Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[LordBaal]

The thing is why? How? What could a irrelevant rando guy in bananistan would make a difference into all this? And no, this person do not speak, read or understand english at all and his internet access is pretty deficient to non-existent.

So, how he got all that? It was someone else? Why? Is not like we get to vote in the US elections. Fuck we arent even necessary in our own elections. You dont show up? That is not impediment for voting at all, and we dont have mail voting, but I digress.

What could the conspiracy maniacs has to do anything here?

[Reelya]

If you ask him for his sources, which might put you in for a huge info-dump, my guess is he watches Youtube videos or similar. Youtube's recommendation algorithm is pretty notorious for recommending ever-more extremely partisan information than whatever you just looked at. They might have improved it but on one video talking about it, they started by clicking a recommended gaming video, with a not logged in account so no prior history the algorithm could work with.

The first video was completely non-political pure let's play stuff, but within about 5 links of clicking recommended videos in the top 5 they were looking at straight up neo-Nazi adjacent videos about race war. The links were via stuff first about those annoying PC gamers, to gamergate, then Jordan Peterson*, then slightly more right wing, then to extremely right wing stuff that's basically militant doomsday fascism.

* With Jordan Peterson, I don't think he as a person is actually right wing, but his message, which is about building personal responsibility and building personal resilience, and how things like safe spaces and trigger warnings may not be the best way to deal with fragility (exposure therapy is in fact one of the most successful approaches to PTSD) are all true, but at the same time, they're also tools the right wing can manipulate as a gateway into right wing politics. The concept of personal responsibility is often used by the right as a "gateway drug" into their more hardcore beliefs, but that doesn't mean the concept of personal responsibility itself is bullshit.

[Naturegirl1999]

I don’t seem to have that problem. My recommendations tend to be unpolitical, like the MorpHex video in the Yech News and Happy threads, or the Portal Music and Films playlist in the Music thread, or the GrayStillPlays videos in the laughter thread

[MrRoboto75]

Yeah, it takes like two or three videos to pollute my YouTube reccs with mgtow propaganda for a week or two.

[Enemy post]

Whenever my recommendations start annoying me, I go into my history and remove whichever video or videos caused the problem.

[Reelya]

The recommendations heavily skew right-wing too. you're not likely to randomly be confronted with anti-capitalist videos for example. you don't click through videos about economics and within 3 clicks you're getting deep Marxist analysis going on. So consider than when you hear right-wingers claiming algorithms are biased against them. The reason for the skew is pretty simple: anger and stupidity is what makes a good headline, it's the same effect here. The more a video is divisive and vitriolic the more engagement it gets, and the algorithm rewards that over well thought out content.

Whenever my recommendations start annoying me, I go into my history and remove whichever video or videos caused the problem.

Something that also worked when I tried it was un-recommending whatever was popped up, and within a little while of this, similar content was never recommended again. I didn't know about history pruning at the time.

The issue is that complete non-engagement doesn't change what it's recommending, so merely ignoring the recommendations does not generate any new information, nothing changes, and they keep getting recommended, keep that in mind.

The absolutely dumbest way to deal with it is what a lot of people do, which is actually open the offending video, then click dislike. Like or dislike is considered engagement, thus that just increases the amount of videos they show you. The entire goal is to get you to open the video and sit through the opening advert, so if you keep doing this, clicking dislike doesn't change anything. So the smart this is avoid any temptation to open the video, add dislikes, or leave an angry comment about it being recommended. Click the triple-dots and select Not Interested or Don't Recommend Channel.

[Rolan7]

Yeah, it takes like two or three videos to pollute my YouTube reccs with mgtow propaganda for a week or two.

Same!  With mgtow or wannabe-nazi stuff or even stuff I actually agree with like extreme leftist takes.

There's a situation here that worries me.  All this stuff is there, but I never see it so I don't realize how popular it is.  Then I follow a link from my 13/50 friend and suddenly I get all these clickbaity alt-right recommendations when I'm just trying to listen to my favorite electro-swing.  For a few days sometimes.

What really bothers me is that this *dis-incentivizes me from following links to opposing political content*.  I'm punished for taking a moment to look at the other side (in this case, brown people wanna replace us, but other times flat world or Qanon), because it starts trying to push those ideas on me 24/7 for a while.

