7 ms·

Very, Very, Few People Are Falling Down the YouTube Rabbit Hole

53 points by fortran77 3y ago

meinmissoula 3y ago
Ironically, the narrative of "right wing rabbit hole leads people to <whatever scary bad thing>" is itself far more concerning to me for the stability and functioning of the US. I frequently talk to people across the full spectrum of political beliefs, and something that's become very clear to me is that there is almost no overlap between "what Republican-voters want" and "what liberals think Republican-voters want". I read online that everyone who voted for Trump is a Nazi full of hate for everyone different from them. Then I talk to Trump voters in real life and they're generally decent people worried about their jobs and the safety of their kids who just have different ideas of how to solve problems and different priorities for which problems are most important than I (a purely Democrat voter) do. The "rabbit hole" might be a problem, but the "shining a magnifying glass on the 0.0001% of people at the bottom of the hole" problem is bigger.
mapt 3y ago
I don't understand this at all. I get just as much extremist content, but I get it advertised at me as well. I've had Daily Wire and Epoch Times content forced on me at preroll thousands of times now, and before that it was Prager U.
xndjdkdhxj 3y ago
[flagged]
stuartd 3y ago
http://archive.today/ymRSg http://archive.today/ymRSg
gandalfgreybeer 3y ago
Misinformation videos for a corrupt major political family in the Philippines started popping up early 2010s. I remember watching one as a kid and watching several related videos. However, I don’t think I truly absorbed them only because I actually knew older people that were detained and tortured during their reign. If I didn’t have first-hand sources and access to books, looking back, I would have definitely believed them. A decade later and that family is back in power. When I talk to their supporters, they bring up details I remember from those videos as facts. Stuff like hidden gold, royal bloodlines, etc. I’m happy we have these safeguards now in place. I hope the LLM and generative AI models popping up will have the same safeguards. However, much like YouTube’s problem, I fear that we will only be able to put them once the damage is done and maybe irreversible.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
[flagged]
dralley 3y ago
It the changes are so successful, then why does youtube keep putting videos like "Canada's woke nightmare - a warning to the west" in my feed when nothing else in my history would suggest that I gave a damn.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dundarious 3y ago
  I have disabled watch history and as much personal tailoring of the algorithm as I possibly can, to the point where my youtube main page is now completely empty, with just a prompt to enable watch history. I am now mostly free of those suggestions. However, I do occasionally get flooded with "rabbit hole" video suggestions underneath a playing video. My personal experience is that it most often happens underneath mainstream news reporting from "reputable" sources (Reuters, etc.). The most recent example was a news story about wildfires, where the first 20 recommendations underneath were exclusively China hysteria from far less "reputable" sources. Videos predicting imminent Chinese societal/political/economic collapse, or a major police state crackdown, or invasion, or about economic imperialism, etc. Personally, I think there's zero basis for any of that, but even if I had a more "mainstream" view that China is a peer competitor and that we're in a new Cold War, these videos would be radicalizing, and exclusively in a more aggressive direction.
timnetworks 3y ago
Rabbit holes go left, too.
- mapt 3y ago
  And when the social media Naxalite guerillas mount a decapitation strike on Sacramento, we'll be able to complain about it. There is little symmetry here in terms of actual idealogues, and there is systemic bias in TOS enforcement and in funded outreach, of which the left has very little and the right has an unending flow.
- hackerfooze 3y ago
  Both sides have merits. The truth is somewhere between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.
  - rustyboy 3y ago
    This is sarcasm right?
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    Politics is preference, little to do with truth.
  - hooverd 3y ago
    Personally I think the truth is somewhere between MaoistRebelNews and Contrapoints, but we can agree to disagree.
    - check89 3y ago
      > Personally I think the truth is somewhere between MaoistRebelNews and Contrapoints LMAO
- dralley 3y ago
  Not on youtube, in my experience.
- jmye 3y ago
ramraj07 3y ago
I can’t go a few videos without a famous Romanian house arrested person saying non mainstream things about women, or a famous meat eating Canadian academic deadnaming a trans athlete, so I’m not sure anyone’s being saved from going down the rabbit hole yet?
- dgrin91 3y ago
  I'm curious about this. I watch youtube a bunch and I never see rabbit hole videos. E.g. I've never seen the videos you mentioned. Is it because I'm signed in? I don't understand why I don't get any shady videos from youtube.
  - gochi 3y ago
    Yes, being signed in encourages personalization to your profile, so YouTube can suggest more things you have a high chance to watch and fewer random/general things, the latter of which rabbit holes require.
  - LarsAlereon 3y ago
