3d ago

YouTube's algorithm is more and more disgustingly reactionary.

I use YouTube without an account most of the time either through a browser (incognito) or NewPipe or PipePipe (Android), which means that the algorithm doesn't adapt to me.

So, every time I see a video, I know that the recommends are unadulterated algorithmic rage. I may be watching a gardening video, there will be some "Women are Evil" type of video, or "random guy talks about why [thing that women do] is wrong, bad and immoral." I am even seeing a comeback of those "sjw cringe compilation" videos - what's this, 2016???

There are also A LOT, and I mean, a fuckton lot, of trad Catholic content being pushed. Mind you, I even set my YouTube to different countries and languages, and it's being spilled that way too.

Fucking nightmare.

I don't want to end it in a low note, so I will also acknowledge that there's quite a bit of left, openly socialist, communist content, too. 10 years ago there was none of that, the right could roam free (I even identified as one, lmao). Contradictions of capitalism, I guess.

25 comments

It's getting really bad in my opinion.
I use ublock and other widgets to give a me a "clean" slate every time I go to YouTube. The first things you see are all the "high engagement" (Of course not high-quality") stuff. YouTube's algorithm (and most other ones I assume) push this stuff in front of you because it fuckin' hates you and think its userbase are nothing but braindead zombies. They know people will "engage" with it so they shove in the front.
They think the average user is stupid and puts stupid things in front of them. It's almost out of a mid 90's sci-fi movie, but these MEGACORPS really do whatever the market responds to with zero thought of anything other than ad-revenue and time on platform. It's almost boring how plain and straightforward the reason is.
Modern "platform services" paradigms really do feed off the rot they create. I hate it so much, and my tech background tells me they are cooking up new ways to make it 420^69% worse.
- It used to be low quality, high engagement stuff; now it's low quality, high engagement, ragebait, bigoted stuff. In my opinion, nowadays is even worse than the 2016 "anti-sjw" era because these groups mastered algorithmic manipulation and developed their pseudoscience even more (redpill, incel things, pseudo philosophy) as a justification for their world-view and there's an up-tick of traditionalist lifestyles. Like, Catholics used to be chill, but on the internet, the ones that exist are imperial zealots (for those who don't know about this phenomenon: I'm not being metaphorical).
  I have had reactionary content when I was watching videos on how to take notes on a software. The fucking youtuber opened his note as a fleeting example and the first thing that appears on his screen is some text on how feminism is bullshit and some weird pseudoscientific pseudophilosophical stuff on "female nature". That wasn't the first one. I discovered a niche that day: religious devouts that specialise in a certain type of software and workflow.
- What I've noticed lately is a lot of rage comments in news stories. It'll always be something like:
  "Illegal migrant kills woman in car accident" with 90% of the comments calling for the electric chair. And most of these comments are from decade-old youtube accounts for what it's worth.

25 comments