I find that YT actually badly overfits my history; it’s super predictable and narrow.
Sure it’s preferable to falling off the bandwagon into conspiracy, but it doesn’t really “explore” a lot for me
If you browse YouTube with cookies disabled or within a cookie fence, you can see that such manipulation is the default behavior. For a significant percentage of videos, the very first set of suggestions is manipulative. For the others, perhaps the first set of suggestions is not problematic but the suggestions for those videos are where the manipulation starts.
It's nice that you found a way out of it but I'm guessing that's rare.
I personally found that I needed to make an account to get away from the horrendous default recommendations. And allow it to use some data and not clear my cookies etc.
One has to log in to benefit from this, though.
However, most YT advertisements that get served to me are scams the last few months.
How can the public form an opinion if the information they get about it is skewed by the affected companies?
What if their politicians get “donations” from the companies that need regulation, to influence them into not doing so?
Catch-22
When Trump was in power, you had the right wanting to regulate Reddit/Twitter, and the left wanting to regulate Facebook.
I don't think the companies are successfully skewing people in their favor of not being regulated.
Big tech are a necessary evil for most people. Philip Morris' customers don't talk about it being a great company, they just need its product.
People blame big tech a lot though, but what if they did give people visibility and control of their algorithms in terms of what content they want...and if we had more competition...would there be less extremism, or would people just up their own dosage?
In the end it will come down to personal responsibility and education.
Pretty sure you could even call it distortion of competition. I doubt legislation can improve the net much but there is an economic significance for less known artists.
This is unfortunately not the same as a downvote, which is effectively saying "show me more of this, I want to hate its siblings too"
And people's ability to self-restrain varies with mood. They are ready to catch you when your mood dips, or you are in an extremely boring situation.
You have to install a browser extension to block politics from your suggested videos.
Twitter is great because they have “blocked words”. I maxed out my 200 words though and have to constantly swap them.
It’s undoubtedly true that they make huge money from hate and divisiveness.
This is not whistleblowing though. They are not breaking laws. And everyone already knows this.
People can choose if they want to work there or not. Just like at a cigarette company or fast food company or pharma company.
If things should be changed, the public should vote to regulate.
But they ain’t doing that. So it’s up to parents to educate their kids about personal responsibility and addiction.