TLDR if you don't wanna watch the whole thing: Benaminute (the Youtuber here) creates a fresh YouTube account and watches all recommended shorts without skipping. They repeat this 5 times, where they change their location to a random city in the US.
Below is the number of shorts after which alt-right content was recommended. Left wing/liberal content was never recommended first.
- Houston: 88 shorts
- Chicago: 98 shorts
- Atlanta: 109 shorts
- NYC: 247 shorts
- San Fransisco: never (Benaminute stopped after 250 shorts)
There however, was a certain pattern to this. First, non-political shorts were recommended. After that, AI Jesus shorts started to be recommended (with either AI Jesus talking to you, or an AI narrator narrating verses from the Bible). After this, non-political shorts by alt-right personalities (Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, etc.) started to be recommended. Finally, explicitly alt-right shorts started to be recommended.
What I personally found both disturbing and kinda hilarious was in the case of Chicago. The non-political content in the beginning was a lot of Gen Alpha brainrot. Benaminute said that this seemed to be the norm for Chicago, as they had observed this in another similar experiment (which dealt with long-form content instead of shorts). After some shorts, there came a short where AI Gru (the main character from Despicable Me) was telling you to vote for Trump. He was going on about how voting for "Kamilia" would lose you "10000 rizz", and how voting for Trump would get you "1 million rizz".
In the end, Benaminute along with Miniminuteman propose a hypothesis trying to explain this phenomenon. They propose that alt-right content might be inciting more emotion, thus ranking high up in the algorithm. They say the algorithm isn't necessarily left wing or right wing, but that alt-right wingers have understood the methodology of how to capture and grow their audience better.
I keep getting recommendations for content like "this woke person got DESTROYED by logic" on YouTube. Even though I click "not interested", and even "don't recommend channel", I keep getting the same channel, AND video recommendation(s). It's pretty obvious bullshit.
Anything but the subscriptions page is absolute garbage on that site. Ideally get an app to track your subs without having to have an account. NewPipe, FreeTube etc.
Are those available on PC/Linux? On my TV? 😭 I have them on my phone but I feel like there's too much hassle to do on my main viewing devices.
I use FreeTube on Linux. I think it's Chromium based, so some people don't like it, and it's usually one of the bigger resource hogs when I have it open, but its worth it for the ad-free, subscriptions-only experience imo...
Though lately it hasn't been behaving well with the vpn...
I mean, on PC I'm not really having much issue. I don't fall for "recommendations", and I run ublock origin in Firefox so I have zero ads. All good there. The TV is the worst though...
Well you asked if it worked on PC so... lol
I know, sorry. I realized it wasn't an issue on PC after the fact.
But the TV... It's brutal, the amount of long, unskippable ads. It's worse than on regular/linear television.
And if you don't want to deal with those breaking (becaue google is actively shooting them in the face) they DO provide RSS feeds for your creators.
Just add the channel url to your feed reader (ex. https://www.youtube.com/@LinusTechTips )and forget the youtube webui exists.
You'd think a recommendation algorithm should take your preferences into account - that's the whole justification for tracking your usage in the first place: recommending relevant content for you...
Even in the best-intentioned recommender system, trained on the content you watch to estimate what you're interested in and recommend similar things, that would be the drift of things. You can't really mathematically judge the emotions the viewers might feel unless they express them in a measurable way, so observing their behaviour and recommending similar by whatever heuristic. And if they keep clicking on rageposts, that's what the system has to go on.
But at least giving the explicit indication "I don't want to see this" should be heavily weighted in that calculation. Just straight up ignoring that is an extra layer of awful.
it is. But who said that you get to decide what's relevant for you? Welcome and learn to trust your algorithmic overlords
Thanks, I hate it
The algorithms are always trying to poke you in the id.
YOU'D THINK THAT YES. [caps intended]
Wrong, the whole purpose of tracking your usage is to identify what kind of consumer you are so they can sell your views to advertisers. Recommendations are based on what category of consumer you've been identified as. Maintaining your viewership is secondary to the process of selling your views.
I said justification, not purpose. They claim they want to track usage to tailor your experience to you.
They don't actually believe that, of course, but respecting your explicit expression of interest ought to be the minimum perfunctory concession to that pretense. By this we can see just how thin a pretense it is.
I feel like it at least used to pretend that it was doing this (YouTube) at least.
I can't say for recently as I use a third party client these days and do not log in.