    They're in the shorts section, which seems to have very different recommendation results compared to the regular feed. My regular Youtube video feed is almost exclusively stuff that's similar to what I usually watch, to the point where I need to go hunting for new content. My shorts feed clearly reacts to what I watch, but I get a lot more content that's well outside my interests, including new uploads by random users and alt-right garbage. The alt-right stuff is usually a reupload by some tiny account so it seems like there's a concerted effort to keep putting it in the feeds.
    - check89 3y ago
      > The alt-right stuff is usually a reupload by some tiny account so it seems like there's a concerted effort to keep putting it in the feeds. Sounds like a conspiracy theory. On the other hand, I do see a lot of left-wing garbage, and YouTube leadership is known to lean in that direction.
mutagen 3y ago
The misinformation distribution has spread to Telegram and other sources, video sites and livestreams that aren't part of the main HN / SV zeitgeist. I met a Flat Earther a couple of weeks ago, in the interest of building common ground and understanding I started talking to him about his sources and journey into this belief. His journey started with a trusted friend passing on a set of videos presenting this 'alternate' view of reality. He passed on a few references, names that when searched bring up the usual set of QAnon results and unsavory backgrounds interspersed with links to sites and streams I've never heard of. I stopped at this shallow look at things but an intrepid journalist could map a variety of sources of livestreams and recorded talks that spread this.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  So weird. I was under the impression that "Flat Earthers" were kind of a parody cult that started decades ago — not unlike "Birds are not Real".
  - rospaya 3y ago
    They were. It was a fun usenet meme I used to see, much like Trumps earlier runs for president, at some point you noticed that a lot of people didn't laugh.
- black_puppydog 3y ago
  I think it's time to acknowledge that "when searched" should really (statistically, if not in this case) mean "when searched on google.com which happens to share some stuff with youtube" The search results on google have been abysmal for very long; they might be harder to study for outsiders (no good indicators like popularity on individual links) but I wouldn't be surprised if they're just as bad an influence as youtube algos.
  - jmye 3y ago
    Of course they are. The point in Google isn’t good search results - it’s results that generate ad revenue. Their search algorithm is absolutely going to prioritize the same “engagement” heavy nonsense that YouTube does.
nathcd 3y ago
The paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add8080 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add8080
BrotherBisquick 3y ago
[dead]
friend_and_foe 3y ago
One fatal flaw: there's no data to compare it to and therefore nothing to base this conclusion on. Personally, YouTube became boring after that. I don't use it's algorithm, it's just a video host to me now. Someone sends me a link, I watch it. It has become impossible to find anything interesting on the site anymore using the site alone. I used to love scoffing at flat earthers, then on to lizard people and so on. Did you know there's a face on Venus? Fun times. You can't even fall down a music rabbit hole anymore, it just shows you stuff you've already seen, often 5 minutes earlier. And then it tries to shill garbage at me. It's no fun anymore.
- py4 3y ago
  To make it more fun again possibly: http://astronaut.io http://astronaut.io
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mensetmanusman 3y ago
“an interest in critiques of feminism could lead to men’s rights and then white supremacy” What a rabbit hole!
- pschuegr 3y ago
  I have no idea if this comment is sarcasm or not.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
gochi 3y ago
If the study was done collecting data post 2020, and YouTube announced changes in 2019, then what use does the study genuinely have? Potentially the changes YouTube have made are successful vaguely but again no data prior to compare it to. Would have liked to see deeper dives into specific demographics, concerning both older generations who have more free time, as well as 13-18 year olds. Both groups are hypothetically vulnerable to such content for a variety of reasons and usually without proper supervision.
gary_0 3y ago
The underlying phenomena is not totally new. You always had a little money being made with bumper stickers, NRA memberships, Che Guevara t-shirts, guys on AM radio hawking anti-commie spray or magic crystals. But the vast majority just got Walter Cronkite echoing safely average thoughts between wholesome ads for McDonald's and Chevrolet. Radicalization wasn't a billion-dollar market, way back when. (Unless you count rock music or violent video games, or religion.) But for a while now, starting with cable news and now with social media, the invisible hand of the market has been playing with some dangerous memetic levers. In the meantime, Americans' trust in their institutions is languishing at rock bottom[0]. And when people lose trust like that, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Things don't look good, and the problem might be much bigger than YouTube's algorithm. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust-in-government-1958-2022/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust...
- mvncleaninst 3y ago
