In the past few days, it’s recommended:

  • Some guy saying vegan diets don’t work (news to me, considering I’ve been on one for years)
  • A different guy complaining about PETA’s new game
  • A woman saying women in modern games are too ugly
  • The same woman saying women don’t really want to be in charge of anything
  • Some bullshit from ShoeOnHead
  • Paul Joseph Watson

Not sure where this all came from. I’d actually enjoyed a very long, pleasant streak where it wasn’t recommending me any of this trash. Now they’re coming out of the woodwork. Every time I see one of these videos I click the “don’t recommend this” button, but there are always more.

  • Groggio [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    37·
    11 months ago

    Every fucking thing i search for and watch on youtube invariably leads to NAZI CONTENT in the sidebar. The ‘right-wing’ content is the majority of youtube’s content but it also keeps pushing explicitly NAZI CONTENT in my fucking face. No matter what subject I’m trying to search.

    • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      15·
      11 months ago

      Yeah that’s my issue, the recommended feed rarely throws right wing garbage at me, but if I search for l, say, something trans related? Out comes the PraegerU/Ben Shapiro/Epoch Times.

      • frostycakes [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        8·
        11 months ago

        And yet for some reason it’s been giving me (a cis man) lots of (thankfully good) trans content, while my trans roommate keeps getting the right wing nonsense you do. idfgi why the algo can’t give her the good (or even just the okay) shit, since it’s clearly capable of serving it up to me.

        Maybe I just need to do a day’s watching on her account to see if it helps fix her recommends.

        • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          4·
          11 months ago

          Tangential, but back on reddit-logo the recommendation algorithm would always be “hey, you enjoy posting on the Enough Libertarian Spam subreddit, we think you’d like these libertarian and anarcho-capitalist subreddits!” The algorithms are good at telling that someone is interested in a subject but not so good at distinguishing positive vs negative interest and content about the subject.

          Plus, there’s the $$$ involved. Shapiro comes up near the top for trans-related searches because he pays to have it rank higher.

  • Vingst [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    28·
    11 months ago

    lol, i got recommended an hour long video by a nerd who got mad at so-called ‘tankie’ memes about the soviet space program

    “part of the reason I’m making this video is because of tankies. what are tankies you may ask? well …”

  • save_vs_death [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    24·
    11 months ago

    Yeah, honestly the “don’t recommend this” button barely does anything anymore, I’ve resorted to straight up blocking channels. The algo seems to fixate on stupid shit and not let go of it. As a personal anecdote, at some point it kept recommending me stuff related to a specific anime, I never watched videos about that anime, I won’t watch anime, so on, after blocking those channels on sight it settled down.

  • PointAndClique [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    11 months ago

    My block list is longer than my subscription list, and if I watch three or so videos outside of my usual viewing (like, if a friend sends a few popular meme vids that I watch while logged in) it’ll start steering strongly towards xenophobia and homophobia specifically.

    It’s really shit. I basically check my home page to see who has updated, then pull up those videos on NewPipe.

    I wonder if there’s been any substantial shift towards mirror sites with the ad block blocker enforcement, which has reinforced the algorithm towards the lowest common denominator. I don’t know how the internet works but if I were speculating to just keep the ball up in the air, that’s what I’d put forward.

  • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    11 months ago

    YT is being astroturfed to hell. A lot of leftists have had their income yanked. Billionaires and Wall Street fascists are funding reich wing media and paying YT cubic ass tons of money to boost their shit. No doubt there are comment farms with scripts / AI. That’s what we noticed with Reddit when I was a mod. It is overwhelming. You have a shit ton of fascist loving bot farms in India, Israel, Ukraine, US.

    I hope someone can do an analysis on it. They aren’t very inventive. They just think repeating the same shit very angerly will Orwell things for them.

    Then companies bitch no one loves them and how young generation ruins their grift because they see through it.

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    21·
    11 months ago

    I’ve been getting the same thing recently. I think maybe the Daily Wire ended up with a windfall of cash or something. They made an awful transphobic movie and have been pushing it everywhere, and maybe that’s filtering down to little right-wing minions or something

  • jol@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    17·
    11 months ago

    I just wish I could tell YouTube exactly what I want to watch. It makes no sense. We both want the same things out of YouTube, for me to be as engaged as possible, for as long as possible, as often as possible. Then why keep showing me irrelevant shit, the worst trash from tiktok, videos I already watched, when they know exactly what kind of videos I spend hours watching??? If they would actually get their shit together, I wouldn’t even mind paying for their service, but it’s utter crap!

  • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    16·
    11 months ago

    I aggressively mark videos as “not interested”. algorithm won’t update for a day or so but it will eventually respect it. terminate anything that even vaguely smells like right-wing bullshit on sight and it will stop showing it to you. though it will occasionally slip one in just to check if you still feel that way lol. I can tell there’s a new wave of cryptofash crap because I suddenly get a video out of nowhere.

  • GhostSpider [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    16·
    11 months ago

    I always had to walk through a minefield of right wing crap on YouTube, but I recently started watching some videos on gender transition and YouTube almost immediately started showing me anti trans crap and videos about “detransitioners” and whatnot. My god, it’s so fucking infuriating.

    Also, I don’t know if that’s possible for video recommendations, but for ads, you can click on de three dots and see why they were recommended to me, and it’s always shit like “your age and AGAB and what other people where you live are interested at”… I know Google is paid to just show ads based on those kinds of flags to the people that have them in their account, but my brother in christ, I couldn’t give less of a crap to what other people of my age and AGAB are interested in where I live.

    • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      They aren’t honest in those. The “advertiser” specifically chooses certain tags - even specific channels to target. They won’t be shown as Google can hide behind their proprietary BS. It’s all smoke and mirrors to pacify people and they can say they showed you the most benign, generic reasons and call “transparency”.

      • GhostSpider [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        11 months ago

        Oh, I know that Facebook also flag their users with their political alignment and let advertisers target that. I would not be surprised if Google does that too.

    • Binette [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      11 months ago

      This is exactly how I got recommended my first alt-right pipeline video. At school we got a conference about trans people, so I looked it up on google and youtube.

      Then I found out that there were other genders and I was really happy because agender was what always how I felt about my gender

      Next video that is recommended to me is some asshole that kept repeating stuff like: “there is only 2 genders and you can’t change it cause that’s how it’s always been”.

      I still believed that one could change their gender, but I was really upset about being “lied to” about the other genders.

      Edit: I forgot to specify this was like 6 years ago, so youtube didn’t change at all from back then.

  • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    15·
    11 months ago

    I don’t know how to explain to the algorithm that I don’t want anything with that sigma male theme song with the slow bass music before it goes into that chanting once the female in the video has been owned.

  • tactical_trans_karen [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    9·
    11 months ago

    Huh… My feed is actually pretty good. I get really aggressive with the “don’t recommend channel” option. 🤷‍♀️ It tried to purge Hasan from my feed for a while though, couldn’t find shit even though there’s multiple channels putting out several videos a day. It’s back to normal though. Search function is still shit as always.

    • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      11 months ago

      yeah it periodically suppresses leftist creators, especially if you’ve recently watched a few videos in a row from more lib channels. I just search and watch a few videos from specific leftist channels and it comes back.

    • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7·
      11 months ago

      A lot of times they don’t even allow me to do that. Or it’s “sponsored” much like the plethora of “Stick your dick in Hydrogen Peroxie or Isopropyl Alcohol to get hard instantly” that I’ve reported as false and dangerous medical info. It’s a whole whack a mole / shell game with these assholes. They’ll just file another form. Switch their name. Find a foreign company ad mill to hide behind. So exhausting.