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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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.