In the old days, when news was printed on paper, you would have one front page per day. I have no idea how many front pages there are per day now but probably dozens if not hundreds of variants, where only after some hours the biggest news is no longer the biggest.

With the barrage of news it is very easy to miss a lot, especially if you want to keep up with multiple domains and geographical regions.

I would love some hierarchical listing that shows the most important news items for different time periods (week, month, quarter, year), and filterable by domain (eg business, economy, politics, science, technology, ...).

One should be able to continuously drill down. Eg start with all news world wide. Then show only Europe, then only eg Sweden, then the economy of Sweden. Same thing with topics. With each entry linking multiple articles from quality sources, across the political spectrum.

I would happily pay 25+/month for such an aggregator with the appropriate quality. Which probably would mean hand-curated lists (opening up all sorts of of bias problems, but still).

Edit: I wonder if this could be crowd-sourced via a dedicated platform.

Does an alright job imo

Here's "what happened politically in France in the last month":

https://news.google.com/search?q=when:30d+french+politics

The query also seems to be limited to a month. When increasing the query param to 60 or 120 days, nothing changes.

To be sure, sections (such as a homepage) still do get significant number of visits. However, the numbers I speak of differ by an order of magnitude. Articles really are the homepages now, this isn't a blind generalization.

There's a bit of a Heisenberg effect involved here. We know not to spend too much time dressing a section front, but we know we'll be judged for it by you. So we put stuff up there that might be what you think we should think to be significant, or else you'll lose your trust in our judgment.

But by no means does seeing the placement tell you anything about effectiveness of placement.

Seems very arbitrary these days if there is any way to get a curated and prioritized selection at all. Seems more like a continuous stream. Keeping up to date is sisyfos work.

However, consider that social share counts can and often exceed measured view counts. As in, viral articles are not necessarily ever read by people who share them.

My filters also block out recommended videos on the righthand side of the video you are watching.

Here's what it looks like: https://imgur.com/a/uxpQE1J

If you'd like the same, enter this into your uBlock Filters. https://pastebin.com/PK1hdeEn

(Feedback and additions Welcome! This is something I hope to share with others to make YouTube a little less insufferable)

https://invidio.us/

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

You can host it yourself or use one of the many public installations: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/wiki/Invidious-Instances

[0]https://github.com/metiis/invidious-redirect

Cease and desist in 3 ... 2 ... 1

I use Stylus plugin to resize the videos and ublock filters to hide things like breaking news, views, "For You" search results etc.

Custom CSS in Stylus: https://pastebin.com/vcqVNfv4 Ublock Filters: https://pastebin.com/wsaTXG0H

Fruitarian, Prepper, Liberal, Conservative, Conspiracist, Climate Denier

The web design is really good! And it's funded by Mozilla which is cool

Preppers seem paranoid because mental health is a normative social function and they're on an edge of the spectrum.

?

Preparing for the end of civilization is perhaps a bit paranoid (I hope), or at least somewhat pointless :)

Side note: that said there is probably many reasonable DIY outdoor enthusiasts who gets categorized as preppers.

First, a lot of the videos are pretty old, multiple years old. That seems weird but idk maybe that's how YouTube works I guess.

There's not a lot of variety in the channels on each section. This is likely due to what subscriptions are setup.

Most of the videos are pretty tame. I've seen a lot worse casually browsing YT so I think being able to crank it up to 11 would be a fun feature of the site.

Observations based solely on what I saw,

Fruitarians seem to be about eating healthy and working out.

Preppers are about diy living off the grid and less about stockpiling guns.

Liberals watch a lot of comedy news type shows and music reviews. Most of their focus is what Republicans are doing

Conservatives have a show featuring Tito Ortiz who is famous for taking a lot of brain damage in the UFC which I thought was funny. More to their category tho, it featured a lot of videos doing "gotchas" on liberals.

Conspiracists watch a lot of videos by some guy named Shane and unsolved mysteries videos.

Climate Deniers I think this channel wasn't tuned right or maybe they really do watch a lot of videos put out by the oil industry (they aren't obfuscating this)

Also, my understanding is that at least some fruitarians allow for some amount of nuts/seeds and leafy greens, but I don't know if that's universally accepted.

As I point out in another comment[1], the origins of veganism are very much rooted in animal rights. I grew up vegetarian, but I would never refer to myself as a "dietary Hindu." There's a lot more to it than just the diet!

Typically, a vegan would refer to someone following a vegan diet as a "plant-based dieter" in order to distinguish between the groups.

