YouTube wants to get you watching more news from 'authoritative sources' | Hacker News Reader

YouTube wants to get you watching more news from 'authoritative sources'

theverge.com

46 pointsthunderbong81 comments

Without even taking this into account, I deleted the Google account I had for YT a few days back. I noticed a lot of the creators I was subbed to where also on Odysse, alas not enough of the tech related ones... So it was not a major hit. There is very good content over there...

That whole vibe of borderline criminalizing ad blockers did it for me... that and the fact that lately is echo chamber after echo chamber, you search for some content, and because everything is so polarized, it only take a few videos to have your entire feed populated by radicalized content...

And to be honest, at times, on the Odysee comments, you can feel like it's a counterculture userbase, but at least in there I dont need to feel like I'm stealing from my overlords by using ad blocker...

> it only take a few videos to have your entire feed populated by radicalized content

I watched a few videos on weightlifting and my "shorts" feed was quickly repopulated to mostly gay content.

I watched maybe half a dozen shorts of The Next Generation and all of a sudden everything was gay (and other LGBTQ+) content. I wonder what the trigger is.

ublock origin still block youtube ads fine.

And everytime I bring this up I always get some angry replies from Google corporate drones telling me that it is "unethical" to block ads.

Let me disagree and here is why: It is my device that is used to display ads. Everyone should have the right to tweak things the way they want to prevent displaying what they don't want to see on their laptops. Google has no obligation to send me the video after I request it, but I also have no obligation to display arbitrary content on my laptop.

In the end this is a cat and mouse game.

I support some content creators by paying them directly or through patreon. Cut the middle man.

I've been trying to use Odysee for the last couple years. The site itself is fine and I want to support it in theory, but the three main problems for me are:

1. Only like 20% of the creators I follow I copy their posts over and none of them comment or remove duplicate postings. I find maybe one good video a week.

2. Literally 90% of the comments are by full-blown Nazis. The recent Veritasium video on Fritz Haber[1] was especially bad as essentially every comment was on he didn't do anything wrong because Zyklon B is really harmless and the Holocaust didn't happen.

3. Odysee's recommendations are way worse than even YouTube. Where YouTube pushes very lowest-common-denominator, mainstream, simple stuff, Odysee pushes clickbaity, totally worthless videos at best or absolutely insane conspiracy videos at worst. The only way I've found to discover anything with any educational or entertaining value on Odysee is to look through YouTube recommendations and see if those people are on Odysee too.

[1]: https://odysee.com/@veritasium:f/the-man-who-killed-millions...

  > I noticed a lot of the creators I was subbed to
  > where also on Odysse, alas not enough of the tech related ones

I had never heard of Odysse, thanks. I just checked some of my top Youtube subs, but absolutely none of them are there. Ave, justrolledin, Practical Engineering, nothing. It seems that some of the usernames are taken, with subscribers but no uploaded videos. It seems that the site has been ruined by spammers and squatters already.

> you search for some content, and because everything is so polarized, it only take a few videos to have your entire feed populated by radicalized content

I'm so glad that this hasn't happened to me. The algorithm generally doesn't work well for me, but in this case it seems to be fine.

Just wanting to add that this might just be perception. The most harmful bubbles are the ones you don't realise you're a part of

I get very few recommendations that are even remotely political in nature, not even ones that I am inclined to agree with. I like that, and it's one of the few things that YouTube gets right for me.

Given all the hubbub about ad-blocking on Youtube, I've started to poke at other places to watch video. I like the idea of PeerTube, but it feels to me like right now it's mostly right-wing conspiracy theorists and material that just violates the basics of common decency. And it's all mixed together.

This is sad. It has been sad since they started pushing silly late night nonsense. I usually cannot stand watching the same mainstream news channel content I've already avoided on TV. Does anyone actually go to YouTube to watch 'authoritative sources' of news? I think the opposite, people go there to avoid news. They will look back at this as a silly decision a few years down the line when some upstart starts killing them and pivot again as they did with tiktok. Google is so terribly reactionary lately.

I don't understand your complaint. This is what the article says (emphasis mine):

> Google’s video platform is rolling out a new “immersive watch page experience” on mobile that’s designed to suggest more news content *when users are watching news videos*.

For somebody who is avoiding news, nothing is changing.

> For somebody who is avoiding news, nothing is changing.

If you choose to believe youtube, sure, but I don't think they deserve your trust.

Well, the article is entirely sourced on a blog post by YouTube [0]. If you don't believe them, there's no story in the first place.

