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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

YouTube is the last high-quality web 2.0 service for me, until I steer away from my subscriptions.

If I wander a few videos too far away I start seeing videos about reptilians controlling the world on channels with 8M subscribers and they show "footage of people shapeshifting caught on camera", completely fabricated alternative history, flat earthers uncovering the grand conspiracy of the globalist etc.

I don't know how AI is worse than this. Also, apparently it's based on the creator disclosing the use of AI in the creation process. I guess the only "authentic" videos will be those of shape shifting reptilians and proof videos that US never landed on the moon. Kind of pointless.

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I watch about 20-30m per day of youtube (not counting listening to videos to put me to sleep) and I've never encountered this. The worst I have seen is cheap knockoff channels with text-to-speech bot voices, which I suspect are just reading pirated textbooks to stock footage. I dislike people doing that, but there was nothing dubious about the content itself.

One thing I'm very cautious about is clicking on rage-bait links from other people. My best friend likes watching dramatic cop-encounters and shares them with me, but I'm always hesitant to click because I'm afraid it will start suggesting them without ability to stop. I can't say if this will work for you, but I aggressively use the "don't show me this" and "tell us why: I don't like the video". I rarely use the "don't recommend channel" (but wouldn't hesitate to use it if I ever got suggested pseudoscience or fake-news bs).

" but I'm always hesitant to click because I'm afraid it will start suggesting them without ability to stop."

The only workaround I know of, is using incoknito tabs/new profiles/different account. It should be supported out of the box, to watch a video with the option to not include that into your profile.

(my account is messed up beyound hope, for not doing this, I can only start a new one, but I don't use yt that much anyway)

If you could pick a curated video catalog, where a human editorial team accepted or declined new video submissions at upload time, and a human team decided what videos ought to be featured / amplified more broadly to various user clusters, would you prefer that to an open system where anyone could upload and ML decided that some users enjoy seeing reptilian conspiracies but a particular group of moderators/curators weren't the arbitrators of truth and taste and moral purity?

(not a loaded question, and it is possible different companies could emerge that would compete on the basis of their taste/curation/moderation policies. also equally possible it would be too costly/ unprofitable for the market to bear many smaller competing entities).

I think perhaps there's a third option but we just haven't really defined and figured it out yet. Some mixture of crowdsourced taste/moderation plus top down taste/moderation plus unfiltered UGC. Twitter's new user-generated Community Notes might be a good example of a step in a new direction. Social media is still relatively new.

I think the root of the problem is presuming that "engagement" is always good. Engagement can be for multiple reasons, and the problem will be solved as soon as we can figure out how to more qualitatively measure engagement.

I think I’m happy with the current system, I’m anti-censorship and IMHO any content that doesn’t harm someone directly should never be deleted.

I am on the side of personal responsibility, that is, any content should be associated with its creator, and it should follow them. If someone posts completely ridiculous video, that video should affect their personal lives. If they change mind and apologize, that should be accepted too. That’s basically how real life relations work.

I just find the labeling as AI pointless.

> arbitrators of truth and taste and moral purity

I have not once looked at TV network executives, publishing house editors, museum curators, retail inventory buyers, librarians, gallerists, or magazine editors as any of those things. Why would somebody do so for video curation?

You don’t need some complicated top down bottom up crowdsourced ML blah blah blah. You just need to be able to contextualize content to the curator. Which is what people naturally do when there is an accountable curator.

Perhaps people who grew up recently only know content as endless troves of machine-curated feeds with no accountability or attributability, but that’s actually just a very ahistorical side effect of Section 230.

Every other way of experiencing media has always been through some curated context, with a specific entity you can point at as the responsible curator, and through which you color your experience of the content.

That’s not to say people couldn’t be misled in that model as well, but this whole “curators are the arbiter of truth” thing has no real or historical ground. Explicit curation actually offers the very opposite thing: recognizable, accountable, obvious context.

Why does it have to be a centralized team?

I think the best answer will be some form of decentralized moderation. All we need is to put curators (users) in a web of trust, and have them cryptographically sign their opinions.

> If I wander a few videos too far away I start seeing videos about reptilians controlling the world on channels with 8M subscribers and they show "footage of people shapeshifting caught on camera", completely fabricated alternative history, flat earthers uncovering the grand conspiracy of the globalist etc.

If you click on that kind of shit, of course youtube is going to show you more. I don't know how people think youtube works but it seems like it should be obvious. If you click on nonsense "ironically" just to laugh at it, youtube doesn't know that and is going to show you more. Even if you dislike and "don't recommend" the video/channel, youtube doesn't know why you disliked it. Maybe you disliked it because the video said the aliens are from Venus but you know they're actually from Alpha Centauri. Youtube doesn't know why you disliked it, all they know is that you clicked on it in the first place, so they'll try to find more to show you.

All I click on is videos about ships, airplanes and trains. That's all youtube recommends to me. No wacky shit in my recommendations because I never click on anything even remotely wacky, not even just to laugh at it. Youtube is a mirror that reflects your viewing habits back at you. If it recommends trash it's because you watch trash. Btw I don't even use an account, just a cookie.

As ai gets better those people making “reptillian globalists” videos will be able to crank out at closer and closer to a dozen a day

> videos about reptilians controlling the world on channels with 8M subscribers

Link?

For example, a shapeshifter video: https://youtu.be/9UCLykdar_k?si=ScpO4zcT99K0Ryf_

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