  > In the meantime, Americans' trust in their institutions is languishing at rock bottom[0]. And when people lose trust like that, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Things don't look good, and the problem might be much bigger than YouTube's algorithm. Why is trust in institutions considered good in itself? If institutions don't behave in a way that engenders trust, why is that the fault of the citizenry? It's like being told by an abuser that they aren't abusive Why are we framing trust as a moral imperative here? Why is it that all other governments need to earn the trust of their citizenry, but the American government for some reason is entitled to it a priori?
  - gary_0 3y ago
    > Why are we framing trust as a moral imperative here? I'm not. Where did you get that impression? I was merely pointing out the fact of declining trust (with data). As for why it's declining, it's obviously a complex issue: the initial causes, and the attitudes that can become ingrained to prevent the situation from improving (why act in good faith if people will always assume ill intent?), how tensions can increase between the different stratas of culture, how people become more isolated and self-interested out of a sense of survival necessity. And how capitalism will, well, capitalize on this environment, and have its own effect in turn.
whartung 3y ago
I haven’t done it in awhile, but it’s getting close to where I’m probably going to pull the trigger. As a general rule I do not login to YouTube. Instead I have some creators that I informally follow. And then, when my feed starts getting corrupted, I obliterate all vestiges of YouTube from my browser, start “fresh”, and re-prime with my list of favorites. Also, as a rule, if something catches my eye, I open it in a private window, so as to limit my feed corruption. It’s far too easy to click on a video and you are seemingly marked for life. Easy enough to reset and start over than fight the tide against you.
- danjoredd 3y ago
  I wish that YouTube allowed RSS. If I could get an RSS feed for my favorite channels, I would be a happy guy!
  - em-bee 3y ago
    i use freetube as a client. it can track channels without a youtube account.
  - xypage 3y ago
    It does, kind of. It's not really officially advertised but it is first party, this guide [0] shows how to find it but it's just https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELI... and the guide just explains how to find CHANNELID since it isn't explicitly shared (which amounts to going a channel page, viewing page source, and searching for "browse_id" which will be a key in a JSON string where the value is the channel ID). [0]: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/08/01/how-to-subscribe-to-youtube-rss-feeds-without-third-party-services/ https://www.ghacks.net/2022/08/01/how-to-subscribe-to-youtub...
- mvncleaninst 3y ago
  You could just self host an alternative front end, is probably easier that way
- thedanbob 3y ago
renegat0x0 3y ago
So they proudly say that YouTube is better at content moderation. Yay! Victory! Now we are free from any harmful content. Now we are free from evil of this world thanks to big corporations, they will keep us from harm! They say they remove conspiracy theories, hate speech, disinformation, misinformation. I think that we can loose something more than that. So there will be another crisis, in which politicians could have been involved? Well that is a conspiracy theory. Certainly YouTube cannot host such videos. Do you have any controversial views? Well sorry pal, you can have such views outside of our platform. Alex Jones is a very nice Goldstein.
Kuinox 3y ago
I'm in a country with more gun control than USA and way less firearms death. YouTube recommends me pro-firearm 'freedom' propaganda. I watch transit infrastructure video, YouTube recommends me "Karen who brake check on highway" videos. Also out of nowhere I have videos of climate activists being ridiculed. The problem isn't so much the rabbit hole but YouTube pushing peoples on certain political viewpoints.
- benabbottnz 3y ago
  Perhaps it wants to rage-bait you into watching and commenting on the video. After you’ve seen the two 15s ads, of course!
  - danjoredd 3y ago
    I have been suspecting this for a while. I am a Christian, and YouTube regularly recommends channels about atheism with provocative titles not long after I watch a few videos on theology. Facebook has been doing similar things for the last decade, monitoring likes and reactions to determine what makes a person the most upset and engage the most. It would not surprise me if Google decided to do the same to drive engagement. The rage train is profitable and has no breaks, after all!
- DharmaPolice 3y ago
  Speculating it's because (previously) the recommendation system was heavily tuned towards novelty. Once you watch a video (or channel) which opens up a new part of the network it gleefully pushes a disproportionate number of videos your way. So I watched a few videos from Derek of "More Plates More Dates" about body building/steroid use and sure enough I was getting various Jordan Peterson videos, some "why x woke thing is killing hollywood" and even some repackaged Andrew Tate stuff. It's like an excited friend who hears you enjoyed Watchmen and has hundreds of comics to recommend. Except it's much less pleasant. The novelty bias occurs outside of YouTube as well. I was walking in London a few years ago and an old guy asked me for directions to the local mosque. I had to look it up on my phone for him and for a couple of days I had recommendations about other mosques/muslim bookshops I might want to check out.
realjhol 3y ago
[dead]
alexfromapex 3y ago
The study keeps talking about extremists but how is that defined? Also why would they select a specific sample from the random population? Seems like a dubious or potentially flawed study design.

