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Comment by tut-urut-utut | Hacker News Reader

Google YouTube recommendations are simplistic, to the point of being unusable.

What I would really like to see is a YouTube video collection powered by the TikTok recommendation algorithm.

TikTok video proposals are much more adaptive and much more nuanced. There I found out some content through recommendations that I would never search for, but truly liked it.

Of course, not sure how that would work with longer videos, but I can suppose at least for music length it would be good enough, and for longer videos it may need more time to train the engine before starting to recommend.

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My problem with youtube isn't their recommendation algorithm, it's that they ban and censor so much of the content I want to watch. Youtube and the major social media outlets have turned into broadcast TV over the last five years. I use it for "how to" videos, and that's about it. I find a higher concentration of interesting/intellectual content on other platforms.

Other than their overzealous enforcement of copyright (and, via ContentID, more expansive than copyright rights), I'm not really aware of anything valuable being banned or censored. But maybe I'm ignorant.

1) Countless medical doctors and researchers discussing COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics like Ivermectin have been banned and censored. This includes world famous, Nobel Prize winning researchers.

Here are some dead links:

1) Discussing Ivermectin (proven by dozens of double blind randomized trials to be 85% effective at treating COVID: https://youtu.be/f0FmjsWwFXs

2) Interview with Dr. Malone, the guy who invented mRNA vaccines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_NNTVJzqtY

3) A US Senator gets canceled: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/youtube-suspe...

4) Half of this guy's videos are canceled: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAWCKUrmvK5F_ynBY_CMlIA

5) I'll stop here.

Here's a good video on the censorship of COVID on youtube and others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COyQVUhtMDQ

That's just COVID. They suspend anything that isn't mainstream politics. It's Orwellian, and normies have no idea.

Pardon me if that sounds rude, but it is unfathomable to me why anyone would attempt to watch scientific/or medical discussion on YouTube (or any social media, for that matter).

My alarm bells start ringing if I read a paper and the authors are overly committed to pointing out the prestige of the institutions or seem to optimize for citations. What possible use could you get out of the discussion of "science" on a platform where flashiness of the thumbnail, shortness of message and flamebait are directly related to your income?

These videos weren't appeals to authority or optimized for citations. They were scientific discussions of therapeutics for COVID as well as the mRNA therapies and what's wrong with the current approaches.

Youtube targeting content based on income and being "flashy" doesn't make their egregious censorship of inconvenient information on their platform OK.

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