That blog post is basically just announcing a feature that recommends related news videos when you're watching a news video. That's it. You're presumably reacting to the article headline, but the claim in the headline that "YouTube wants you watching more news" appears to be entirely made up by The Verge's headline/clickbait editor.

But ok, let's trust the headline and not the blog post. What do you think the lie is? That the news recommendations will actually be shown for non-news videos not related to the event? That there's some totally separate YouTube feature in the works unrelated to the announced feature that's about making you (yes, you!) watch more news from authoritative news sources, that some buffoon at The Verge was privy to, and accidentally revealed in the headline even though it was unsupported by their single piece of public source material?

[0] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/investing-in-a-multi-fo...

So I will admit my comment isn't really substantial or that relevant to this particular situation. I also didn't read either article, and probably won't.

My opinion is that anything that appears on any blog of any organization that is touting some change or improvement will always describe said change/improvement in the most charitable way possible, because it was written by the org's PR team. Because of this, I do not trust them by default, and will wait to see what actually happens when they make the change.

So through that lens, your comment saying "actually nothing will change because youtube said so" just doesn't hold up for me. Unless they are legally forced to do so, I assume that there is always something they aren't telling us, and frankly I think it's naive to take their word for it as you are suggesting.

I don't know, it feels like your thinking could be used to justify absolutely any conspiracy theory no matter how nuts.

It's obviously totally fair to be skeptical about any statement anybody makes. Anything could be a lie. But this isn't the OP being skeptical about a claim YouTube made. It's the OP making an assumption about what was being done based just on a misleading headline, and then you posting that it's a legitimate concern because YouTube could be lying about the totally different thing they're doing.

It's important to point out that the vast majority of conspiracy discoveries start as conspiracy theories.

its more important to point out that the vast, vast majority of conspiracy theories end up as false

In germany, I already see "news" on the frontpage.

YouTube serves MSM on any search query I have for trendy topics. And they are one sided. Its propaganda at its finest

I just want a cat and meme video platform not some “Breaking now” state sponsored information funnel

Have you heard of the saga of the puppy channel?

A man had collected hundreds of hours of VHS tapes of cute pets and embarked on a mission to create a broadcast channel featuring no ads, just cute videos. Everyone turned him down, not interested, offended even at the notion that one would need a break from ad-mediated drama-laden television

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/233/starting-from-scratch/a...

For awhile, Reddit did pretty well with "cat pictures".

The front page has been compromised for many years, but there's still corners like:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Awww/

https://old.reddit.com/r/AnimalsBeingBros/

Sadly the reposting (and mislabelling, and potato-ing) has gotten absolutely insane across the board so it’s quite a bit less enjoyable than it used to.

One of the local cable channels growing up was a fish channel-- Somebody shot a few hours of footage at a local aquarium[1] and they ran it constantly on loop with a soundtrack of classical music.

[1] Maybe a pet fish store, actually

My wife and I still occasionally break out into a song of "Puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppieeeeees!"

"Natalie Portman & Rashida Jones Speak Out Again"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdEdZ8FY_fo

(I can't find the puppies one.)

I get a lot of Fox & Al Jazeera mixed in with the usual BBC, CNN et cetera. I wouldn't call that one sided.

They are all pro-state media, the other side would be anarchist media ;)

BBC is being chastised by Congress for not calling Hamas terrorists.

Not to defend the utility of anarchist media because I won’t, but in this case the BBC is a different state’s media.

One sided in that they’re state propaganda machines even if they represent different flavors of power

Fox and CNN are two wings of the same bird. That I keep hearing people refer to Fox as the right-wing outlet tells me either "right-wingers" aren't caught up, or they are caught up, and the everyone else still thinks they care what Fox has to say. Not sure which.

The two party system is a farce. There is only one party and one media with opposing methodology to herd the masses into the end results the "ESTABLISHMENT" wants.

all the pro-war channels

Which side? Left, right?

There is only one side but with different rhetoric

Curious what you mean by this. I know it's a sensitive topic but... the people who are really "far left" or "far right" definitely aren't what I would call "on the same side with one another" unless you mean "pawns/positioned against each other by the media they seek out to consume/think the worst of each other/are ultra radical"

Not sure what you might mean by "that's one side"

YouTube is also under heavy pressure from the site formally known as X, and hasn't said anything about "that YouTuber girl who steals content with a pretty voice" even though her actions, by any objective standard, obviously violate YouTube's guidelines.