53 points by fortran77 3y ago

Ironically, the narrative of "right wing rabbit hole leads people to <whatever scary bad thing>" is itself far more concerning to me for the stability and functioning of the US. I frequently talk to people across the full spectrum of political beliefs, and something that's become very clear to me is that there is almost no overlap between "what Republican-voters want" and "what liberals think Republican-voters want". I read online that everyone who voted for Trump is a Nazi full of hate for everyone different from them. Then I talk to Trump voters in real life and they're generally decent people worried about their jobs and the safety of their kids who just have different ideas of how to solve problems and different priorities for which problems are most important than I (a purely Democrat voter) do. The "rabbit hole" might be a problem, but the "shining a magnifying glass on the 0.0001% of people at the bottom of the hole" problem is bigger.

mapt 3y ago

I don't understand this at all. I get just as much extremist content, but I get it advertised at me as well. I've had Daily Wire and Epoch Times content forced on me at preroll thousands of times now, and before that it was Prager U.

xndjdkdhxj 3y ago

[flagged]

stuartd 3y ago

http://archive.today/ymRSg http://archive.today/ymRSg

gandalfgreybeer 3y ago

Misinformation videos for a corrupt major political family in the Philippines started popping up early 2010s. I remember watching one as a kid and watching several related videos. However, I don’t think I truly absorbed them only because I actually knew older people that were detained and tortured during their reign. If I didn’t have first-hand sources and access to books, looking back, I would have definitely believed them. A decade later and that family is back in power. When I talk to their supporters, they bring up details I remember from those videos as facts. Stuff like hidden gold, royal bloodlines, etc. I’m happy we have these safeguards now in place. I hope the LLM and generative AI models popping up will have the same safeguards. However, much like YouTube’s problem, I fear that we will only be able to put them once the damage is done and maybe irreversible.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

