Dear YouTube AI, I Am Not a Nazi

> I like it so much that I pay the utterly economically irrational Youtube Premium monthly fee just to skip ads.

I use uBlock Origin and haven't seen an ad on Youtube in years.

A big bonus of uBlock Origin is customization. I've disabled the righthand suggestions and the post-play suggestions, so I'm not subjected to The Algorithm.

I think Youtube has ran its course. Google knows Youtube is no longer the money maker it once was, and is knowingly (either literally so, or by using algorithms they can blame and plead ignorance) pushing spicy content to get you to interact.

This isn't a zero sum game: every time you tell it "don't recommend" and "not interested", that is an interaction, too. You are on Youtube instead of some other website or service. This is the attention economy equivalent of a loss leader.

If you believe Youtube no longer serves you, quit. This goes for any other service, too.

Also, remember I actually pay hard cash for Youtube (which embarrasses me every time I type it!) so the idea that they can't distinguish engagement highly likely to keep me forking over subscription moolah versus engagement highly likely to send me running for the hills when I actively use their provided tools to tell them "I HATE THIS STOP SHOWING IT TO ME" is a pure business failure. The concept that all engagement is good engagement may work on a platform like Twitter where the point is to rile everyone up into opposing war camps but is that really why people come to Youtube? Some people just like physics videos, or cooking videos, or video game reviews, or whatever...

Truly sad to throw out the baby with the bathwater though.

On Youtube I can watch IAS lectures on cutting edge topics on quiet evenings. I can find incredible creators explaining mathematical and physics concepts - often with innovative and useful graphical presentation. I can watch Kendo matches from Japan and more BJJ instructional videos from true masters than I'd have time to watch in 10 lifetimes. For someone who spends all day reading/writing text for work and then still reads a lot on free time - well sometimes you just want to watch/listen vs. more text input!

But yes I will move on if anything like this happens again. Nothing is irreplaceable.

Why is it embarrassing to pay YouTube for its service? We've been paying for tv channels for decades. For me, YouTube seems to provide way more educational value, entertainment etc than tv ever did.

>Google knows Youtube is no longer the money maker it once was

Implying YouTube literally ever made money lmfao

Working as designed? That explains everything!

It's kind of funny that this is a thing too. Sometimes, I'll get the pop culture outrage grifters recommended to me since I like to dip into the current events regarding comic books. Otherwise, I get just random junk. Recommendations to view uploaded movie clips or whatever but nothing close to what I regularly watch. I always feel like the Youtube recommendation system is flakey. It doesn't even pick up the fact that I'm subscribed to a ton of small channels for cooking and rarely puts their content on the feed. It's wild I swear.

Exactly. Do Nazi's offend me? Sure (sorry if that's a spicy opinion for some of the people who left response comments here). But as a computer person I'm offended by how lazy and bad the recommendation system is. After two decades the system should be able to segment the person who just wants to watch cooking videos and check out the latest Spiderman news and leave the culture wars for Twitter.

It is a disservice to the end-user and to all the amazing creators for whom Youtube is as present an irreplaceable venue for distribution.

It's kind of like the whole SEO sites that use to plague Google back in the early 2000s. Obviously today they deal with similar SEO nonsense in the form of review sites but at least if you're not looking for a review on a product then you won't usually get them in your first page results. Too bad YT devs don't have that decent of an algorithm for the front page.

I regularly get recommendations for extremist content on Youtube, even though it's not thematically related to anything I already watch. The most harmless ones are Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate videos, but not too far behind is conspiracy stuff, fundamentalist religious channels, "spiritual" videos about faith and ghosts and living the Matrix. Like you, I used to click on the <not interested> options to little effect, so now I just ignore them. It's actually a running joke with my friends that in the YT app on my iPad I often get an extremist suggestion exactly in the third slot of the suggested videos list.

