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Comment by patrickaljord | Hacker News Reader

Or maybe people are naturally more attracted to the extremes (left and right) when given the choice. Outlets such as the NYT or their right wing counter parts have historically filtered out extreme views. What if youtube was just giving people what they want and the NYT was the de-Radicalizer? For better or for worse. Also note that today's mainstream pro-democracy/social democracy views used to be regarded as radical a couple of centuries ago or just today a few thousands miles away.

Radical ideologues by virtue of not holding any power are devoid of corruption compared to mainstream politicians and for this reason always attract the crowd when they (rightfully) denounce the corruption of the current power that be. Not that they would be just as corrupt in their place.

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> Or maybe people are naturally more attracted to the extremes [..] What if youtube was just giving people what they want

That's part of it, but I think the point is more subtle. YouTube shows the content that will keep people on YouTube (to maximize advertising), but that doesn't mean it's what they most want.

Given good or bad news, we may prefer the good but spend more time on the bad, even if the bad news is something that's irrational to worry about.

The way to get people to spend more time on YouTube may be to make them worry more, care more, and overall be more involved in the topic by showing more extreme aspects of it. That may be more exploiting human psychology (perhaps unintentionally) than giving people what they want, or maybe it's giving our darker sides what they want.

>[not] giving people what they want

>giving our darker sides what they want.

This almost sounds like people have almost no agency or say in it.

These sites are designed to remove as much agency as possible, so that users are driven to behave in predictable, repeatable and easily monetizable patterns.

The question is, how much agency can they actually remove? If someone uploads "radical" material and it's popular with other "radicals," then is exploiting that any worse than doing so for mainstream content?

I don't agree with the way you phrase it.

No freaking suggested video is going to rob any individual of their agency any more than yet another hottake NYT Op-ed is going to rob mine. Their algorithms however do move the average, increasing monetization. The average is not the same as the individual.

I don't see that as removing agency, even if it is influencing individuals a little. There are dark patterns like those employed by shady mobile game apps that hook in players into addiction. The recommended vids on youtube don't reach that level in my opinion and it's a category error to lump them together.

giving people what they want

This implies that people have static, immutable sets of preferences. Do you believe that?

Just curious. Were there any foods you hated as a child but now like? What about musicians? Movies? Books? Art?

I ask (somewhat acerbically) because I see this argument so often and I struggle to see how anyone would believe that humans have static preferences over time. The natural corollary of humans having mutable preferences is that the entire discipline of marketing is geared toward discovering and shaping preferences for profit.

I'm not seeing anywhere in the parent comment that implies that people's desires are static and immutable. On the contrary it points out that, "today's mainstream pro-democracy/social democracy views used to be regarded as radical a couple of centuries ago" to provide an example of changing preferences. The dynamic nature of people's desires is part of why I think Youtube does so well. It reacts very effectively changes in what's trending.

> Or maybe people are naturally more attracted to the extremes (left and right) when given the choice.

If by given a choice you mean people are usually not given a choice, but in mid-1600s England, late 1700s France, mid 1800s USA, and most of the world in the early-mid 1900s, then yes. Or there can be changes in the forces of production and its various superstructural elements that cause this to happen. People are drifting away from the center and status quo in Greece, but unemployment was at 28% in 2013, and is still above 20%. Thus many people are boun bouncing between anarchism, fascism, and communism. The current prime minister is head of a party of what were called in the 1980s "euro-communists" - people on the right wing of the communist movement (the KKE are the left wing communists).

I think you're using "corruption" in a way that's not really justified. All sorts of radical ideologues build self-serving cults of personality that provide them with a sustainable grift. That is, the ideology is not something they really live in any deep way, but rather is just a means to lining their pockets. That seems just as corrupt to me as any politician on the take.

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