Notices

1. Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social)'s status on Monday, 24-Apr-2023 22:41:46 CEST Christine Lemmer-Webber

   somehow I've noticed that the youtube engagement algorithm seems to be repeatedly sneaking in a bunch of "subtly religious" content that then walks you into more and more extremely religious stuff, with more and more of it being right wing religious stuff too

   eg you're listening to lofi girl and then suddenly at "catholic lofi" girl praying rosaries and you didn't notice and then suddenly you've got all this deeply religious christian stuff and you can't stop it without clearing your cache

   I set up my browser to clear my cache every time I restart my browser, so seeing this happen multiple times makes me think there's been intentional effort to have this kind of "algorithm onboarding"

   • Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social)'s status on Monday, 24-Apr-2023 22:41:45 CEST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     also every time I restart my browser I get a fresh look into what the current lowest common denominator of the unspecialized youtube recommendations is and hoo boy it's more depressing every time

     Ekaitz Zárraga 👹 repeated this.
   • Craig Maloney ☕ (craigmaloney@octodon.social)'s status on Monday, 24-Apr-2023 22:41:45 CEST Craig Maloney ☕

     in reply to

     @cwebber And this is why I view youtube via RSS and youtube-dl. That algorithm is pure poison.

   • Ekaitz Zárraga 👹 (ekaitz_zarraga@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 24-Apr-2023 22:43:31 CEST Ekaitz Zárraga 👹

     in reply to

     @cwebber I don't think it's on purpose but they deliberately decide not to change it. Think about their mechanical turks: where are they from? what kind of views they have?
     Also, the algorithm wants to make you stay engaged (they don't care about the reason!) so it must radicalize you a little bit in each interaction.