Here's my theory on why that happens: Youtube knows I'm male, kind of old, a tech nerd, and that I likely don't have any kids or a wife. That's it. It's the kind of content I'm supposed to like in my gender/age/status cohort.

It's the kind of content I'm supposed to like in my gender/age/status cohort.

Yes. This is exactly how personalized advertising works.

Advertisers pay to target specific groups/cohorts in a statistical manner. Sorry that you don't like your cohort but this is a well known and unavoidable byproduct of their statistical approach.

It's like when a friend has cancer. You search for it on Google and the next thing you know, you're bombarded with ads for quack remedys.

The only effective solution --- avoid those who play this game.

Advertising doesn't have to work this way. There are alternatives --- such as basing it strictly on expressed interest. If you search for cancer, you should expect some ads related to cancer. What you shouldn't expect is these ads tracking you all over the internet.

Advertising works but there is not much independent evidence to show that personalized advertising is really any more cost effective.

I fully agree, although in my case it's not advertising per se. I'm on YT Premium, I don't get ads as such. But they're still trying to "sell" me engagement, of course. There is very little doubt in mind my that extremist content is maximally engaging, especially for the many people who actually fall down the rabbit hole and get their filter bubble permanently modified.

While YT staff may not actually hold these extremist views themselves, my guess would be they're nevertheless actively pushing it for commercial reasons. Just like it turned out that the supposedly liberal pre-Elon old guard of Twitter had special protections in place that made accounts such as LibsOfTikTok immune to getting banned, I am quite certain Youtube has the same protections for extremist channels that would otherwise run afoul of its T&C on the daily.

although in my case it's not advertising per se

The slickest and most subversive form of advertising is that which isn't immediately recognized as such.

Again, you're not wrong, but that response isn't quite fair to the point I was trying to make.

More to the point, personalised advertising doesn't mean you are supposed to like it; it means they like reaching you.

It means they like spending money to annoy you.

The question for advertisers --- is this really more cost effective than a simple, non-personalized, context based approach?

There is evidence that advertisers are increasingly deciding it is not. For example --- Amazon's context based ads are one of it's fastest growing areas.

https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-amazons-growing-ad-bu...

The YouTube recommendation system is optimized to direct all users toward pools of content that have the highest amount of watch time. The AI has learned about various paths that get users to watch for longer amounts of time. One of those paths is right-wing polemics. Another path is, say, makeup tutorials. It's not inherently political.

Purely by its own machine learning, the YouTube algorithm becomes sophisticated at inching people toward the high-watchtime material. There is no mal intent. There's no intent at all except for revenue. The AI doesn't "know" what the content of the reactionary videos even is. All it "knows" is that people who get there watch longer, and that people get there by way of other interests, such as martial arts, history, or guns. It also "knows" that this transition has to happen gradually to succeed. The recommendation progression is subtle:

Martial arts -> combat -> guns/militaria -> liberals are coming to seize your guns

Martial arts -> combat -> guns/militaria -> look at this neat Nazi gun -> were the Nazis so wrong???

Martial arts -> MMA -> Joe Rogan -> Jordan Peterson -> feminism is destroying Western civilization

Martial arts -> MMA -> Joe Rogan -> (((George Soros))) is a space reptile

Your line of questioning assumes that this process is malfunctioning, when in fact it is working as intended. You're correct that it's ethically grotesque, but since when have companies ever taken responsibility for externalities without being compelled to via regulation? YouTube has the legal right to host and broadcast whatever (non-obscene, non-copyrighted) content makes it the most money. The only free-market answer would be advertisers pulling money, which they occasionally do as a disciplinary mechanism. But if the advertisers don't really care, well...

I absolutely get the recommendsation progression. I'm a pragmatist and a capitalist. I'm not demanding a ban on anything.

But when a user explicitly says "NO NO STOP YOU HAVE IT WRONG" and it has no impact then it is not optimal design, it is bad design, and not possibly revenue maximizing. Fixing it would also be a great way for these companies to stop stepping in public relations unforced errors.

