Asklemmy

44151 readers

1436 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

485

Why is youtube recommending conservative "talking points" to me? (lemmy.fmhy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

175 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi, I am a guy in early thirties with a wife and two kids and whenever I go on youtube it always suggests conservative things like guys dunking on women, ben shapiro reacting to some bullshit, joe rogan, all the works. I almost never allow it to go to that type of video and when I do it is either by accident or by curiosity. My interest are gaming, standup comedy, memes, react videos, metalurgy, machining, blacksmithing, with occasional songs and videos about funny bullshit and I am not from america and I consider myself pretty liberal if I had to put it into terms used in america. But european liberal, so by american standards a socialist. Why does it recommend this shit to me, is this some kind of vector for radicalization of guys in my category? Do you have similar experience?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] yukichigai 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's also kinda dodgy what YouTube considers "viewing" a video. 3 seconds of autoplay? You viewed it. Misclick an ad trying to skip? Viewed it. AndroidTV previewed the video when you left it highlighted for too long? You guessed it, viewed.

Fortunately figuring out what it considers you to have viewed is pretty straightforward: if it's in your watch history it considers it viewed. You can also go through that and manually purge things.

Of course there's still the question of why YouTube will so consistently recommend videos that get people started down this downhill slide of absolute dogshit atrocious content.

[–] kplaceholder 2 points 1 year ago

If you don't disable the feature where it plays the videos directly in the thumbnail by hovering over it, it also counts as viewed if you let the thumbnail play for like 3 seconds. I hate it.