This may partially be because YouTube had her featured at one of their events a few months ago and to cancel her for literally acting pedophilic (in another discovery from yesterday) would be a bad look...

Sniperwolf?

I guess there is political pressure to push news down our throats as people zone out from news in general.

E.g. MS have started to spam the start menu with news.

The sensationalization of web news makes it unbearable. I only read dead tree news papers.

I don't watch or read national/world news at all. I have zero influence over it and it doesn't affect me personally so it doesn't seem worth a minute of my time.

I keep up with a couple of local news sources as that news is actually relevant to my life.

> The recommended videos are all from major news publishers like The Associated Press, Sky News, and CBS Evening News.

Oh good old propaganda then

I'm actually glad to see more people waking up to massive propaganda news machines .

Especially with ycombinator as it appears that Tech people land on the Liberal side based on the comments I have seen in the past here.

Anyhow I look forward to the downvotes . lol

Nothing wrong with that in a world not only with friends but also adversaries.

Why is competion in the media space through small & independet news outlets a bad thing? If I realize a media outlet provides low quality or baised news, I choose not to watch it. Only Orwellian authorities do not like that!

Like everything else related to content decisions made by free services like youtube, it comes down to advertising money. Advertisers don't want their products marketed underneath a video about how the holocaust didn't happen or how covid was fake.

It really, really, really sucks. We're letting some of the most immoral and unethical organizations dictate what is acceptable online based purely on how it will affect their profits.

I assume they're worried about people with less discerning judgment. I know plenty of people who get all their news from YouTube channels and send me videos about how Italy hacked spy satellites to flip votes to Biden, how COVID vaccines will permanently change your DNA, how Hamas hasn't actually done anything wrong, how you don't really need to eat or drink anything to live except sunlight, how the government staged the Maui wildfires, etc. Regardless of how paternalistic you believe YouTube should be about such content, they probably don't want that to become the association everyone has with "YouTube news".

I'm pretty sure those people are still going to spout rumours even if the only source of news is "official" channels. Does anyone think that dictating what news is acceptable will actually work? Every authoritarian regime in the past 100+ years has tried this and failed for the most part.

Those examples are a whole lot less concerning than millions of people going out to be slaughtered or slaughter others in some war because broadcast or printed media told them to.

Youtube is also unrolling adblock detection. Some are already affected. I hope their web environment integrity will be a huge fail and miss as well.

Authoritative sources are probably those they have a direct business relation with.

> Authoritative sources are probably those they have a direct business relation with.

Not only. Youtube loves the WHO despite them being wrong about just everything

WHO being wrong about many things isn't a bug.

Unrolling Adblock detection? I finally caved and got YouTube premium but I’m still on the free trial.

I think they meant unrolling as in deploying.

Looks like I'm going to have to find a good blocker for YouTube content, any recommendations? There's a few chrome extensions to choose from

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/channel-blocker/nf...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blocktube/bbeaicap...

or maybe some alternative interface? Is there something that allows you to just view channels you subscribe to but also has a decent recommendation system built in?

Invidious[^1]. You can enabled/disable what you mentioned (and much more). You can't login with your youtube account but you can import your channels (what I did). You can find public instances but they are a bit hit or miss since youtube can often throttle those instances.

I have it running on my home server (so not throttled) and am quite happy with the result.

[1]: https://invidious.io/

thank you! I had heard of invidious before but had forgotten about it. Looks like it's time to give it a try

Skytube on fdroid. lets you block chans.

TV channels from authoritarian regimes are 'authoritative sources', right?

Only if said regimes are friendly with the US of course.

That's pretty funny coming from a service that seems to push the opposite every time I experiment with starting with a blank-slate account/session. It only takes about two clicks and I'm seeing conspiracy videos all about the WEF the UN and great replacement and so on.

Never been a fan of the "MSM" as they call it, but the "opposite" is seemingly worse. I'd opt for neither?

To me the problem with YouTube and similar systems seems to be the whole idea of click/impression-based ranking and funding. It creates awful incentives.

Funding sources for independent, ethical, journalism is what we need.

I agree, but also don't be too quick to discount the "MSM". Sure, they're big organisations that are open to bribery and corruption like any other; but the people they employ are generally decent journalists trying to do their jobs as well as anyone else.

I don't disagree fully, though I have a special loathing for American "MSM"; as a Canadian I can't watch e.g. CNN without my gag reflex kicking in. The presentation style, glibness, and superficiality is ridiculous. From the outside, it's just Fox News for smug US liberals instead of crazy radical conservatives.

