtube eng (and let's be realistic, the broader product teams bossing eng around). But it's not for encoding their tastes, it's for indiscriminately allowing the tastes of their markets to echo in a feedback loop that becomes a screech of extreme content. Not always anti-social, or even politically directional, just extreme flavors of whatever it is.
  - rowanG077 7y ago
    Unintentionally. Of course they are doing it. Youtube's content policy is so laughably bad that they probably have no choice but to take their own interpretation and use that.
  - bluedino 7y ago
    They have so many goofy things going on over there. One example is certain bands will never make 'trending'
  - mattr47 7y ago
    It is definitely possible. Imagine an engineer gets approached by some other corporation that wants to boost a few videos, ads, etc. It would not take much to nudge the system in that direction. The resulting payoffs could be in the billions.
jedberg 7y ago
They do apply humans but not where it matters to creators. A lot of creators hate their automated compliance schemes. Curation is terrible too, when it comes to kids content. I won't let my kids use YouTube kids anymore, it's awful. It used to have mostly appropriate kids content, but now people have gamed it.
RickS 7y ago
I've seen others that allege that the YT related-to algo is being systematically gamed to raise the prominence of such videos, so the removal is a return to norm, rather than a suppression. What's frustrating is that we don't have many ways to find out what's true. Youtube's algo is an arbiter of taste whether they're happy about it or not. I'm not sure it's possible to be apolitical here.
- ralusek 7y ago
  Yes it is. Just recommend videos similar to ones you've watched, and attempt to cater neutrally to your sensibilities. Use views and engagement to determine when something is trending. That's apolitical. Arbitrarily excluding Joe Rogan or PewDiePie is political.
MrMember 7y ago
I think it's pretty clear that "trending" videos are manipulated. I've seen a video with 10k views and five times more dislikes than likes show up in trending.
- kace91 7y ago
  Apparently dislikes count almost as much as likes for popularity - videos that evoke an emotional response are considered better by YouTube. It's a general trend in social networks, because it leads to more views, and one of the causes of the current environment of polarization and toxicity.
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  Unless you know the algorithm for how "trending video" is selected -- I certainly don't -- you can't say that that's "manipulation." Is it a number of clicks over a certain period of time? What's the period of time? How many clicks? And most importantly, how much of what any given user sees as "trending" is based on contextual information: what they've most recently watched, what they tend to watch on average, what channels they're subscribed to? An awful lot of discussion around YouTube and human curation/moderation elides just how much content they're dealing with; the most recent figures I've seen -- which are over a year old at this point -- show that about 500 hours worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. If we figure an average video is about 15 minutes (a 2017 statistic I found suggested that "the average length of a first page YouTube video is 14 minutes, 50 seconds"), that's 2000 videos a minute -- over 30 a second. Is it impossible that YouTube employees have secret levers to raise and lower the profile of individual videos and channels? Of course not. But it's absurd to think that such manipulation is common, let alone corporate policy.
  - munmaek 7y ago
    Not only is it manipulated, it's flagrantly obvious. PewDiePie for example trends in many countries except the US [e.g. 45 times in Canada, 42 times in Germany vs 1 time in the US], and it's not just him either but many "controversial" channels. Source: an analysis of 40,000 trending videos [7 months of trending tab videos]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqBeXJ8Zx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqBeXJ8Zx8
root_axis 7y ago
PewDiePie is literally the most popular vlogger on the internet by a wide margin, and Joe Rogan is the biggest podcaster on the platform, I find it hard to believe that any "suppression" they are facing is at all significant.
- shard972 7y ago
  Living under a rock, there was a statistical analysis recently which proved CNN gets trending multiples more times than someone like PDP with magnitudes less views.
aphextim 7y ago
This is a video I recall watching recently that backs up your point. Not sure if anyone has refuted this person's points but they are pretty alarming no matter what side of isle you sit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqBeXJ8Zx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqBeXJ8Zx8 (What 40,000 Videos Tell Us About The Trending Tab)

