Why is youtube recommending conservative "talking points" to me?

V01t45@lemmy.fmhy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 481 points –

Hi, I am a guy in early thirties with a wife and two kids and whenever I go on youtube it always suggests conservative things like guys dunking on women, ben shapiro reacting to some bullshit, joe rogan, all the works. I almost never allow it to go to that type of video and when I do it is either by accident or by curiosity. My interest are gaming, standup comedy, memes, react videos, metalurgy, machining, blacksmithing, with occasional songs and videos about funny bullshit and I am not from america and I consider myself pretty liberal if I had to put it into terms used in america. But european liberal, so by american standards a socialist. Why does it recommend this shit to me, is this some kind of vector for radicalization of guys in my category? Do you have similar experience?

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You most probably viewed these types of videos a few times and the algorithm started recommending them to you. It only takes a couple of videos for the algorithm to start recommending video of the same topic. You could easily solve this by clicking on the 3 dots next to the video and then selecting "Not interested", do it enough times and they'll be gone from your feed.

This, the algorithm doesn't care whether you like enjoy it or not, it cares whether you engage with it or not. Even dislikes are engagement.

I'm not talking about liking the video, I'm talking about viewing the video. Viewing the video, especially a large part of it, will contribute to the watch time, therefore affecting the algorithm's recommendations.

It's also kinda dodgy what YouTube considers "viewing" a video. 3 seconds of autoplay? You viewed it. Misclick an ad trying to skip? Viewed it. AndroidTV previewed the video when you left it highlighted for too long? You guessed it, viewed.

Fortunately figuring out what it considers you to have viewed is pretty straightforward: if it's in your watch history it considers it viewed. You can also go through that and manually purge things.

Of course there's still the question of why YouTube will so consistently recommend videos that get people started down this downhill slide of absolute dogshit atrocious content.

If you don't disable the feature where it plays the videos directly in the thumbnail by hovering over it, it also counts as viewed if you let the thumbnail play for like 3 seconds. I hate it.

I meant like as in "enjoy" not as in click the thumbs up button, sorry for the confusion. Even a video that pisses you off, that you thumb it down along with every comment is considered engagement and it not only feeds you more but also boost the video as a whole.

All it cares is whether it keeps you on YouTube. It's like news, outrage is profitable even if everyone hates it.

I am constantly bombarded with Jordan Peterson videos despite disliking them and telling the algorithm to show less like this.

I’m not sure how it profiles people, but it sucks.

Disliking is engagement. Instead tap the three dots and select "not interested"

Go into your watch history and remove them after disliking it. I find removing stuff from my watch history to have a bigger impact over disliking stuff. You can also have YouTube stop recommending specific channels to you. Odds are if they're posting Jordan Peterson content, you're not missing anything of value by blocking them

The thing is I’m not sure what I’ve watched that’s triggering the JP spam.

Maybe I need to just nuke my entire history and start again.

If you leave youtube/close the app everytime Jordan Peterson opens his big mouth, the algorithm will get the idea quick enough

I don’t know how much a Not Interested designation does. I’ve done that for channels where I don’t want to see THAT video, but still like the channel in general.

What I do is just block the channel: if this is what the channel wants to espouse then I’ll do better by eliminating it entirely.

Yeah, I get those too. Am always a little surprised, but I'll be honest I'm interested in knowing what the other bubble is telling themselves... If it gets to be too much I'll click not interested, but right now it's just a bizarre break in my feed.

Edit: Just remembered this quote that fits "I'm fascinated by trash TV. The poet must not avert his eyes" - Werner Herzog

You don't even have to watch those types of videos. I got watching Star Trek lore videos etc. And got off on to one channel in particular. Whose videos always ended up devolving into rants against SJW and leftists. This from someone who posts lore videos on a show about luxury gay space communism. But simply because of apparently a large portion of his viewership also engages with the bigotry and hatred. I started getting tons of recommendations for shit that I have never watched and would never watch.

But yes Mark not interested and delete from history was the best way to get it out.

My shorts is the worst. Regular seems fine. Especially the pods dunking on women. "So who should pay on the first date?".....

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