FWIW, I became a vegetarian at age seven (22 years ago) and became vegan a little over three years ago, and never in my life have I heard or seen the terms "dietary vegan" or "moral vegetarian" which are both mentioned in the Wikipedia article.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992110

> A philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

The recent rise in interest in plant-based eating—while awesome—has unfortunately caused a lot of confusion about what veganism is. Many people who start following a vegan diet for health or environmental reasons* eventually become vegan, but this isn't always the case.

* FWIW, my interest was sparked by environmental concerns.

Hmm..mostly I agree with what you say in your 3 comments, (longtime vegan here, for ethical reasons) but this seems going too far. This is just a guess, which my evidence suggests is not correct, and it seems very odd presenting it as a certain fact. If someone has a vegan diet, sure I would call them vegan. What else?! (Well, I don't think I've come across someone who is vegan for non-ethical reasons, like their own health - vegetarian, yes, but not vegan.) I do avoid animal products, but I don't think of that as part of, or the same thing as, being vegan.

Words don't always mean what they used to, or what some dictionary or society says. Meanings evolve and can't (mostly) be controlled. It seems the word, like many others, now has multiple meanings, and calling the use of other meanings than the one you prefer "confusion about what veganism is" seems..a political move, trying to attract/convert people to your cause[0], and not how it seems to you, a grammatical move to try to keep the Unchanging True Meaning untainted. I guess what you say makes sense if you only call people "vegan" when they use the word the same as you. Then, by definition, it's a definition only used by non-vegans. But the sentence I quoted appears to make much stronger claims, and it seems false to me. Well, I know it's false, as I'm a vegan in your sense, but use the word to mean someone with a vegan diet.

[0] i.e. the cause of using the word the same way you do.

> No true Scotsman, or appeal to purity, is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect a universal generalization from counterexamples by changing the definition in an ad hoc fashion to exclude the counterexample.[1][2] Rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule: "no true Scotsman would do such a thing"; i.e., those who perform that action are not part of our group and thus criticism of that action is not criticism of the group.

I'm not really familiar w/ that subculture, so I'm legitimately curious.

Look, I'm sure there are plenty of people who get sucked into bubbles of YouTube nonsense, and sadly these recommendations may accurately represent the recommendations for typical users. But just deciding that someone is a "liberal" or a "conspiracy theorist" does not in fact mean that you can assume anything about what they are seeing on YouTube, which is what the title seems to claim. Please keep that in mind.

I would have thought anyone on this site could discern that but you're self-proclaimed climate denier so I guess you did your best :)

A person, or group of people, set up this site and built YouTube profiles on what they think people in these categories are like. Then they use those profiles to show "what these people see". The problem is few actual, real individuals match these caricatures. The people that built this site aren't "them", except within a limited one of the presented profiles or two. My only hope is that nobody tries to build an argument around the outcomes of this exercise.

I think if anything is to be learned, it's the biases and preconceptions of the people that built the site moreso than anything about how YouTube builds recommendations... re-enforcing or otherwise (and I'm no fan of YouTube recommendations, either).

Esse quam videri

"Each of these TheirTube personas is informed by interviews with real YouTube users who experienced similar recommendation bubbles"

"These accounts subscribe to the channels that the interviewees followed, and watches videos from these channels to reproduce a similar viewing history and a recommendation bubble"

Unfortunately you'll need to already know a number of entry searches to "seed" the movement. After that you can try to just move around by surfing from the seeds.

I think it's easier if your target bubble uses a different script, or at least a different language.

It's funny that once I became a software developer (frontend specifically), things like dark patterns and other UI features that try to keep users on the app is very interesting to me. I will never put something like that in my own code but it's still interesting to pick up dark patterns out of every day apps we use (Instagrams "slot machine of dopamine" is one that comes to mind)

I've been experiencing this for years and it's worse to a critical point with the notion of recentness gone.

This isn't an either/or situation.

I get trying to be private and disclosing as little information to Google as possible. However, I've found YouTube unearths interesting content pretty well if you create an account and let it track your preferences a little bit. Especially don't turn off the viewing history, otherwise you'll get the same recommendations over and over and YouTube is kind of useless.

The fix is to remove all liked videos, problem, I had over 15,000 liked videos over decades(s?) of use. I finally found a howto, a script to run in chrome to remove all my likes.