cowpig 7y ago

The algorithms are a proxy for some youtube engineers' tastes

majewsky 7y ago
That's a popular conspiracy theory, but it doesn't hold up to Occam's Razor. The simpler explanation is that content from all sides gets buried to some extent, but it appears biased to people because they only notice when their own content is buried.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Why is it hard to believe that an engineer would engineer something that agrees with their own beliefs?
  - true_religion 7y ago
    It’s because of the way the conjecture is structured. It proposes that we believe a multi billion dollar corporation would risk their profit margins on the tastes of one engineer in the shadows.
    - SkyBelow 7y ago
      Occam's razor would say that such a large corporation does not have the direct controls to monitor every single actor. Is it so hard to find actors acting against the interest of their employer? I've even personally experience cases where the actors are rewarded for such actions due to flaws in the incentive structure.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - dcole2929 7y ago
    Because most people don't work in silos that allow them to operate with impunity. I'd assume at a company the size of google any feature is going to have minimum of 3-4 different sets of eyes on it between Engineering, QA, UX, and Product.
  - scj 7y ago
    Saying AI does funky things from time-to-time is hardly an extraordinary claim. Meanwhile, an individual injecting bias without the hack's true purpose being obvious to co-workers would be difficult. The more subtle and circumstantial the hack, the more likely it will be broken/ignored by someone else's changes. A hack is still possible, but I'd want evidence of intentional bias before entertaining the claim.
    - 50656E6973 7y ago
      Algorithmic bias does not have to be an intentional "hack" to have drastic effects.
- mistermann 7y ago
  > That's a popular conspiracy theory, but it doesn't hold up to Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor isn't some sort of physical law that governs human behavior. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor > Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor) is a principle from philosophy. Suppose there exist two explanations for an occurrence. In this case the one that requires the least speculation is usually correct. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation. Occam's razor applies especially in the philosophy of science, but also more generally.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    That doesn't refute my point. A razor is a tool for working with limited evidence, which is exactly what I'm doing.
    - mistermann 7y ago
      Statement #1: > That's a popular conspiracy theory, but it doesn't hold up to Occam's Razor. This comment is open to interpretation. A reasonable interpretation is that something must hold up to Occam's Razor, or else it is not true, especially with the inclusion of "That's a popular conspiracy theory". In fact, the "conspiracy theory" charge is also flawed. The speculative claim "The algorithms are a proxy for some youtube engineers' tastes" may actually be true. We do not know. Statement #2: > The simpler explanation is that content from all sides gets buried to some extent, but it appears biased to people because they only notice when their own content is buried. This persuades the reader, perhaps based on a presumed knowledge of the phenomenon of confirmation bias, that any such beliefs are likely an example of such confirmation bias. Again, the truth is not known. If you don't like your comments being interpreted, you could tighten them up to minimize the need or possibility for interpretation.
    - Covzire 7y ago
      I think he's saying that positing Occam's Razor isn't proof of anything. If he's not, then I'm saying it, and that it gets over applied to the extreme.
- batty_alex 7y ago
  It's no conspiracy, we all encode our beliefs into what we do. I don't think the poster is suggesting it's on purpose. Occam's Razor would suggest it's more work to take bias out, I would think.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    “You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from the system, but we helped create it. And our spirit remains in every program we designed for this computer.” — Dr. Walter Gibbs, Tron, 1982
- 50656E6973 7y ago
  Have you never heard of algorithmic bias? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_bias It's quite real, and it is not illegal (in the US), so asserting this is a "conspiracy theory" is silly. Software engineers are human beings, so of course they have inherent bias.
  - liability 7y ago
    The very term "conspiracy theory" is frustratingly flawed in the first case, in practice being nothing more than a perjorative for anything that runs contrary to the official narrative, where 'official' is highly context sensitive. In practice it means 'a theory about a conspiracy' with the implication that conspiracies aren't real and therefore the a theory involving a conspiracy is wacky bunk. But sometimes the official narrative is that there was in fact a conspiracy, and in those cases the term 'conspiracy theory' is not typically used. A prime example is the 9/11 Commission Report which describes in great detail a conspiracy to commit mass murder. When it comes to 9/11, everybody agrees there was a conspiracy. I've yet to even hear rumor of anybody who believes that day was a series of unlikely coincidences. Whether you think it was bin Laden or Dick Cheney, it's obvious somebody was doing some conspiring. I think the difference between the logical and practical meanings of the term is rooted in a specific case in which popular theories were theories about conspiracies, but for which the official narrative is that the guilty party didn't conspire with anybody. Obviously I'm talking about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
- moate 7y ago