I wonder if their attitude is "hey, you clicked on it once buddy. chances are you're a little curious, and people really engage with this material"

Pretty much. It costs them nothing to keep pecking. The odds of a user actually leaving YouTube for good are pretty minimal.

> One of those paths is right-wing polemics.

Agreed completely. Uh… is it your thought that they do not employ left-wing polemics for precisely the same reason?

Because https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34463025

I had a chance to reflect on this overnight. I apologize that the initial rant was not written very well. I had to get it out and off my chest but was multitasking to hit a parallel real life deadline elsewhere.

My personal answer to all of this is that YouTube is a failed product for me. It may serve some general consumption/ad revenue production use case but it is a terrible product for a self-directed “power user.” I see the situation analogous to Twitter. The benefits of the platform are too powerful to entirely leave behind but horribly deficient to what they could be and there is no real alternative because of monopoly. YouTube in my view long ago stopped focusing on providing more value in a two sided market between content consumers/creators and shifted to pure monopoly resource extraction. I’m sure there are alternative emerging platforms but the logic of natural monopolies in two sided markets makes it brutally hard for any of them to reach critical useful scale.

But I realize I’ve gotten very lazy over the past decades and outsourced far too much power to the platform companies. Business is always some combination of providing value to your customers and extracting value for yourself but too many of these platforms have lost the balance. I’m tired of being the product even when I try to provide an alternative paid revenue stream to opt out of that deal.

Annoying and painful as it will be (I’m at a point in life where I no longer have bandwidth to self-hack every thing) I am going to have to reclaim big chunks of my digital autonomy. Thanks all for the great discussion here.

Chances are someone you link to (either following their channel or through some other metric) has engaged with that content, and so Youtube believes that you're more likely to engage with it as well, if you have overlapping interests. It may be a relationship several orders removed from you - but Youtube still counts it.

> If anything, because I was so puzzled by what was happening that I looked at who this Leather fellow was, Youtube’s trillion dollar “AI” tech stack will probably serve more and more of this stuff.

So... it worked. You seem to be confused about the goals of Youtube's algorithm - it isn't to show you the content you're most interested in, per se, it's to show you the content you're more likely to add value to by engagement. That can and often does correlate to your interests, but controversy works just as well, which is why these platforms often incentivize controversy over quality. Sometimes they'll throw random stuff into your feed just so see if you'll bite.

Consider deleting your view history if you haven't already. Go through your subscriptions and see who they're following. Absolutely do not click on more than one of someone's video if you don't want to get flooded with their content.

"Consider deleting your view history if you haven't already. Go through your subscriptions and see who they're following. Absolutely do not click on more than one of someone's video if you don't want to get flooded with their content."

- Exactly ... which is both hard and sad. You don't always know what the content is before you click out of curiosity or otherwise. For example, I couldn't write this post before clicking on the Leather Apron guy to see what the heck was going on.

And we should be able to listen to normalize arguments from the "other side" of politics without starting a cascade ending with Nazi propaganda. And the easiest way to do that is to take the user "STOP IT" feedback seriously. Which is really the point of my post if my rant and need to keep things under 4k characters obscured the TLDR.

Had a similar problem, wrote some js for TamperMonkey, and now TM runs my script whenever Youtube.com/* is loaded.

Youtube doesn't decide what I see, I decide that. Youtube merely offers me data that I filter.

Seems taking the web into my own hands is the only solution for this, I'm sure Youtube and other sites couldn't care less about their users.

The funniest I've ever had was an audiobook of Mein Kampf appearing as my top recommendation.

I think I've spoke about this here previously, but I do feel YouTube radicalised me in my early 20s. In my case though it was from the left, not the right, and ack then there was no real recommendation algorithm. There was trending videos and subscriptions, but if I remember correctly the only recommended stuff was basically just related content next to videos.