[flagged]

dralley 3y ago

It the changes are so successful, then why does youtube keep putting videos like "Canada's woke nightmare - a warning to the west" in my feed when nothing else in my history would suggest that I gave a damn.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dundarious 3y ago
I have disabled watch history and as much personal tailoring of the algorithm as I possibly can, to the point where my youtube main page is now completely empty, with just a prompt to enable watch history. I am now mostly free of those suggestions. However, I do occasionally get flooded with "rabbit hole" video suggestions underneath a playing video. My personal experience is that it most often happens underneath mainstream news reporting from "reputable" sources (Reuters, etc.). The most recent example was a news story about wildfires, where the first 20 recommendations underneath were exclusively China hysteria from far less "reputable" sources. Videos predicting imminent Chinese societal/political/economic collapse, or a major police state crackdown, or invasion, or about economic imperialism, etc. Personally, I think there's zero basis for any of that, but even if I had a more "mainstream" view that China is a peer competitor and that we're in a new Cold War, these videos would be radicalizing, and exclusively in a more aggressive direction.

timnetworks 3y ago

Rabbit holes go left, too.

mapt 3y ago
And when the social media Naxalite guerillas mount a decapitation strike on Sacramento, we'll be able to complain about it. There is little symmetry here in terms of actual idealogues, and there is systemic bias in TOS enforcement and in funded outreach, of which the left has very little and the right has an unending flow.
hackerfooze 3y ago
Both sides have merits. The truth is somewhere between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.
- rustyboy 3y ago
  This is sarcasm right?
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Politics is preference, little to do with truth.
- hooverd 3y ago
  Personally I think the truth is somewhere between MaoistRebelNews and Contrapoints, but we can agree to disagree.
  - check89 3y ago
    > Personally I think the truth is somewhere between MaoistRebelNews and Contrapoints LMAO
dralley 3y ago
Not on youtube, in my experience.
jmye 3y ago

ramraj07 3y ago

I can’t go a few videos without a famous Romanian house arrested person saying non mainstream things about women, or a famous meat eating Canadian academic deadnaming a trans athlete, so I’m not sure anyone’s being saved from going down the rabbit hole yet?

dgrin91 3y ago
I'm curious about this. I watch youtube a bunch and I never see rabbit hole videos. E.g. I've never seen the videos you mentioned. Is it because I'm signed in? I don't understand why I don't get any shady videos from youtube.
- gochi 3y ago
  Yes, being signed in encourages personalization to your profile, so YouTube can suggest more things you have a high chance to watch and fewer random/general things, the latter of which rabbit holes require.
- LarsAlereon 3y ago
  They're in the shorts section, which seems to have very different recommendation results compared to the regular feed. My regular Youtube video feed is almost exclusively stuff that's similar to what I usually watch, to the point where I need to go hunting for new content. My shorts feed clearly reacts to what I watch, but I get a lot more content that's well outside my interests, including new uploads by random users and alt-right garbage. The alt-right stuff is usually a reupload by some tiny account so it seems like there's a concerted effort to keep putting it in the feeds.
  - check89 3y ago
    > The alt-right stuff is usually a reupload by some tiny account so it seems like there's a concerted effort to keep putting it in the feeds. Sounds like a conspiracy theory. On the other hand, I do see a lot of left-wing garbage, and YouTube leadership is known to lean in that direction.

mutagen 3y ago

The misinformation distribution has spread to Telegram and other sources, video sites and livestreams that aren't part of the main HN / SV zeitgeist. I met a Flat Earther a couple of weeks ago, in the interest of building common ground and understanding I started talking to him about his sources and journey into this belief. His journey started with a trusted friend passing on a set of videos presenting this 'alternate' view of reality. He passed on a few references, names that when searched bring up the usual set of QAnon results and unsavory backgrounds interspersed with links to sites and streams I've never heard of. I stopped at this shallow look at things but an intrepid journalist could map a variety of sources of livestreams and recorded talks that spread this.

