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Comment by nisa | Hacker News Reader

YouTube constantly recommends me COVID-19 conspiracy videos since I dared to watch one that was popular here in Germany. Basically on every video I watch I have now german conspiracy videos as recommendations. I did neither like the video or did I subscribe the channel.

It's beyond fucked up what Google is doing.

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If you want to watch something one-off, some interesting tidbit outside of your curated feed then doing it in incognito mode is required, otherwise, as you noted you are doomed.

If you find it here and delete it, I think it will cease to influence your recommended videos.

https://www.youtube.com/feed/history

We shouldn’t have to jump through these kinds of hoops. Their recommendation engine is smart enough to discern between a one off video watch and a genuine interest, but youtube gets stuck on recommending conspiracyland videos. It’s at the point where I just ignore the entire section as if it were ads.

I want a tool to work without having to sift through hundreds and hundreds of videos and try to guess which one caused the drift into crazy town.

I have YouTube history turned off along with other publicly visible tracking and this kind of nonsense still happens to me. Their algo is working on more data than just what they make visible to the user.

"The only winning move is not to play."

You have to evict all Google tracking cookies. Just disabling a few features won't cut it.

Alternatively if you’re never logged in and reject all cookies, then you never have this issue at all.

You also get to see just how low the lowest common denominator of society is for the default recommendations.

Yup. It's just what do these recommendations do to the society? If you are suspectible to believe certain content for whatever reasons you are basically doomed as you get caged into an echo chamber that only validates the bullshit that is fed to you.

Wait until you get into the dystopian world of clips on YouTube targeted at children.

That's why I never watch any video on logged in YouTube that may not interest me. Better right click and use anonymous window.

There are plugins for Firefox to hide all recommendations and the start page of YouTube. Did this a couple of months back, and it has honestly made me happier and with a lot more control over watchtime etc.

I now live in the Subscription section, and it's great!

If you're logged into YT, you can try deleting the video from your watch history.

Yeah, I've been doing this a lot lately. It's kind of disappointing how easily the recommendations shift once you click on a video that's sketchy.

In my case, I once made the bad decision to watch a Jordan Peterson video. By itself it wasn't crazy, he was mildly provocative, a little paternalistic, not my cup of tea. But geez, the trash that then ended up appearing in the side bar after that was awful. I find that if I watch some "bad" videos, I have to spend a fair amount of time culling shit out of the subsequent recommendations.

Another way to keep your feed from being polluted is simply to create "garbage user" that you toggle to if you want to view potentially garbage content.

What I really wish youtube did was to allow users to filter out videos that contain keywords we choose, like twitter's somewhat effective "muted words" list.

"It's kind of disappointing how easily the recommendations shift once you click on a video that's sketchy."

It isn't just "sketchy" videos. Someone linked me to a video of a dog being rescued, which I watched on my logged-in profile, and it was fine and all, but explaining to YouTube that that doesn't mean I'm interested in hearing about every dog ever rescued (since I didn't know about the 'delete from history' trick) has been a lot of "Never show me videos from this channel" button pushed.

So you effectively desire a way to build your own bubble, and cast it in stone, and also give even more information to Google (what you do not like) ???

My feeling is they pushing the extra crazy ones though. Watching a clearly not well Person argue crazy theories isn't very convincing to healthy people anyway.

On the other Hand people like Dr. Erickson get censored, because they simply dare to question the lock down and argue that there is no evidence supporting it's effectiveness in saving lives.

It might have been correct to say there's no evidence in March (which is not a reason to not do something, we would still be in the Stone Age if every action we took required evidence.). There's plenty of evidence now as we have data for both going into and coming out of lockdown.

There's plenty of weird, contradictory evidence. Many places have come out of lockdown early, been told they're facing certain doom ("Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice" [1]), and then been quietly forgotten when the predicted consequences don't come. It's hard to believe that lockdowns don't do anything at all, but I don't think anyone can honestly say we have definitive proof they were necessary.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georg...

I can. R0~5.7 has dropped below 1.0 in many mask-averse stay-at-home regions, which I consider compelling evidence of efficacy in an adverse environment, under common-sense priors informed by the medical literature.

"This number is below 1.0" is not, by itself, an argument that some particular social policy was necessary or effective. An argument that lockdowns were necessary would at a minimum need to address the questions of "would a less strict policy have sufficed" and "will the long-term outcome after lockdowns end be different".

Georgia has 164 deaths per million residents, versus 82 in South Carolina next door and 87 in California. Are you sure you still want to call that a bad prediction?

> On the other Hand people like Dr. Erickson get censored, because they simply dare to question the lock down

Erickson, among other things, makes provably false statements about the prevalence and mortality of covid19. You’re allowed to be misinformed as a private citizen; you’re not allowed to grandstand in public as a physician and spread misinformation. He’s lucky he only got deplatformed, rather than have his license taken.

You make it sound like he was expressing an unpopular interpretation of the data, rather than actively spreading untrue assertions.

> Erickson, among other things, makes provably false statements about the prevalence and mortality of covid19.

Such as?

> you’re not allowed to grandstand in public as a physician and spread misinformation

For all I know Erickson is saying no one died of Covid or something that ridiculous/obviously false, but labelling statements as misinformation and censoring them instead of retracting endorsements and getting others to realize those statements are false is an aggressive seize of power by authorities over what is or isn’t true.

I realize authoritative knowledge is necessary; not everyone has the time or ability to parse through medical information and come to reasonable conclusions.

But authoritative bodies should have to earn their authority from the public, not use censorious platforms to assert it. The fundamental problem we’re running into now with misinformation is a lack of trust, not a lack of information. Forcing people to listen to sources they don’t trust and blocking sources they do trust will make the situation worse.

If people trust a crackpot more than they trust an established authoritative body, that authoritative body should take a real hard look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves why that’s the case.

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