Personally I don't know if the current recommendation algorithm is any worse than the subscription feed. I think we humans might actually just be drawn to more extreme or "pure" versions of our own beliefs. At least I feel this is true for myself as it's something I have to actively fight all the time.

A good example of people being drawn to more extreme versions of their own beliefs is TV news. People who watch CNN don't watch Fox News and people who watch Fox News don't watch CNN. This self-selection of media content serves to amplify political division and radicalise people because most people will only watch and read what they already agree with when they have to pick the content.

So I think there's an argument to be made here that while not perfect the YouTube recommendation algorithm might actually be better than the old way of consuming content by personal selection. And I guess the fact you were recommended something you so strongly disagree with that you wrote this post you're kind of proving what I've been thinking. This recommendation clearly didn't serve to radicalise you, but for better or worse it might have helped you understand what people you wouldn't normally interactive with actually think on some subject matter. And sometimes you had the perspective, but I find I often that's not the case.

So yeah, while YouTube sometimes recommends me crazy stuff, I no longer have a list of 50 far-left videos waiting for me when I open the site. And while I find what I'm recommended is still biased to my personal preferences, it's less biased then myself.

Self radicalization at least takes some initiative and sustained focus which would seem to limit the relative population risk but I fully admit I’m on the thin edge here of what I have any clue about.

I have very nerdy and musical follows, no violence of any sort that I can think of other than the occasional snarky vlogger but even those tend to get pruned. I did find that the NI/DRTC method did help me to prune all political content - I do subscribe to one political show for sure because it's genuinely funny (even they rarely get much of a watch these days though), but with a concerted effort over a good week of daily instruction I got it to stop recommending all the talentless pandering pundits of the same stripe who desire my attention.

The real concern is if Google really has accepted money from this channel in exchange for access to the feeds of people who are into violent content. To say that scenario is believable is an understatement, but to believe it is dark. I'd prefer not to.

One thing to consider about the "As far as I can tell those buttons aren’t connected to anything on the back-end." idea is - if a new channel or video comes out, the algorithm might not know its undesirable to people in your cluster until enough unlucky people in your cluster is served that poor video recommendation and hits that button, at which point the ML has sufficient labels to start avoiding serving that video to people with similar preferences to you.

But there's an endless amount of new content, and new content has a period before its properly labeled and sorted into the right filter bubbles, so you will likely never get to a world where you don't have to see that stuff.

Their AI sucks, this is what happens when a site curates their feed instead of just using hashtags+views+popular.

I've been using pockettube addon and just add my favorite channels to groups. Now I can just watch tech, and get my favorite tech shows. Cars, Music, etc. Plus I get uncensored and time/popular feeds sort views again for each of my groups. This is 10000% better than clicking "subscriptions".

Sad people are just herded like sheep on what content they consume.

https://pockettube.io/

Thanks I’ll check it out.

Turn off your watch and search history, then install a plugin that redirects you from the home page to the subscription page. Your recommendations will turn to whatever you have in your subscriptions, videos similar to what you're currently watching and an occasional super popular video that will stay in your recommendations until you click on it. It's pretty bad but it's still much better than the garbage it's serving you with the default settings.

I have seen this as well. What in the world is going on at Google?

I get ads from the Epoch Times in my Discover feed all the time, and every time, I tell it to block that ad. No, I don't want to get news from Chinese cultists. No, I don't want to watch their corny stage productions. Please stop.

To me paying the fee for YouTube is utterly rational. I get enormous pleasure out of YouTube without commercials. I too am exceptionally frustrated with their algorithms. They have never got my taste even remotely right.

It's really simple. It's the same reason ChatGPT doesn't mean the end of human creative labor.

ML isn't perfect.

That's it. You found a false negative.

I agree and appreciate that AI is very fallible. That’s exactly why I think the algos should take direct user feedback to knock it off with certain content types seriously instead of very apparently ignoring it altogether.

