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?
Machining and blacksmithing are highly correlated with right wing BS in the US. Check my uname and ask me how I know. 😁
This one may not be so obvious, but I’ve seen someone lose their marbles over the crazy idea that they get recommended stuff for children when all they watch on YouTube is Minecraft videos and sometimes Roblox. And people in the comments agreed…
The YouTube subreddit wasn’t full of bright people.
Your interests have a strong correlation with people on the right aside from maybe react videos.
But even if your interested were not so strongly correlated with the right, you would probably still get right wing ads or videos suggested. They garner the highest engagement because it is often outrage porn. Google gets their money that way. My subscriptions are to let wing political channels, science, and solar channels but I still get a decent amount of PragerU and Matt Walsh ads. Reporting then does not stop them from popping up either.
Yeah big tech loves to throw dumb stuff your way to piss you off and keep you engaged, even if you’ve never shown an interest before.
My interest are gaming, standup comedy, memes, react videos, metalurgy, machining, blacksmithing,
Because a lot of the type of guys who like seeing those stupid conservative videos also like many of the same things as you. Gaming^™ is well known to have a problem with the alt-right, react videos have a very similar structure to conservative “libs destroyed with fact and logic” types of videos, and finally a lot of conservatives like to think of themselves as an old fashioned man’s-man so they enjoy things like metalwork and other typical “manly” careers.
Pretty sure this is it - I see them as well but my interests are science education, gaming, and 3D printing.
Because the algorithms favor alt right garbage heaps and the companies will never bother to fix them. Hence why we need some regulations.
Let’s be honest. The companies only really care about “engagement” and the Right is more than happy to provide that.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean about regulations, but I think regulating what political views can and can’t be seen on the internet is a very slippery slope. I completely agree that their viewpoint is garbage, however, countries like China and Russia made laws with the same justification, and now they completely control the media in their countries and control the political views of their citizens because of it. That said, as much as I distrust my government, I don’t believe they are as bad as Russia or China. However, a day may come where they are just as bad. And if that day comes, I don’t want them to be able to control what political views we are allowed to put on the internet.
I’m 30 and have a small family, too. When I watch shorts on YouTube I get the exact same content you’re describing. None of the long videos I’m watching are political, yet the Algo keeps throwing them at me. I get a lot of Jordan Peterson crap or lil Wayne explaining how there’s no racism. I hate it.
The lil Wayne stuff is so strange. Usually when some specific celebrity pops up in my feed I assume their publicist is rehabbing their image after some public incident or recently exposed private conflict. YouTube shorts isn’t like that.
YouTube shorts seems to be exclusively just a pipeline to rightwing talking points and the unfunniest parts of stand up comedy framed to serve the same rightwing pipeline.
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This, the algorithm doesn’t care whether you
likeenjoy it or not, it cares whether you engage with it or not. Even dislikes are engagement.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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/close
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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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.
If you watch any kind of gaming videos, and haven’t trained your algorithm, then you’ll get flooded with this shit
If I accidently watch a Linus Tech tips video, that will be all it recommends me for the next month.
I watched a Some More News video criticizing Jordan Peterson, and Google thought “did I hear Jordan Peterson? Well in that case, here’s 5 of his videos!”
Almost all content algorithms are hot garbage that are not interested in serving you what you want, just what makes money. It always ends up serving right wing nut jobs because that conspiracy theorists watch a lot of scam videos.
Edit: my little jab at Linus has nothing to do with politics. I have no idea what his views are. I only mentioned it to point out how YouTube will annihilate my recommendations if I watch a single one of his videos.
To be fair, you did watch a 3 hour JP video…
That’s my point, the algorithm doesn’t understand context.
I watch Linus from time to time, but don’t get that sort of recommendation (unless I watch some gun videos!). I only watch his tech stuff and don’t know anything about his politics. Now I’m worried.
Oh I didn’t want to imply that Linus puts out political opinions. Of the few videos I’ve seen of his it’s all tech hype videos. I was only giving an example of the algorithm deciding to nuke my recommendations if I watch one of his videos.
you are a closet conservative. the algoritham has spoken.
I almost never allow it
The times you do allow it are all the algorithm cares about, sadly. Any kind of engagement is great for companies.
“Hate Rogan? Cool, watch some Rogan as hateporn, hate watching is still watching.”
Conservative proganda is a highly coordinated and well-funded network. They pay for preference.
It’s not that so much as Howard Stern theory. The people that like that stuff, click on it and move on.
The people that hate that stuff hate it enough to interact with it… That means more time on the site, more ads, more revenue.
It’s just the hate algorithms… They’re lucrative.
I get right wing stuff only on YouTube shorts typically. And I think it’s because I’ll watch them. I find it interesting in a detached sense.
Good to know what you’re up against. Same reason I try and watch as many Trump speeches as I reasonably can.
It sees you like standup comedy (POTENTIALLY ANTI-WOKE) and gaming (POTENTIALLY INCEL) and in your 30s (LIKELY HAS SOME DISPOSABLE INCOME)
So it’s pipelining you to the annals of YouTube that check those boxes, have very good viewer retention and have good user engagement.
The ones with good user engagement are the ones that raise your blood pressure. They make you angry. So, politics, or dirty cops, interrogations, murder stories, stuff like that.
You can resist them all you want, but stuff that makes people angry and chatty and commenty and re-watchy is like cocaine to the algorithm. It makes them money, so they spam it everywhere it even remotely makes sense to try to get you stuck in their quicksand.
This is the real answer. It’s easy to forget that for most people who are famous for their unusual political views, most of their overall content has nothing to do with that. There’s something about politics that can turn even the most open-minded of individuals into raging idealogues.
It’s hilarious to me that Joe Rogan is now known for his like 3 conservative views when I mostly remember him as the guy who hosted Fear Factor, did every drug known to man, interviewed scientists in every field out there, and did that really popular interview with Bernie Sanders a couple years ago.
The point is that every hobby and niche interest has someone who gets way too hung up on one particular issue and devotes way too much time to talking about it, dragging the whole community down with them.
If they piss you off, you will stay on their platform longer, and they make more money.
That is the sad truth of EVERY social network.
Lemmy might not be that advanced yet, but as soon as they get big enough to need ads to pay for bandwidth and storage, soon after they will add algorithms that will show you stuff that pisses you off.
One way to combat this is to take a break from the site. Usually after a week, when you come back it will be better for a while.
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Who is hosting this? Lemmy.ml, all the federated sites? With the reddit exodus there is probably a lot more activity. Who’s paying for that? That’s who they would be in this situation I think.
I think it has more to do with the stuff you watch than wanting to piss you off.
All YouTube recommends to me are videos of kpop, dog grooming, Kitten Lady, and some Friesian horse stable that went across my feed once. Oh, and some historical sewing stuff.
If they started recommended stuff that pissed me off, I wouldn’t bother going back except for direct videos linked from elsewhere.
Edit: Rereading what OP said they watch, their interests are primary interests of the right wing in the US. If they don’t train the algorithm they don’t want it, the algorithm doesn’t know that those interests don’t intersect.
