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Comment by ptaipale | Hacker News Reader

It's quite strange to complain about YouTube and call its front page" fake news. That's pretty much like blaming "television" is fake news.

Youtube is a carrier, rather like UHF frequency is a band for transmitting carriers. Your television can show anything, depending on which channels you choose to watch. YouTube service also contains just about anything, and there's no such thing as a "YouTube front page" like you have front page of a newspaper. It's your own front page that comes up, based on what you've previously been interested in.

If you are interested in fake news, you'll see fake news in YouTube. Just like if you're interested in supermarket tabloid stories, you'll buy National Enquirer and read that. It's your choice.

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YouTube is not a clear pass-through from one's truly held interests to the computer screen. I am not interested in fake news, Peppa the Pig, superhero movies, Logan Paul, Lil Durk, Time Magazine, and yet, loading up the YouTube home page just now, there they are.

YouTube profits from showing people things they might be likely to click on, and from collecting money from people who want people to click on their things. This has something to do with "interests" in some sense of the word but I do not think YouTube's recommendation engine is an unmediated expression of a user's true desires.

> YouTube is not a clear pass-through from one's truly held interests to the computer screen. I am not interested in fake news, Peppa the Pig, superhero movies, Logan Paul, Lil Durk, Time Magazine, and yet, loading up the YouTube home page just now, there they are.

With respect, there is no way this is correct - at least not in a meaningful sense.

Are you logged in with a YouTube account? Does anyone else pass YouTube traffic through your IP address, ie do you have children, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc? Do you purposefully block ads and analytics that would make suggestions like this random? Lil durk and Peppa pig are simply not going to be recommended next to each other without reason.

I just loaded YouTube.com and scrolled for _dozens of pages_. There is nothing remotley bizzarre. The most annoying thing is that it supports cut-and-pasters, who take clips from source videos that I watch and repost them.

> I do not think YouTube's recommendation engine is an unmediated expression of a user's true desires.

Cynically, I disagree. i think their recommendation engine is a reflection of a collection of people's true desires. People reveal their preferences through actions (clicking on things) more than thought, which is generally rationalization for a decision already made.

UHF does not have an algorithm behind it recommending you content. No one goes to YouTube because they are interested in fake news, they go with the intention of being informed but watch a video with false content in it. Then YouTube's algorithms show them more and more fake content in an attempt to keep them watching.

> Then YouTube's algorithms show them more and more fake content in an attempt to keep them watching.

Have a source for that claim? I watch a lot of YouTube with one account and it only recommends things similiar to what I already watch. There's no sudden fake news switch to Fox news or CNN or... anything, really.

This is a pretty interesting account of the recommendation algorithms at work:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...

It links to this WSJ investigation:

How YouTube Drives People to the Internet’s Darkest Corners https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-youtube-drives-viewers-to-t...

I suspect people who watch a lot of YouTube aren't as badly affected as there is a large dataset to recommend from.

While not a source for OP's claim, there's evidence[0] that YT's algorithms incentivise viewers towards ever more extreme content. [ß]

The logic is simple: the more reactions a piece of content generates, the more it will be recommended. "Fake news", at least in the form of incendiary propaganda, is designed to invoke strong emotions. In the case of YouTube (probably applies to FB too), the compound effect is pure amplification.

In a way one could say that YouTube and propaganda thrive from a perverse symbiotic relationship.

0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtu...

ß: You can easily find other news items on the same topic, but they tend to have either have a paywall or GDPR modal.

It's not though, you do not write the algorithm, YouTube does.

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