For what it’s worth, I also have YouTube Premium and watch a lot of gun content and conservative political content on YouTube, and I don’t think I’ve ever been recommended any sort of explicitly anti-Semitic or neo-Nazi content.

I do suspect that the recommendation algorithm for Premium is slightly different and perhaps more favorable to gun content. Pretty much all gun content is demonetized, and anything that’s demonetized gets recommended less; I suspect Premium is an exception to this. Also, there may be more gun content than usual lately because SHOT Show, a trade show for the gun industry, is happening this week.

Same exactly. I have a very specific question for you. I made the mistake of back in 2016 of watching some Jordan Peterson videos (mostly kidding about the word mistake, but read on). I enjoyed them and moved on. Ever since then YouTube has been obsessed with recommending Jordan Peterson videos to me even though I haven’t watched one in ages. Have you had this issue by any chance?

I went through a Jordan Peterson phase maybe a little later than you, but I don’t get a lot of JBP recommendations anymore. When I look at the recommendations I do get, though, it’s generally content I’ve engaged with more frequently and recently. Though I probably watch more YouTube than any other video content overall, so maybe that’s a reason why. (I feel a little sheepish admitting that, but I honestly shouldn’t because there’s a lot of good content.)

Thanks. I'm getting slightly obsessed as to why YouTube thinks I'm obsessed :O

Thanks. FWIW I wasn't trying to "yuck your yum" for gun folks. Just not my personal bag of tea. I was raising it as an example of how useless the feedback mechanisms were for correcting the recommendation engine, not trying to draw some line between gun content and Nazi loving.

I appreciate that and I didn't take any offense. I just wanted to add my own experience. And I do think there might be something to the recommendation algorithm being different for Premium.

It seems like the algorithm recommended you a video and then you clicked on it and watched it or at least read the description for it but then you clicked don't recommend and not interested.

I mean how else did you know what this leather apron club was? You seem to of described the content of the video that was recommended as if you watched it or clicked on it or interacted with it in some positive manner.

You sent a conflicting signal to YouTube by investigating the content that you don't want to be recommended by interacting with it a whole bunch.

Next time you get recommended things that you don't want to be recommended I'm going to recommend to you to not interact with it at all. Don't click on it don't do anything that is considered engagement to it.

I also use YouTube a bunch and I also pay for YouTube premium. All of my recommends are extremely accurate and that is because the only thing that I view or consume are things that I want to view or consume.

I don't click on things I disagree with or would be offended by I don't click on shorts because I hate that entire concept of content and I don't click on trash content like haha funny viral videos because I am under the complete understanding that interaction and engagement are what drive the algorithm that recommends me content.

I could get totally rabbit holed and click on this stuff that every once in awhile it tries to recommend me that is slightly outside of my bubble in order to research it and find out why it tried to recommend me this. but you know what that would do? It sends a signal to them that I clicked on the video and then I clicked on their homepage to find out more and then I clicked on their about to look at other channels associated with it maybe I clicked on a couple more videos to find out if all of their content is like this maybe I clicked on videos on the side that are related to the video that it thinks I would be interested in if I like the video I'm currently clicked on and all of these are positive signals that feed the recommendation engine to give me more things that I don't want to be given.

And I'll go as far as to say I wouldn't even do that in an incognito tab or from the same IP address or from the same computer because it will somehow leak into my logged in normal account.

I guess I also want to put forth the idea that the negative signal that you put out by saying you don't want to be recommended something is possibly exponentially weaker to the recommendation engine then any amount of investigatory engagement that you do. You say AI a lot and frankly this is how YouTube's recommendation engine has worked for a very long time and I think it's going to be an even longer time and it's going to require more invasive analytics for YouTube to be able to have the ability to pick up on intent of a click. Because that's what this really revolves around. If a human was behind the recommendation engine and you were able to small talk with said human during your frustration of investigating why you're being recommended something then that human would understand to ignore this engagement.