‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)

Re:‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked ... by lopmotr on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:44PM (#25520652)

You know what's worse than aspirations to become a celebrity? No aspirations at all. I know people like that. They just seem to see the future as a regular life with nothing particularly to do in it except exist and perform normal regular practical activities to sustain it. I can't imagine how dull it must be, but they seem to cope, and get all their excitement from immediate events. I hope you can be happy that your relatives at least have ambition, even if it's not quite accurately targeted yet. Not everyone is that fortunate.

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Re:‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked ... by wpietri on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @03:49PM (#25522049)

Just to be clear, I know of no relatives who want to be influencers. It's only a hypothetical problem for me.

I also have never met people with "no aspirations at all" and am not sure they exist. Although you seem concerned about diminishing people's ambitions, you also seem to denigrate people who want to have "a regular life", as if there's something wrong with people who want to settle down and raise kids and live a good life. That's never been my path, but I respect it a lot.

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Re:‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked ... by laurent92 on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @03:14PM (#25521659)

I don’t know, I have quite a lot of respect for the fathers around me. I’d rank climbing Mount Lenin, being a CEO or hitchiking from Paris to Sydney an order of magnitude easier than being a father ;)

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