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Comment by Mountain_Skies | Hacker News Reader

What fraction of videos on YouTube are political in nature? Seems like a lot of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in this. Why should videos about replacing the alternator on a 1999 Ford Ranger have the Like/Dislike buttons removed because YouTube wants to protect a very small number of accounts from criticism?

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Exactly.

The example you make is fantastic, because if such a video had 4 times more dislikes you know you’ll probably not find anything useful there, generally confirmed by skimming comments fast as “ this is a 1997 model “, etc.

In last months comments often just disappear randomly. Youtube outsourced their spam filter and it was messed up - randomly deletes comments on basis of poorly set machine learming model and wrongly set keywords.

It’s definitely not small. I’m not particularly political and anecdotally my recommendation bubble has atleast 30% of politically “triggering” videos. These videos don’t have to be explicitly political but just involve a person that can be considered a “trigger”. I mostly watch videos on wood and metal working.

What YouTube recommends to you is just that, their recommendations. It doesn't reflect the actual amount of content that exists, it reflects what YouTube wants you to watch to drive engagement. It might be 0.001% of content but make up 30% of the recommendations YouTube gives you.

> It doesn't reflect the actual amount of content that exists, it reflects what YouTube wants you to watch to drive engagement.

Exactly. And what drives engagement more than enraging political content? Of course they're going to shove politics in your face even if you've never watched a single one before.

I too mostly watch woodworking/metalworking. If I ignore the “current events” row of videos that I haven’t clicked on in years (because they are incredibly boring and oversimplify complex topics), less than 1% of my recommendations are political. I wonder how YouTube decides which videos to allow in that special row. Most of them don’t have nearly as many views/hour as my usual recommendations.

Interestingly we have similar hobbies. I have to actively hit the don't recommend this to me button on all the political stuff. It generally works for a while and then I accidentally watch something close to controversial and I get another flood.

The algo loves some ragebait. I ruthlessly remove bad recs and yet I watch one self-help video and suddenly the algo shows me far-right suggestions.

It’s pretty incredible how hard the recommendation algorithm is trying to make me become right wing. It must assume I am because of my interests and watch history. Not interested, YT.

The fraction of political videos on Youtube is "definitely not small"?! I'd be surprised if it's more than 0.01%, i.e. if more than 1 in 10,000 videos are political.

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