In the past few days, it’s recommended:
- Some guy saying vegan diets don’t work (news to me, considering I’ve been on one for years)
- A different guy complaining about PETA’s new game
- A woman saying women in modern games are too ugly
- The same woman saying women don’t really want to be in charge of anything
- Some bullshit from ShoeOnHead
- Paul Joseph Watson
Not sure where this all came from. I’d actually enjoyed a very long, pleasant streak where it wasn’t recommending me any of this trash. Now they’re coming out of the woodwork. Every time I see one of these videos I click the “don’t recommend this” button, but there are always more.
Yeah, honestly the “don’t recommend this” button barely does anything anymore, I’ve resorted to straight up blocking channels. The algo seems to fixate on stupid shit and not let go of it. As a personal anecdote, at some point it kept recommending me stuff related to a specific anime, I never watched videos about that anime, I won’t watch anime, so on, after blocking those channels on sight it settled down.
Do the channels you block show up in your search results?
I’ve blocked the fake trailer sites and an anorexic youtuber but if I search an unrelated topic they still show up in the results.
same for me, seems like “block this channel, do not show it to me ever again” gets interpreted as the new “show me less of this”, a friend told me (and take it with a grain of salt) that for them channels get automatically unblocked after a couple months, i didn’t notice that, yet
My block list is longer than my subscription list, and if I watch three or so videos outside of my usual viewing (like, if a friend sends a few popular meme vids that I watch while logged in) it’ll start steering strongly towards xenophobia and homophobia specifically.
It’s really shit. I basically check my home page to see who has updated, then pull up those videos on NewPipe.
I wonder if there’s been any substantial shift towards mirror sites with the ad block blocker enforcement, which has reinforced the algorithm towards the lowest common denominator. I don’t know how the internet works but if I were speculating to just keep the ball up in the air, that’s what I’d put forward.
I have a rss app with all of my subscriptions (youtube still lets you use rss) and libredirect installed on firefox to use invidious instances. I guess you can also use newpipe to open the videos
Every fucking thing i search for and watch on youtube leads to garbage in the sidebar.
Yeah that’s my issue, the recommended feed rarely throws right wing garbage at me, but if I search for l, say, something trans related? Out comes the PraegerU/Ben Shapiro/Epoch Times.
And yet for some reason it’s been giving me (a cis man) lots of (thankfully good) trans content, while my trans roommate keeps getting the right wing nonsense you do. idfgi why the algo can’t give her the good (or even just the okay) shit, since it’s clearly capable of serving it up to me.
Maybe I just need to do a day’s watching on her account to see if it helps fix her recommends.
Tangential, but back on the recommendation algorithm would always be “hey, you enjoy posting on the Enough Libertarian Spam subreddit, we think you’d like these libertarian and anarcho-capitalist subreddits!” The algorithms are good at telling that someone is interested in a subject but not so good at distinguishing positive vs negative interest and content about the subject.
Plus, there’s the $$$ involved. Shapiro comes up near the top for trans-related searches because he pays to have it rank higher.
lol, i got recommended an hour long video by a nerd who got mad at so-called ‘tankie’ memes about the soviet space program
“part of the reason I’m making this video is because of tankies. what are tankies you may ask? well …”
I actually started watching that video because I was curious and immediately closed it when he said that.
I just wish I could tell YouTube exactly what I want to watch. It makes no sense. We both want the same things out of YouTube, for me to be as engaged as possible, for as long as possible, as often as possible. Then why keep showing me irrelevant shit, the worst trash from tiktok, videos I already watched, when they know exactly what kind of videos I spend hours watching??? If they would actually get their shit together, I wouldn’t even mind paying for their service, but it’s utter crap!