But being able to look at a few specific videos and talk about them is VITAL to productive modern discourse!  So it's really scary - not only that it pushes these videos, but that I'm learning not to EVER look them.

Fortunately incognito mode exists.  Still though.
Edit:  Also, taking the 2-4 clicks to tell Youtube you're not interested in a recommendation (optionally explaining why) does seem to help a lot.

Edit2: This hit me in particular when my somewhat mgtow brother linked me a video from someone I knew to be anti-trans, and I rejected it.  I said I didn't want to give the channel engagement, but in retrospect I didn't want my feed flooded.  The whole thing really strained the otherwise productive conversation my brother and I were having, feelings were justifiably hurt.

Edit3:

The absolutely dumbest way to deal with it is what a lot of people do, which is actually open the offending video, then click dislike. Like or dislike is considered engagement, thus that just increases the amount of videos they show you. The entire goal is to get you to open the video and sit through the opening advert, so if you keep doing this, clicking dislike doesn't change anything. So the smart this is avoid any temptation to open the video, add dislikes, or leave an angry comment about it being recommended. Click the triple-dots and select Not Interested or Don't Recommend Channel.

This, but also commenting is *serious* engagement!  No wonder youtube comments have so few intelligent dissenting comments:  Experienced users are aware that any comment, no matter how persuasive, mostly just signal-boosts the misinformation the video espouses.  This is what we call a perverse incentive, and bad design (if you're optimizing for meaningful discourse and not, obviously, profits)

[Reelya]

The latest set of theories I've heard about is that Justin Bieber was mind-controlled by MKUltra*, and that Bieber escaped the attempts by the elite Pizzagate cabal to recruit him, and that he left secret clues in his videos and you just have to decode those clues to get the truth. This type of speculation is popular in the Gen-Z Tiktok video version of QAnons, with other more younger gen celebs often involved as either heroes, villains or escaped victims.

* one girl spread this theory based on the idea that Lyme's disease is really a side-effect of MKUltra, and Bieber has said he got Lyme's Disease. The origin of the Lyme's Disease theory is some shady conspiracy website, where there's an article "Did MKUltra cause Lyme's Disease", and the entire theory is that the tick bite that causes Lyme's Disease looks like a red blob with concentric circle around it: a bullseye and asks the question "could these people really have been shot by a dart by the CIA?" completely ignoring the problem here that a bullseye is what you shoot something at, not cause by shooting something.

EDIT: stolen, but the best joke about the Epstein thing. Ghislaine Maxwell bought a mansion with all-cash through a third party trying to avoid being arrested. The joke: "darling someone bought the house!" "Oh, ... who?" "A Gentleman by the name of Peter Edophile, a Mr P. Edophile".

[Lord Shonus]

Whenever my recommendations start annoying me, I go into my history and remove whichever video or videos caused the problem.

What do you do when you have no idea what could possibly have done it? My Youtube recs were absolutely flooded with "I will read these Reddit selections to you via a shitty text-to-speech program" videos for months, and I don't have a clue why it started (it kept on because I kept accidentally clicking them as my dodgy wireless mouse didn't want to work).

[Reelya]

The best bet would be "don't recommend channel" first. There should really be a finite number of channels that do that stuff, so banning channels from your recs should block a lot of them.

After that, "Not interested" on specific videos.

[Enemy post]

What do you do when you have no idea what could possibly have done it? My Youtube recs were absolutely flooded with "I will read these Reddit selections to you via a shitty text-to-speech program" videos for months, and I don't have a clue why it started (it kept on because I kept accidentally clicking them as my dodgy wireless mouse didn't want to work).

I don’t think it’s ever come up, I’m pretty quick to resort to history pruning. Reelya’s ideas seem good.

[pisskop]

*shrug*  youtubes new 'dont recommend video' and 'dont reccomend channel' work well for me.

[hops]

You know, back in the old days, people actually go to channels they're interested in and then look at the uploads on there.

[Egan_BW]

I follow too many channels to do that manually. So I just have youtube's giant eldritch brain serve me things from the channels I follow and also anything vaguely related and when I find something new that I like I watch the other videos on that channel and then follow it, giving THE ALGORITHM yet more data about things I like for the daily entertainment stream.

[Naturegirl1999]

This begs the question, maybe I could run an experiment where I unsubscribe from all channels and have youtube base it’s recommendations solely on what I watch and like? Rather than subscription as well?