Very, Very, Few People Are Falling Down the YouTube Rabbit Hole
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Personally, YouTube became boring after that. I don't use it's algorithm, it's just a video host to me now. Someone sends me a link, I watch it. It has become impossible to find anything interesting on the site anymore using the site alone. I used to love scoffing at flat earthers, then on to lizard people and so on. Did you know there's a face on Venus? Fun times. You can't even fall down a music rabbit hole anymore, it just shows you stuff you've already seen, often 5 minutes earlier. And then it tries to shill garbage at me. It's no fun anymore.
The problem isn't so much the rabbit hole but YouTube pushing peoples on certain political viewpoints.
After you’ve seen the two 15s ads, of course!
The rage train is profitable and has no breaks, after all!
So I watched a few videos from Derek of "More Plates More Dates" about body building/steroid use and sure enough I was getting various Jordan Peterson videos, some "why x woke thing is killing hollywood" and even some repackaged Andrew Tate stuff. It's like an excited friend who hears you enjoyed Watchmen and has hundreds of comics to recommend. Except it's much less pleasant.
The novelty bias occurs outside of YouTube as well. I was walking in London a few years ago and an old guy asked me for directions to the local mosque. I had to look it up on my phone for him and for a couple of days I had recommendations about other mosques/muslim bookshops I might want to check out.
I am subscribed to Forgotten Weapons channel (the only gun related channel) and I never got any crazy, conspiricy etc recommendations.
Maybe someone else is using your youtube channel to view stuff and inadvertently poisoning your recommendations?
As a general rule I do not login to YouTube. Instead I have some creators that I informally follow. And then, when my feed starts getting corrupted, I obliterate all vestiges of YouTube from my browser, start “fresh”, and re-prime with my list of favorites.
Also, as a rule, if something catches my eye, I open it in a private window, so as to limit my feed corruption.
It’s far too easy to click on a video and you are seemingly marked for life. Easy enough to reset and start over than fight the tide against you.
I do this too, however I suspect YouTube is guessing that's what I'm doing (from my mouse hovering over the video to right click it, perhaps) because my feed still seems to get corrupted, just more slowly.
It's not really officially advertised but it is first party, this guide [0] shows how to find it but it's just https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELI... and the guide just explains how to find CHANNELID since it isn't explicitly shared (which amounts to going a channel page, viewing page source, and searching for "browse_id" which will be a key in a JSON string where the value is the channel ID).
[0]: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/08/01/how-to-subscribe-to-youtub...
But for a while now, starting with cable news and now with social media, the invisible hand of the market has been playing with some dangerous memetic levers.
In the meantime, Americans' trust in their institutions is languishing at rock bottom[0]. And when people lose trust like that, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Things don't look good, and the problem might be much bigger than YouTube's algorithm.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust...
Why is trust in institutions considered good in itself? If institutions don't behave in a way that engenders trust, why is that the fault of the citizenry? It's like being told by an abuser that they aren't abusive
Why are we framing trust as a moral imperative here? Why is it that all other governments need to earn the trust of their citizenry, but the American government for some reason is entitled to it a priori?
I'm not. Where did you get that impression? I was merely pointing out the fact of declining trust (with data). As for why it's declining, it's obviously a complex issue: the initial causes, and the attitudes that can become ingrained to prevent the situation from improving (why act in good faith if people will always assume ill intent?), how tensions can increase between the different stratas of culture, how people become more isolated and self-interested out of a sense of survival necessity.
And how capitalism will, well, capitalize on this environment, and have its own effect in turn.
I'm with you on both this and trust (with one caveat). I get the impression that you talk about trust in individuals and trust in institutions as the same thing. They aren't the same thing
I trust the people I deal with on a regular basis, but the institutions can all go to hell. I find it disheartening that you criticism capitalism, yet talk about "trust in institutions" like it's a good thing. The institutions are agents of capitalism. The politicians, newspapers, the C suite, all of them are defenders of capitalism
> and the attitudes that can become ingrained to prevent the situation from improving (why act in good faith if people will always assume ill intent?)
I have no idea why you talk about "trust in institutions" in one comment, and then try to associate it with trust in individuals. People don't need to "make peace" with institutions in order to trust each other. This attitude is conservative in nature
> but the institutions can all go to hell
On the spectrum of whether present institutions are always our friend or if they are irretrievably malicious and evil, the extremes are not good places to be. One end is idiotically naive, and the other means we're imminently going to suffer in a civil war or be enslaved. Maybe there's productive room in the middle, where we can try to make things better, however unlikely that might seem? Otherwise, assuming a foregone conclusion might cause you to allow that conclusion.
We aren't stuck with the institutions that we have. We have the resources to create new ones as old ones die out. Some institutions could go to hell and the world would keep spinning.
