Re:On YouTube’s recommendation system
by dredmorbius on Friday September 17, 2021 @05:39PM
(#28571203)
Kara Swisher of The New York Times (previously ReCode) has been absolutely biting in her criticisms of Google generally, Youtube specifically, and other current tech monopolies.
Directly to Susan Wojcicki's face in a live public interview: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zKrQzJgFWdw
(Starting about 1:50 into the interview.)
Also numerous times in her column and podcast (I can chase those down if requested, though they should be prominent).
See "Algorithms Won’t Fix What’s Wrong With YouTube" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/opinion/youtube-algorithm... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20184282)
I came to a similar conundrum and concluded that a split across two Google accounts was necessary to keep youtube subscriptions and recommendations in check. Initially, I wanted to separate betwween personal and work but it has now more or less turned into a generic filter between intelligent and casual topics. Incidentally, political content along with it's secondary and tertiary discourse gets the same treatment with little to no exceptions.
I was recommended a video by some guy who ate $14000 worth of Wagyu steaks super fast...
Guess it had good acting, surely no one in their right mind is that excited to eat 5 kilos of meat with water in 5 minutes or whatever...
Just kinda felt disgusting, why does this have a million views? This guy's channel was all about eating shit fast... Wat
There seems to exist a downward spiral where content that is prioritized to be attention grabbing over all else gets the most clicks and then drives more content to focus on this. The quality of the content itself seems to be increasingly inconsequential and has fallen off a cliff in the face of click spam.
Anecdotal evidence 1: I used to watch youtube videos for investment ideas and now all of these streamers pump out the same low quality, not very researched content with their face plastered on top with a shocked look on their mug.
Anecdotal evidence 2: My son was shown youtube by one of our nannies (despite my rules on no youtube) and has since become semi-addicted to the most brain dead content of toys being made into knock offs of the reasonable shows he used to watch or some adult man child being a weird clown in public.
Idiocracy will be due to memes as much as genes.