  Sure it does. I'm hypothetically designing a filter that checks for objectionable content on my site. You find any use of skeletons objectionable. I don't, if they're cartoon skeletons. My filter will not prevent cartoon skeletons from being posted, but will post real skeletons. Bias has been introduced. The fact that "both sides" are affected doesn't mean there's no bias, it means there's > no bias. It's literally impossible to censor something without SOME bias, because somewhere, someone doesn't find the thing you censor objectionable.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  My right wing friend argues that Google straight up manipulated search results to harm Trump and I don't have any evidence to argue against him. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%20Testimony.pdf https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%20Tes... I wouldn't be surprised if there's an anti-alt right bias (which frankly I don't feel so bad about because many of those folks are toxic). Also, to be pedantic that's a misapplication of Occam's razor. The simplest explanation to explain nature is likely true. Nature likes simple laws. People and organizations, however, can be endlessly complex.
  - nfrbc 7y ago
    That's funny, because the only political video recommendations I get are right wing videos, despite actively avoiding them for years. I guess when it comes to politics the Youtube algorithm just shows whatever the user doesn't want to see.
    - p1necone 7y ago
      Youtubes PS4 UI "breaking news" section is exclusively videos about brexit/boris johnson (this was even before he became PM) for me despite me not living in the UK and having zero interest in the topic. It's weird.
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    Although bear in mind here that Epstein has a long-standing beef with Google that may be introducing a bias here. > In 2012, Epstein publicly disputed with Google Search over a security warning placed on links to his website. [...] Several weeks later, Epstein admitted his website had been hacked, but criticized Google for tarnishing his name and not helping him find the infection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Epstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Epstein
  - caconym_ 7y ago
    Here is a thought experiment: there are two political parties vying for control over the government of a country. Ahead of an election, leaked documents are published on the internet describing a plan by one of these parties to tear down the institutions of democracy in that country and install themselves permanently as a dictatorial elite. This party's political enemies will be rounded up and killed on an ongoing basis by a militarized police force, women will be stripped of their rights and property and reduced to chattel, possession of subversive materials will be punishable by torture and death, and so on. This is all outlined in the document, which was written and reviewed by the leaders of that party. They've been caught red-handed! The other party has its skeletons-in-closets, but no analog to the above-described document exists. So, people using popular search engines to research their options ahead of election day find this horrifying information about party A and nothing comparable for party B, and they end up voting for party B mostly on this basis. So, those search engines, despite providing results that faithfully reflect reality without a priori bias toward either party, will (hopefully) greatly influence the outcome of the election. Is that bad? Should they have censored this document in results so that nobody comes away from a web search with different opinions than they had going in? Is finding the truth an unacceptable thing for "big tech" to facilitate? It's like when politicians like Steve King complain that search results for their names make them look bad. To me, if you conduct yourself as a racist, bigoted lunatic on the public political stage, that's what a web search result about you should say. I recognize that statements like "racism is bad" are subjective value judgments, but that's rolled up in all of this too: if as a society we don't think racism and other bigotries are bad, then this sort of search result won't be seen as negative. So there's some admission here that Steve King and his ilk know their words and actions are viewed negatively by a large segment of the population and so they would like them to be suppressed. By not suppressing them, are major search engines exhibiting a bias? No, not really. I don't think so. P.S. The burden of proof falls on the purveyors of conspiracy theories, not the other way round.
RickS 7y ago
I've always found this argument strange. Your comment isn't specific enough, so I don't want to put words in your mouth, but in general – Do people really believe youtube engineers are encoding their values into the algorithm, intentionally or unintentionally? Intentionally, I just can't imagine. What might this look like? How does it get through code review? Is it broad enough to apply to the entire ranking algo, or does it only act on tiny pockets that the offending engineers specifically care about? In the unintentional case, certainly they're twisting specific knobs like engagement time, ad revenue, vids watched per session, etc... but is that encoding a specific person's taste, or a broader company's thirst for revenue? Do they even care about taste, or just metrics? In other words, I find it suspect that youtube's policy is "More Jordan Peterson conflict vids", and more likely that it's "float high activity posts to the top", creating an echo chamber. To be clear, I think there's some blame that rests on youtube eng (and let's be realistic, the broader product teams bossing eng around). But it's not for encoding their tastes, it's for indiscriminately allowing the tastes of their markets to echo in a feedback loop that becomes a screech of extreme content. Not always anti-social, or even politically directional, just extreme flavors of whatever it is.
- rowanG077 7y ago
  Unintentionally. Of course they are doing it. Youtube's content policy is so laughably bad that they probably have no choice but to take their own interpretation and use that.
- bluedino 7y ago
  They have so many goofy things going on over there. One example is certain bands will never make 'trending'
- mattr47 7y ago
  It is definitely possible. Imagine an engineer gets approached by some other corporation that wants to boost a few videos, ads, etc. It would not take much to nudge the system in that direction. The resulting payoffs could be in the billions.