And I don't think the possible outcomes are restricted to a civil war or slavery, we have no idea what the set of possible outcomes even is. If people choose to get rid of them, that's their choice to make, and it's a choice that many aren't even aware of
If institutions have nothing to fear because they know that the population is psychologically dependent on them, then what is going to make them accountable? Other institutions?
Would have liked to see deeper dives into specific demographics, concerning both older generations who have more free time, as well as 13-18 year olds. Both groups are hypothetically vulnerable to such content for a variety of reasons and usually without proper supervision.
I frequently talk to people across the full spectrum of political beliefs, and something that's become very clear to me is that there is almost no overlap between "what Republican-voters want" and "what liberals think Republican-voters want".
I read online that everyone who voted for Trump is a Nazi full of hate for everyone different from them. Then I talk to Trump voters in real life and they're generally decent people worried about their jobs and the safety of their kids who just have different ideas of how to solve problems and different priorities for which problems are most important than I (a purely Democrat voter) do.
The "rabbit hole" might be a problem, but the "shining a magnifying glass on the 0.0001% of people at the bottom of the hole" problem is bigger.
LMAO
But yes, let's pretend that one side somehow has the high ground.
I met a Flat Earther a couple of weeks ago, in the interest of building common ground and understanding I started talking to him about his sources and journey into this belief. His journey started with a trusted friend passing on a set of videos presenting this 'alternate' view of reality.
He passed on a few references, names that when searched bring up the usual set of QAnon results and unsavory backgrounds interspersed with links to sites and streams I've never heard of. I stopped at this shallow look at things but an intrepid journalist could map a variety of sources of livestreams and recorded talks that spread this.
The search results on google have been abysmal for very long; they might be harder to study for outsiders (no good indicators like popularity on individual links) but I wouldn't be surprised if they're just as bad an influence as youtube algos.
However, I do occasionally get flooded with "rabbit hole" video suggestions underneath a playing video. My personal experience is that it most often happens underneath mainstream news reporting from "reputable" sources (Reuters, etc.).
The most recent example was a news story about wildfires, where the first 20 recommendations underneath were exclusively China hysteria from far less "reputable" sources. Videos predicting imminent Chinese societal/political/economic collapse, or a major police state crackdown, or invasion, or about economic imperialism, etc. Personally, I think there's zero basis for any of that, but even if I had a more "mainstream" view that China is a peer competitor and that we're in a new Cold War, these videos would be radicalizing, and exclusively in a more aggressive direction.
However, I don’t think I truly absorbed them only because I actually knew older people that were detained and tortured during their reign. If I didn’t have first-hand sources and access to books, looking back, I would have definitely believed them.
A decade later and that family is back in power. When I talk to their supporters, they bring up details I remember from those videos as facts. Stuff like hidden gold, royal bloodlines, etc.
I’m happy we have these safeguards now in place. I hope the LLM and generative AI models popping up will have the same safeguards. However, much like YouTube’s problem, I fear that we will only be able to put them once the damage is done and maybe irreversible.
Sounds like a conspiracy theory.
On the other hand, I do see a lot of left-wing garbage, and YouTube leadership is known to lean in that direction.
Be glad. It depends on many factors what videos "the algorithm" thins you want to watch. Location, videos you already watched, probably gmail mail contents, purchase history from google pay, music you like... the list is endless and iam sure even for some google engineers not transparent at all. And don't you dare click on the wrong video by mistake! A simple dislike isnt gonna get you out of that hole.
Iam actually mostly fine because I barely watch youtube and ads and suggesstions are only one reason.
My theory is that the algorithm has figured out that even people who don't like him can still fall down the rabbit hole. And when they do, they become hyper-engaged. Which makes the Hail Mary attempt worth it.
It's almost like the algorithm is constantly testing the waters just in case I'm suddenly more receptive to being radicalized into that particular world view.
If I want to explore certain videos I make a habit of copying the link, opening a new window in Private Mode (in whatever browser), and viewing it through that: no sense 'contaminating' my preferences with exploratory paths. Even for some channels that I like occasionally (reaction stuff for (e.g.) Blind Wave) I often do it in private mode so that I don't get flooded with the genre.
Every so often I have to declare 'Youtube bankruptcy' by deleting my cookies and then manually going to a view channels that I know gear towards my general preferences (personal finance (not investing), history, IT/tech, urban planning, etc).
By contrast, Twitter is always showing me controversial tweets from people I don't follow. But then that's mostly why I use the site, to enjoy the arguments and drama.
They say they remove conspiracy theories, hate speech, disinformation, misinformation. I think that we can loose something more than that.
So there will be another crisis, in which politicians could have been involved? Well that is a conspiracy theory. Certainly YouTube cannot host such videos.
Do you have any controversial views? Well sorry pal, you can have such views outside of our platform.
Alex Jones is a very nice Goldstein.
What a rabbit hole!