JKCalhoun 3y ago
So weird. I was under the impression that "Flat Earthers" were kind of a parody cult that started decades ago — not unlike "Birds are not Real".
- rospaya 3y ago
  They were. It was a fun usenet meme I used to see, much like Trumps earlier runs for president, at some point you noticed that a lot of people didn't laugh.
black_puppydog 3y ago
I think it's time to acknowledge that "when searched" should really (statistically, if not in this case) mean "when searched on google.com which happens to share some stuff with youtube" The search results on google have been abysmal for very long; they might be harder to study for outsiders (no good indicators like popularity on individual links) but I wouldn't be surprised if they're just as bad an influence as youtube algos.
- jmye 3y ago
  Of course they are. The point in Google isn’t good search results - it’s results that generate ad revenue. Their search algorithm is absolutely going to prioritize the same “engagement” heavy nonsense that YouTube does.

nathcd 3y ago

The paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add8080 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add8080

BrotherBisquick 3y ago

[dead]

friend_and_foe 3y ago

One fatal flaw: there's no data to compare it to and therefore nothing to base this conclusion on. Personally, YouTube became boring after that. I don't use it's algorithm, it's just a video host to me now. Someone sends me a link, I watch it. It has become impossible to find anything interesting on the site anymore using the site alone. I used to love scoffing at flat earthers, then on to lizard people and so on. Did you know there's a face on Venus? Fun times. You can't even fall down a music rabbit hole anymore, it just shows you stuff you've already seen, often 5 minutes earlier. And then it tries to shill garbage at me. It's no fun anymore.

py4 3y ago
To make it more fun again possibly: http://astronaut.io http://astronaut.io
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

mensetmanusman 3y ago

“an interest in critiques of feminism could lead to men’s rights and then white supremacy” What a rabbit hole!

pschuegr 3y ago
I have no idea if this comment is sarcasm or not.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

gochi 3y ago

If the study was done collecting data post 2020, and YouTube announced changes in 2019, then what use does the study genuinely have? Potentially the changes YouTube have made are successful vaguely but again no data prior to compare it to. Would have liked to see deeper dives into specific demographics, concerning both older generations who have more free time, as well as 13-18 year olds. Both groups are hypothetically vulnerable to such content for a variety of reasons and usually without proper supervision.

gary_0 3y ago

The underlying phenomena is not totally new. You always had a little money being made with bumper stickers, NRA memberships, Che Guevara t-shirts, guys on AM radio hawking anti-commie spray or magic crystals. But the vast majority just got Walter Cronkite echoing safely average thoughts between wholesome ads for McDonald's and Chevrolet. Radicalization wasn't a billion-dollar market, way back when. (Unless you count rock music or violent video games, or religion.) But for a while now, starting with cable news and now with social media, the invisible hand of the market has been playing with some dangerous memetic levers. In the meantime, Americans' trust in their institutions is languishing at rock bottom[0]. And when people lose trust like that, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Things don't look good, and the problem might be much bigger than YouTube's algorithm. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust-in-government-1958-2022/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust...

mvncleaninst 3y ago
> In the meantime, Americans' trust in their institutions is languishing at rock bottom[0]. And when people lose trust like that, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Things don't look good, and the problem might be much bigger than YouTube's algorithm. Why is trust in institutions considered good in itself? If institutions don't behave in a way that engenders trust, why is that the fault of the citizenry? It's like being told by an abuser that they aren't abusive Why are we framing trust as a moral imperative here? Why is it that all other governments need to earn the trust of their citizenry, but the American government for some reason is entitled to it a priori?
- gary_0 3y ago
  > Why are we framing trust as a moral imperative here? I'm not. Where did you get that impression? I was merely pointing out the fact of declining trust (with data). As for why it's declining, it's obviously a complex issue: the initial causes, and the attitudes that can become ingrained to prevent the situation from improving (why act in good faith if people will always assume ill intent?), how tensions can increase between the different stratas of culture, how people become more isolated and self-interested out of a sense of survival necessity. And how capitalism will, well, capitalize on this environment, and have its own effect in turn.