jedberg 7y ago

They do apply humans but not where it matters to creators. A lot of creators hate their automated compliance schemes. Curation is terrible too, when it comes to kids content. I won't let my kids use YouTube kids anymore, it's awful. It used to have mostly appropriate kids content, but now people have gamed it.

RickS 7y ago

I've seen others that allege that the YT related-to algo is being systematically gamed to raise the prominence of such videos, so the removal is a return to norm, rather than a suppression. What's frustrating is that we don't have many ways to find out what's true. Youtube's algo is an arbiter of taste whether they're happy about it or not. I'm not sure it's possible to be apolitical here.

ralusek 7y ago
Yes it is. Just recommend videos similar to ones you've watched, and attempt to cater neutrally to your sensibilities. Use views and engagement to determine when something is trending. That's apolitical. Arbitrarily excluding Joe Rogan or PewDiePie is political.

MrMember 7y ago

I think it's pretty clear that "trending" videos are manipulated. I've seen a video with 10k views and five times more dislikes than likes show up in trending.

kace91 7y ago
Apparently dislikes count almost as much as likes for popularity - videos that evoke an emotional response are considered better by YouTube. It's a general trend in social networks, because it leads to more views, and one of the causes of the current environment of polarization and toxicity.
chipotle_coyote 7y ago
Unless you know the algorithm for how "trending video" is selected -- I certainly don't -- you can't say that that's "manipulation." Is it a number of clicks over a certain period of time? What's the period of time? How many clicks? And most importantly, how much of what any given user sees as "trending" is based on contextual information: what they've most recently watched, what they tend to watch on average, what channels they're subscribed to? An awful lot of discussion around YouTube and human curation/moderation elides just how much content they're dealing with; the most recent figures I've seen -- which are over a year old at this point -- show that about 500 hours worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. If we figure an average video is about 15 minutes (a 2017 statistic I found suggested that "the average length of a first page YouTube video is 14 minutes, 50 seconds"), that's 2000 videos a minute -- over 30 a second. Is it impossible that YouTube employees have secret levers to raise and lower the profile of individual videos and channels? Of course not. But it's absurd to think that such manipulation is common, let alone corporate policy.
- munmaek 7y ago
  Not only is it manipulated, it's flagrantly obvious. PewDiePie for example trends in many countries except the US [e.g. 45 times in Canada, 42 times in Germany vs 1 time in the US], and it's not just him either but many "controversial" channels. Source: an analysis of 40,000 trending videos [7 months of trending tab videos]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqBeXJ8Zx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqBeXJ8Zx8

root_axis 7y ago

PewDiePie is literally the most popular vlogger on the internet by a wide margin, and Joe Rogan is the biggest podcaster on the platform, I find it hard to believe that any "suppression" they are facing is at all significant.

shard972 7y ago
Living under a rock, there was a statistical analysis recently which proved CNN gets trending multiples more times than someone like PDP with magnitudes less views.

aphextim 7y ago

This is a video I recall watching recently that backs up your point. Not sure if anyone has refuted this person's points but they are pretty alarming no matter what side of isle you sit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqBeXJ8Zx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqBeXJ8Zx8 (What 40,000 Videos Tell Us About The Trending Tab)