Hacker News Reader

Comment by satya71 | Hacker News Reader

YouTube could take its engagement algorithm down a notch, thus reducing radicalization by many orders of magnitude. Otherwise, it's just playing whack-a-mole.

View on HN

It's very easy to find articles that find that suggestion/engagement algorithms for YouTube, and presumably Facebook and others, pushes people toward more and more radical (extreme) content.

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10419/...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/algorithms-take-ov...

https://theconversation.com/youtubes-algorithms-might-radica...

Quoting your third link

> Does YouTube create extremists? A recent study caused arguments among scientists by arguing that the algorithms that power the site don’t help radicalise people by recommending ever more extreme videos, as has been suggested in recent years.

why are you misrepresenting your sources?

> It’s hard to argue that YouTube doesn’t play a role in radicalisation.

Why aren't you reading the article? So many questions, so few answers.

> pushes people toward more and more radical (extreme) content.

content was the key word there.

I wish this was the top upvoted comment. It's the root cause behind so much of all this.

Engagement algorithms are driving extremism. Outrageous, inflammatory, even seditious political speech is more "engaging" than reasonable speech.

So until we can reform engagement algorithms, we will indeed have to keep playing whac-a-mole. With uglier and uglier moles.

They could at least shortlist quality content and make only that content eligible for algorithmic recommendations, rather than seemingly all sorts of scraps like now.

How do you quantify quality without manually choosing only a few mainstream content producers?

Just show people what I watch! Joking aside, I think they have some sharp minds that can tackle this.

I'm sure they can choose more than a few. Hire to scale that up. Probably wouldn't need to make it at the video level - flag the better creators first. For subjects without recommendations, let people search to find their next video.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com