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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

This exact thing goes on in my YouTube sidebar. Let's say I watch a video game streamer. The sidebar will end up consisting of:

- Same streamer, different video

- Different streamer

- Far right pundit blasts immigration

- Video game streamer

- Video game review

- Same streamer, similar content

- Ben Shapiro OWNS Liberals with FACTS

- Video game streamer

It's obvious that some slots are simply reserved for whatever YouTube thinks will enrage/engage. Nothing I do seems to stop this. I can click "Don't Show Me This" until I'm exhausted, and next time around, while they might not recommend that exact channel, they just fill these slots with different ragebait. There's no way to say "Don't recommend this shit or anything like it."

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I think you've drawn the wrong conclusion from this observation. The realization you should have reached instead is that game streamers are highly aligned with the radical right. Those videos are in there because other viewers sought them out after watching the streams.

Or that the youtube algorithm is leading you toward videos that will maximize their metrics (engagement). Video Games is just the example here but I get the same things from other anodyne hobby videos.

The "gamer to alt-right pipeline"[1] is weirdly real, but what I don't understand is why all these social media companies are trying to funnel gamers as a particular group into extreme right political content, and why is the alt-right targeting gamers in particular? I guess it's possible that gamers tend intentionally seek out this content, so the algorithm matches this energy, but it would surprise me. Why would gamers want this crap?

1: https://www.npr.org/2018/11/05/660642531/right-wing-hate-gro...

I think it's just the overlap between gamers and a desirable younger male voting demographic that helped Trump win in 2024. These guys aren't watching cable news so it seems logical to try and reach them on the internet.

Disaffected male youth almost universally play (or watch people play) video games as their primary form of entertainment.

The point of my comment though, was that it’s not just video game content leading here, it seems to be any male leaning hobby, including weightlifting, sports, tabletop gaming, etc.

You might find this interesting

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/the-curious-case-o...

When I did this experiment in the browser (different topic, same result) the bait videos were tagged with a little "new"

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