Yeah, I guess my perspective is very British.

The BBC is complained about fairly equally from all sides, so I count them as fairly unbiased most of the time.

You're right though, American cable news on all sides is unpleasant to watch.

American MSM / cable news media has the same coverage style as their sports media. In many ways their political culture is just team sports, NFL, but transposed into another domestic sphere.

It's weird though how Americans you'd think would know better don't always see this. Was hanging out at a friend's house in the US, he tossed on CNN and I made comments to the effect of what garbage it was, and he got really defensive; as if the only alternative to that ... was Fox news and Trumpy Republicans.

I think many US "liberals" just feel continually under siege, and deep in a culture war, and everything is just absolutely binary "my side" vs "your side." But it's imho a trap.

E.g. the same friend just can't comprehend that we have a 3rd (social democratic, left wing) party here in Canada. To him it's just "splitting the vote" and we should all just be voting Trudeau to stop the evil Conservative horde. Because that's the corner US politics has been backed into. Completely tribal, team-sports, football metaphor pasted over everything. (And it keeps getting exported up here.)

Independent, ethical journalism that doesn't tell you about potential conspiracies because you have an aversion to them?

Conspiracies happen. I will bet my life that there are plenty of major ones going on now, that we'll only possibly learn of in the coming decades.

Independent, ethical journalism should present evidence they have found in their investigations, not regurgitate the speculations of anyone with a few twitter followers. Any conspiracy theory that does wind up being true will survive any attempt to debunk it.

Surprised you're getting pummeled for this comment. What you're asking for is totally reasonable: An actual, non-insane alternative to the mainstream media. One that's factual, evidence-driven and research-driven. Current "alternatives" seem to all have the same problem: They quickly become crackpots in print form. This seems to be what happens any time someone creates "the Alternative to Mainstream Site X" and "the Free Speech Version of Social Media Site Y": The cast-offs of the mainstream become their audience, and the site quickly devolves into conspiracies, hate, Qanon, Holocaust Denial, Flat Earth... the whole loony bin. There seems to be no way to stop it.

Unfortunately hackernews has become a bit of a destination for people with far right conspiracy-oriented feelings in the last couple years. They're not the majority, but they're here. It's either a new milieux, or an existing libertarian-capitalist/Ayn-Randy segment whose opinions moved in this direction during COVID.

I'm used to the downvotes on anything like this where this kind of thing comes up. The "mistake" is implying that vaccine-skeptics or far right conspiracy theorists or actual-neo-NAZIS are baddies It always gets downvotes.

It usually rebounds later once more eyes are on the topic, though.

How about less news?

It might be that's what they're trying to solve https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37929373 - I checked and it may be the case: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-repo...

I did a double-take at "pledging $1.6 million" assuming it was a typo.

That isn't a number you brag about as a company at YouTube's scale.

But don't worry, a crack team of hacker news users are here to comment on the headline :)

The same YouTube that promoted, in their recommendations page, "alternative news" sources throughout the last six+ years and made many of them popular? YouTube's algorithm with little human oversight has caused major damage and this is the least they can do.

Plus "shortform news" is inherently problematic even from authoritative sources, because it has to simply every issue into a black Vs. white to fit the format. Reality is often shades of gray/grey. Try explaining the current Gaza situation in 60-seconds, I couldn't, I couldn't in 15-minutes.

Why is everything online so political? Turn off, get out and enjoy life. Plant a tree or something. Take a walk. The world will keep doing what it's doing, no need for it to occupy 90% of your thoughts.

Because political content is a sure fire way to generate outrage from almost anyone, and outrage translates to advertising revenue, whereas planting trees does not. As big tech continues to consume the entire internet, more and more political content will be shoved down our throats. And the scary thing is, one day they will figure out how to monetize planting trees, and even that won't be safe.

As hackers, it's our job to solve problems with the tools we have. Each part of society plays a role, ours is building technology to ensure tomfoolery like this doesn't go rewarded.

If there was a software that allowed creators to upload to every video platform at once with the click of a button, more platforms would take part of the market share.

Maybe there already is? Maybe it's not so great? This seems purely a technology problem that we as a community could help overcome.

Frankly I'm sick of youtube and how cosy it has got in a position of power.

So YouTube becoming the ol' good TV full of ads and propaganda? You won't believe what happens next.

Fuck news.

If YouTube wants to promote "authorative" content, there are many documentaries on the platform.

If I wanted 'authoritative sources', I would just watch TV.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com