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Comment by dsabanin | Hacker News Reader

Could it be that it’s just not as popular as one might think?

No. Keeping out LGBT related keywords was shown to increase their performance.

Yeah but is it the algorithm suppressing such content, or is that outside of a vocal minority, similar tags reduce interest in the content, on average?

So a thing that you should know about YouTube is that if a video is demonetized, it loses ranking in search engines. Since videos seem to be automatically demonetized if they have LGBT related tags, it is much more likely that the lose in ranking is due to the demonetization that is due to the LGBT content.

It might be the case that advertisers aren’t interested in such content at all. I think similar things happened with PewDiePie a lot before he started censoring himself.

Instead of trying to derive the reason for the suppression of LGBT content on YouTube from first principles or hunches, maybe you should dig into the evidence first.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/6/4/17424472/yout...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/14/youtube...

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/lgbtq-...

In that last story did the suit go anywhere? It was 2017.

The washingtonpost story can be proven false. Whenever I add the word lesbian to a video title traffic goes up 4x the average.

The everage article was interesting. Keywords trans or transgender could put the video into a more mature sexualized context. Most searches with that term probably have a mature/porn intent. It's one of the more popular sexual preferences by keyword search volume so the context of other words matter more.

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