whartung 3y ago

I haven’t done it in awhile, but it’s getting close to where I’m probably going to pull the trigger. As a general rule I do not login to YouTube. Instead I have some creators that I informally follow. And then, when my feed starts getting corrupted, I obliterate all vestiges of YouTube from my browser, start “fresh”, and re-prime with my list of favorites. Also, as a rule, if something catches my eye, I open it in a private window, so as to limit my feed corruption. It’s far too easy to click on a video and you are seemingly marked for life. Easy enough to reset and start over than fight the tide against you.

danjoredd 3y ago
I wish that YouTube allowed RSS. If I could get an RSS feed for my favorite channels, I would be a happy guy!
- em-bee 3y ago
  i use freetube as a client. it can track channels without a youtube account.
- xypage 3y ago
  It does, kind of. It's not really officially advertised but it is first party, this guide [0] shows how to find it but it's just https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELI... and the guide just explains how to find CHANNELID since it isn't explicitly shared (which amounts to going a channel page, viewing page source, and searching for "browse_id" which will be a key in a JSON string where the value is the channel ID). [0]: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/08/01/how-to-subscribe-to-youtube-rss-feeds-without-third-party-services/ https://www.ghacks.net/2022/08/01/how-to-subscribe-to-youtub...
mvncleaninst 3y ago
You could just self host an alternative front end, is probably easier that way
thedanbob 3y ago

renegat0x0 3y ago

So they proudly say that YouTube is better at content moderation. Yay! Victory! Now we are free from any harmful content. Now we are free from evil of this world thanks to big corporations, they will keep us from harm! They say they remove conspiracy theories, hate speech, disinformation, misinformation. I think that we can loose something more than that. So there will be another crisis, in which politicians could have been involved? Well that is a conspiracy theory. Certainly YouTube cannot host such videos. Do you have any controversial views? Well sorry pal, you can have such views outside of our platform. Alex Jones is a very nice Goldstein.

Kuinox 3y ago

I'm in a country with more gun control than USA and way less firearms death. YouTube recommends me pro-firearm 'freedom' propaganda. I watch transit infrastructure video, YouTube recommends me "Karen who brake check on highway" videos. Also out of nowhere I have videos of climate activists being ridiculed. The problem isn't so much the rabbit hole but YouTube pushing peoples on certain political viewpoints.

benabbottnz 3y ago
Perhaps it wants to rage-bait you into watching and commenting on the video. After you’ve seen the two 15s ads, of course!
- danjoredd 3y ago
  I have been suspecting this for a while. I am a Christian, and YouTube regularly recommends channels about atheism with provocative titles not long after I watch a few videos on theology. Facebook has been doing similar things for the last decade, monitoring likes and reactions to determine what makes a person the most upset and engage the most. It would not surprise me if Google decided to do the same to drive engagement. The rage train is profitable and has no breaks, after all!
DharmaPolice 3y ago
Speculating it's because (previously) the recommendation system was heavily tuned towards novelty. Once you watch a video (or channel) which opens up a new part of the network it gleefully pushes a disproportionate number of videos your way. So I watched a few videos from Derek of "More Plates More Dates" about body building/steroid use and sure enough I was getting various Jordan Peterson videos, some "why x woke thing is killing hollywood" and even some repackaged Andrew Tate stuff. It's like an excited friend who hears you enjoyed Watchmen and has hundreds of comics to recommend. Except it's much less pleasant. The novelty bias occurs outside of YouTube as well. I was walking in London a few years ago and an old guy asked me for directions to the local mosque. I had to look it up on my phone for him and for a couple of days I had recommendations about other mosques/muslim bookshops I might want to check out.

realjhol 3y ago

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alexfromapex 3y ago

The study keeps talking about extremists but how is that defined? Also why would they select a specific sample from the random population? Seems like a dubious or potentially flawed study design.