Also I have an addon that lets me put channels into categories, addon called PocketTube. It lets me see unfiltered access to my channel choices, and youtube hates its direct access and if I open a video in a new tab, it prompts me for a captcha. I've ended up watching youtube in a VM with a VPN so I can change locations due to youtube's heavy handed behavior. I also will just copy the URL and watch on my desktop.

Really, youtube content is vast and un-navigable, they filter results, show in the wrong default order, wont remember settings of order, removed language choice filter.

The 80/20 rule, or top 10%, Pareto principle, whatever you want to call the cream on the top problem. The problem is small popular percentage of content. Youtube is pushing popular videos, and you miss out on all the lower popular videos, hiding 80% of the content, many new creators go unnoticed and unviewed.

There is a demand for a front end portal, that runs unfiltered but allows search controls, skip popular, view ascending order of all content, view by category only, be able to exclude content, exact search phrase allow, no shadow banned or hidden content rules, no white list rules (by default).

I cant be the only one tired of facebook/google/twitter showing me what they think I want, i didnt ask them to be my parser of content, just because I use their service, as its the only game in town, I still dont want spoon fed content.

Same problem with podcasts, a search function vs a browse directory. There are so many podcasts, and most places give you the top 10 podcasts per search.

I think a unfiltered directory of content providers (any platform), tired with advertising, crowd funding, etc would re-open the internet of new content, and take back the controlling behavior of mega corps.

Liberal is well defined in virtually all models of classification used in political science and political philosophy, which a project such as this should probably defer to.

Also, the reductive "then we should toss out the word 'logic' then!" kinda comes off as a tantrum, to me. I don't really get the point. Why not focus and possibly disagree with the suggestion that nobody agrees on what "a liberal" means?

If you try to switch the argument to your analogy, then you're going to spend more time defending and explaining your (nonsensical) analogy than you would just explaining where you disagree. For example, you'd have to start explaining why you think people disagree about the word "logic", something I've never encountered.

Not a very effective strategy.

>I don't really get the point.

The point is that it doesn't matter if people in general don't know that the word means, which is why I didn't refer to "people" but classification systems designed by and for people trying to understand political ideologies and orientations. The term "liberal" has definite specific meanings that correspond relatively narrowly.

> something I've never encountered.

Then you've never asked regular people what logic is or haven't noticed that their answers differ widely and hardly correspond to what philosophers and mathematicians mean. Nevertheless, the laity's ignorance does not dilute the meaning of the term.

Is there a correlation between YT's recommendation algorithm clearly seems to think there is as there are videos that I would describe as more tangentially political than topical on both the Climate Denier and Conspiracist pages.

Great website with excellent design that provides a thoughtful exploration of the youtube's online "echo chambers".

That's why I just use it for music.

This strikes me more as actual "red pilling."

The current dominant cultural/political/academic stance would suggest that all people are inherently racist and that living in the US is participating in a racist society.

The opposite of a "far-right racist" is seen constantly online and in real life as the "anti-racist" or "racial equity advocate" who, rather than supporting non-racist policies (eg, blind auditions for an orchestra where only the sound of playing is heard) they support actively "anti-racist" policies (eg, specifically including race as a consideration for who to include in an orchestra, to achieve a racially diverse outcome from auditions).

Of course, just drawing these lines is itself politically challenging. The far-left anti-racist is likely to believe that anyone saying they're not a racist is just in denial or lying. The non-racist might see contemporary policies to treat people differently on the basis of race as itself racist rather than anti-racist.

What's that person supposed to do put up a page on their website about not smelling like a demon?

To a recommender model, the clusters for “left-wing” and “right-wing” content aren’t on opposite ends of the feature cloud; they’re likely very close neighbours.

A recommender algorithm would have to be a lot smarter to realize that some particular neighbouring cluster has an adversarial (i.e. “watching X makes you less likely to watch Y, without that just meaning that X and Y are redundant”) relationship with the one it’s looking at.

What someone doesn't want to watch is far too broad, from one of the videos on the liberal profile here, you'd be as likely to be "unrecommended" a right-winger's vlog as the Baby Shark song, unless they're keeping track of far more metrics than I think would be practical even at Google scale.

When logged in, Youtube.com shows you a mix of new videos from creators you watch and related/recommended videos in the effort to provide you something you will probably want to watch. So I go there when I'm in the mood to watch something, perhaps while eating dinner.

And it works. If you want to see how ineffective it would be just looking at a list of popular videos, view the horror that is the trending tab.

https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending

The title is "ThereTube" -- today I was that guy...