Technology

Does this mean youtube preferentially selects alt-right shorts, or alt-right people make more shorts? Or some other thing entirely? Jump to your own conclusion.

Yeah it sure does. There is no way that garbage should be showing up for me, but yet...

There's a firefox extension to hide short and another to default to your subscription. Along with ublock, those are the only things that makes youtube usable.

So you're saying we need to start pumping out low quality left wing brainrot?

I don't think it makes me feel better to know that our descent into fascism is because gru promised 1MM rizz for it

I found youtube shorts very annoying, because I have an attention span and can focus on something for more than 30 seconds. But if you right-click the three dots on a few Shorts sections and click Not Interested, youtube gets the hint and stops offering them to you. Win-win!

Alt right videos are made to elicit outrage, hate, and shock which our lizard brains react to more due to potential danger than positive videos spreading unity and love. It’s all about getting as many eyeballs on the video to make money and thi is the way that’s most effective.

I realized a while back that social media is trying to radicalize everyone and it might not even be entirely the oligarchs that control its fault.

The algorithm was written with one thing in mind: maximizing engagement time. The longer you stay on the page, the more ads you watch, the more money they make.

This is pervasive and even if educated adults tune it out, there is always children, who get Mr. Beast and thousands of others trying to trick them into like, subscribe and follow.

This is something governments should be looking at how to control. Propaganda created for the sole purpose of making money is still propaganda. I think at this point that sites feeding content that use an algorithm to personalize feeds for each user are all compromised.

Instagram does the same thing with "dark jokes" and really weird ufo and conspiracy videos it really sucks

I have to get 2 extensions to make youtube better in order to block shorts, disable autoplay, make UI better, and bring youtube dislike button back. This is excluding ublock origin by the way, so I guess 3 or so

I keep getting recommendations for content like "this woke person got DESTROYED by logic" on YouTube. Even though I click "not interested", and even "don't recommend channel", I keep getting the same channel, AND video recommendation(s). It's pretty obvious bullshit.

I think the explanation might be even simpler - right wing content is the lowest common denominator, and mindlessly watching every recommended short drives you downward in quality.

Same happened to me (live in WA) but not only do I get pro-tyranny ads and Broprah (Rogan) shorts, I also get antivax propaganda.

I always use the “show less of this” option or outright remove it from my feed. Seems better now.

I hate the double standards

On a true crime video: "This PDF-File game ended himself after he was caught SAing this individual.... Sorry Youtube forces me to talk like that or I might get demonetized" Flagged for discussing Suicide

On PragerU: "The Transgender Agenda is full of rapists and freaks who will sexually assault your children, they are pedophiles who must be dealt with via final solution!" Completely fucking acceptable!

From my anecdotal experiences, it's "manly" videos that seem to lead directly to right wing nonsense.

Watch something about how a trebuchet is the superior siege machine, and the next video recommended is like "how DEI DESTROYED Dragon Age Veilguard!"

Yup they have been showing up for me today. Fuck YouTube

I don't know if anyone of you still looks at memes on 9gag, it once felt like a relatively neutral place but the site slowly pushed right wing content in the last years and is now infested with alt-right and even blatantly racist "memes" and comment-sections. Fels to me like astroturfing on the site to push viewers and posters in some political direction. As an example: in the span during US-election all of a sudden the war on palestine became a recurring theme depicting the Biden admin and jews as "bad actors" and calling for Trump; after election it became a flood of content about how muslims are bad people and we shouldn't intervene in palestine...

I like Youtube (with adblocker) but shorts are pretty trashy. It's mostly shorts of women as naked as they can get on Youtube without breaking the rules who have purposefully given themselves super camel toes and set the thumbnail for the short to show their camel toe to get people's attention. And it's just a front to get you to their OnlyFans.

Do these companies put their fingers on the scale? Almost certainly

But it’s exactly what he said that’s what brought us here. They have not particularly given a shit about politics (aside from no taxes and let me do whatever I want all the time). However, the algorithms will consistently reward engagement. Engagement doesn’t care about “good” or “bad”, it just cares about eyes on it, clicks, comments. And who wins that? Controversial bullshit. Joe Rogan getting elon to smoke weed. Someone talking about trans people playing sports. Etc

This is a natural extension of human behavior. Human behavior occurs because of a function. I do x because of a function, function being achieving reinforcement. Attention, access to something, escaping, or automatic.

Attention maintained behaviors are tricky because people are shitty at removing attention and attention is a powerful reinforcer. You tell everyone involved “this person feeds off of your attention, ignore them”. Everyone agrees. The problematic person pulls their bullshit and then someone goes “stop it”. They call it negative reinforcement (this is not negative reinforcement. it’s probably positive reinforcement. It’s maybe positive punishment, arguably, because it’s questionable how aversive it is).

You get people to finally shut up and they still make eye contact, or non verbal gestures, or whatever. Attention is attention is attention. The problematic person continues to be reinforced and the behavior stays. You finally get everyone to truly ignore it and then someone new enters the mix who doesn’t get what’s going on.

This is the complexity behind all of this. This is the complexity behind “don’t feed the trolls”. You can teach every single person on Lemmy or reddit or whoever to simply block a malicious user but tomorrow a dozen or more new and naive people will register who will fuck it all up

The complexity behind the algorithms is similar. The algorithms aren’t people but they work in a similar way. If bad behavior is given attention the content is weighted and given more importance. The more we, as a society, can’t resist commenting, clicking, and sharing trump, rogan, peterson, transphobic, misogynist, racist, homophobic, etc content the more the algorithms will weight this as “meaningful”

This of course doesn’t mean these companies are without fault. This is where content moderation comes into play. This is where the many studies that found social media lead to higher irritability, more passive aggressive behavior and lower empathetization could potentially have led us to regulate these monsters to do something to protect their users against the negative effects of their products

If we survive and move forward in 100 years social media will likely be seen in the way we look at tobacco now. An absolutely dangerous thing that was absurd to allowed to exist in a completely unregulated state with 0 transparency as to its inner workings

The people where I live are -- I guess -- complete morons because whenever I try to check out Youtube without being logged in, I get the dumbest of dumb content.

But as another weird data point, I once suggested my son check out a Contrapoints video which I found interesting and about 1 year later she told me she wanted to get a surgery -- I don't exactly remember which kind as I obviously turned immediately into a catatonic far right zombie.