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erlich

YouTube is exactly the same.

You have to install a browser extension to block politics from your suggested videos.

Twitter is great because they have “blocked words”. I maxed out my 200 words though and have to constantly swap them.

It’s undoubtedly true that they make huge money from hate and divisiveness.

This is not whistleblowing though. They are not breaking laws. And everyone already knows this.

People can choose if they want to work there or not. Just like at a cigarette company or fast food company or pharma company.

If things should be changed, the public should vote to regulate.

But they ain’t doing that. So it’s up to parents to educate their kids about personal responsibility and addiction.

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Youtube isn't really the same. I've found that I can watch the things I want to fine without seeing a single political video being suggested.

I find that YT actually badly overfits my history; it’s super predictable and narrow.

Sure it’s preferable to falling off the bandwagon into conspiracy, but it doesn’t really “explore” a lot for me

I never see political videos. Only videos in my very narrow interest.

Weird, I watch YT quite a bit but it only suggests things that are related to stuff I've watched before, and I don't recall ever seeing a political video on there show up.

That's totally weird because I have never watched a political video on YouTube, yet my whole suggested feed is filled with it. Even in the first 3 suggested videos. All of it is very far right conservative. Never touch it. I login to see if anyone I'm interested in has posted anything new then get off the platform. Have no clue how to get out of it.

Check out elsagate on reddit... https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/

I find the opposite; YouTube is on a constant mission to pull me into the world of right-wing videos with angry titles and antivax propaganda.

If you browse YouTube with cookies disabled or within a cookie fence, you can see that such manipulation is the default behavior. For a significant percentage of videos, the very first set of suggestions is manipulative. For the others, perhaps the first set of suggestions is not problematic but the suggestions for those videos are where the manipulation starts.

It's nice that you found a way out of it but I'm guessing that's rare.

That being said, I live in the UK. We know it's going to base its default recommendations based on your perceived location.

I personally found that I needed to make an account to get away from the horrendous default recommendations. And allow it to use some data and not clear my cookies etc.

You're mostly correct, but I'm guessing you don't use the feature of marking videos as not interesting - it really helps, to the degree that I don't get suggested almost any right-wing videos of the disgusting kind even when I listen to music popular in those circles, as evidenced in the comments sections (I prevailingly use YT for music). Now, if only there was an option to filter out the nationalistic comments (insubstantial comments calling for "unity among brethren" and similar), too.

One has to log in to benefit from this, though.

However, most YT advertisements that get served to me are scams the last few months.

I just found out a trick where you can get rid of YouTube Shorts by marking all of them as not interesting.

> If things should be changed, the public should vote to regulate.

How can the public form an opinion if the information they get about it is skewed by the affected companies?

What if their politicians get “donations” from the companies that need regulation, to influence them into not doing so?

Catch-22

> How can the public form an opinion if the information they get about it is skewed by the affected companies?

When Trump was in power, you had the right wanting to regulate Reddit/Twitter, and the left wanting to regulate Facebook.

I don't think the companies are successfully skewing people in their favor of not being regulated.

Big tech are a necessary evil for most people. Philip Morris' customers don't talk about it being a great company, they just need its product.

People blame big tech a lot though, but what if they did give people visibility and control of their algorithms in terms of what content they want...and if we had more competition...would there be less extremism, or would people just up their own dosage?

In the end it will come down to personal responsibility and education.

YouTube always lures you back to mainstream content. Pick an unusual genre of music and let it autoplay. Come back after a few hours and you will hear pop music. This has a self-reinforcing character as my views will make those videos even more popular. Youtube now also tagged me as liking pop music.

Pretty sure you could even call it distortion of competition. I doubt legislation can improve the net much but there is an economic significance for less known artists.

I used to criticize youtube for this, but its really pretty easy to tune out the politics by saying "not interested".

This is unfortunately not the same as a downvote, which is effectively saying "show me more of this, I want to hate its siblings too"

The problem is that if you watch a news clip for informational purposes, say you want to know information about lockdown restrictions easing, you will get sucked into the most addictive news content. It takes a lot of self-restraint not to click on some of the accompanying recommended videos, they are all carefully designed to make you click.

And people's ability to self-restrain varies with mood. They are ready to catch you when your mood dips, or you are in an extremely boring situation.

Try invidious, it's basically a filter over youtube that protects your privacy and gets rid of the junk:

https://iteroni.com/feed/popular

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