Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

I'm mildly curious about the whole Jordan Peterson anti-woke movement. Mildly, as in, I'm interested in the arguments but I often don't agree with them. I once made the mistake of clicking on a Peterson YouTube video and subsequently got only obscene alt-right "Peterson KILLS stupid feminist reporter!!" type of edited content. Like at some point 80% of my suggestions was crap like that, drowning out all the lovely nerdy Tom Scott stuff I come to YouTube for.

I had to reset all suggestions to get away from it. Whenever I now see a video like that about the culture wars (or about covid for that matter), I open an incognito browser and search for the title. It's nuts that this is necessary.

It's come to a point that I now hate suggestion engines with a passion. I wish I could simply only see the tweets/videos/whatever from people I follow/subscribe, chronologically. I can't figure out whether the people making these services are simply incompetent or downright evil.

The AI future is now and it's awful.

It's a consequence of the algorithm optimizing for engagement. YT obviously wants people to stay for as long as possible, to interact, write comments, upvote/downvote and follow the chain of recommended videos. The longer they stay on YT and the more content the consume, the more ads YT can show and the more money they make.

Anti-woke/alt-right type content is provocative, controversial and makes people engage with. Either because they want to enthusiastically join in or because they want to dunk on it for how ridiculous it is. And the people who are into it are generally really into it, so they'll keep watching hour after hour of it.

YT doesn't care, as long as they get as many people watching videos and looking at ads as they possibly can.

> And the people who are into it are generally really into it, so they'll keep watching hour after hour of it.

Maybe that's the effect and not the cause.

I see it as a self-sustaining loop at this point. At some point the flames were lit and fanned, and now they've taken on a life of their own.

It'd make a good The Onion headline "AI Accidentally Resurrects Fascism."

This supposedly won't happen anymore because YouTube changed the recommendation algorithm a year or two ago to not show hardcore politics as a suggestion for everything.

Personally I find it easy to dismiss bad suggestions by looking at animal videos or vtubers, those reliably displace everything else. And that everything else was just strange Minecraft roleplays for small children, not racism lately.

It's important to note however that alt-right content is just one particular example. Often people encounter this algorithmic behavior and ascribe certain motives to Youtube etc. And while that probably IS happening to some degree, it's also true, and probably more common, that the system is just showing you more of what it thinks you will like. There are plenty of stories of this happening in a more innocuous (but still obnoxious) way: click one car repair video, everything is car repair videos. Click one clip from an old animated show for nostalgia, EVERYTHING is now clips from old 90s shows.

And to counter all this, often the system is actually surprisingly insightful in digging up obscure crap from god knows where that's really neat, and right up your alley, that you never would have seen otherwise.

And then it goes back to filling your whole front page with Simpsons clips.

Same. Worse is the fact it continues to make the same suggestions no matter how many times I scroll past, no matter how many other videos I watch.

I find Spotify similar. I try a suggested playlist. I check out after 2 or 3 songs. It doesn't get the hint.

I think that in the future, having a way to tell the algorithm "I didn't like this" will be common courtesy. Especially as the algorithm becomes stronger, I.E. companies offload more and more curation to ML.

On YouTube, this exists. On the Home screen where you get video recommendations, you can mouse-over each video title, click the little three dots, and mark that you're not interested in a video or channel. They'll never show up again in your recommendations.

Im the opposite. I very ocassionally watch a JP video which I find interesting and it means Google no longer fills my feed with woke stuff which is nice.

It’s going to kill us

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