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Comment by 2bitencryption | Hacker News Reader

In general, whatever model Youtube uses seems to get really obsessed with certain concepts every once in awhile.

A few years ago, for about a month it was obsessed with videos of red-hot knives cutting through things. It was ridiculous. To the point where "professional Youtubers" with no previous history of videos like that needed to ride that wave just to be relevant.

Think about it: some person in their house heating up a kitchen knife over the stove so they can cut through a bar of soap, simply because an algorithm decided that's what people on some video site want to see.

Then it was Family Guy clips, which is still happening.

And "relaxing low-fi music to study/relax to", which I'm pretty sure at least a billion people on planet Earth have seen recommended to them at some point.

I'm sure there are many other examples, those are the ones I remember.

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YouTube kept offering me videos of lockpickinglawyer for months and months despite having no interest in lockpicking or lawyers then one day I finally gave in and watched a half dozen of them and now it’s my entire recommendation feed.

Oh you too? Youtube been shoving his videos at me for the last month or two. The only thing I could think of is that Youtube started data mining a back log of old google searches and got to the mild interest I had in lock picking from like 10 years ago.

I don't think it's that specific... I got them and so did loads of my friends. I think the algorithm just decided that everyone with vaguely nerdy interests will now see lockpickinglawyer.

Makes three of us.

In all fairness, his videos are good and I usually watch them till the end.

I have no interest in picking locks.

The "1000 degree red hot knife" fad was reasonably organic. It combined a couple of viral factors -- a visually arresting thumbnail (bright red knife), a short video demonstrating something unusual and somewhat violent (objects melting or catching fire), and a formula which can easily be iterated upon (substituting in new victims for the knife).

It is hilarious, but is it really that different from the fads that have swept through society for all of recorded history? I remember Pogs coming and going within a few months when I was growing up. I don't see it as all that different.

I think the implication is that it's not an organic fad, it's one that's been at least partially manufactured by YouTube's algorithm. For whatever the difference may be.

I'm not so sure this is a meaningful distinction in the modern era of big advertising and big corporations. Pogs weren't an organic fad either, were they? Certainly the toy manufacturer that made them stood a lot to gain from their success, and pushed them as much as possible. By this metric Pogs were less of an organic fad than "hot knives cutting through things", because with the knives YouTube doesn't care anything about the particulars of it so long as there is a fad full stop, whereas the manufacturer of Pogs definitely pushed one particular fad that benefited them greatly.

Some other similar fads that have come around on YouTube including unboxing, slime, and bizarre mash-ups of superheroes and cartoon characters. I doubt that YouTube specifically pushed these exact concepts over any other random thing that could have been a fad, but wasn't.

Youtube's model is just obsessive in general. It much prefers to show people 50 videos about swords rather than cater to people who want to watch like 2 videos about 25 different mildly interesting topics.

> In general, whatever model Youtube uses seems to get really obsessed with certain concepts every once in awhile.

There's probably a "new and unique" engine running somewhere.

Most of YouTube content is 99% "same shit, different day" if not "outright copy and ripoff".

So, anything genuinely new and good is actually going to generate more engagement and that probably self-reinforces until it spreads to everyone interested and which point it burns out.

I just wish it stopped recommending me years old videos from my subscribed channels that I've already watched. -_-

Similar thing happens to me on Instagram, which I seldom open. Most of my stream is Indian memes. I've never been to India, nor can speak any of the Indian languages.

Asking the application not to show them doesn't seem to work.

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