I don't see Jordan Peterson or any of those right-wing videos in my suggestions at all.
I just went to my front page, and everything there is stuff I'm interested in. There's the latest clip from a Hell's Kitchen episode, a Gamers Nexus video, an aviation incident with ATC recordings, a video from Fully Ramblomatic (game reviewer), a video on how to to use a cable comb and why you'd want to, a LockPickingLawyer video, videos related to MS Flight Simulator, mountain biking, Factorio, Technology Connections, Adam Savage's Tested...
There is literally not a single suggested video that I wouldn't be interested in in the first 3 pages of my YouTube front page.
So when people complain that YouTube is constantly suggesting right-wing content, brainrot, and MrBeast, I don't know what the hell they're talking about.
Heck, I watch Legal Eagle, which gets pretty political, and yet I don't get basically any political content suggestions.
Are you guys not logged in or something? Constantly browsing from incognito windows?
I let YouTube remember my history indefinitely. I've never been recommended MrBeast (and only recently-ish heard of him, the last year or so). Maybe years ago, I watched some clips of Joe Rogan if they popped up, but I've never been a regular listener.
My earlier comment shouldn't have been so down on YouTube - overall, my recommendations are good. But it does concern me that the algorithm consistently tries to push Peterson on me.
I do watch a lot of sports commentary and breakdowns, maybe that leads down the path to Peterson?
Not everybody telegraphs how to get into their wallet as well as you do!
"they" in that sentence was Jordan Peterson.
> the article you're thinking of
There's plenty of articles to find.
I can't tell if it's just placed in articles to get people to believe it or if it's true. How big is the alt-right? Is 100 people on the alt-right a substantial alt-right following? How big is that following compared to his overall following size? Is this just the same logic as "You think snow is white? Did you know Adolf Hitler thought snow was white?"?
As a meta-point, I understand that uninquiring minds don't want to know, and you can get a long way by defining yourself by people you don't like. But I genuinely do want to know, or at least ask the question, and if Bernie Sanders were constantly tarred with "Has a substantial following in the KKK community" I'd be asking the same thing: how many people is that, and how many is it of the total people who like him?
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/...
This is something that infuriates me about youtube, to the extent that I wonder if it's deliberate. Those guys feel like the propaganda the platform wants to sell me, whereas on the Chinese platforms there isn't the sense of HERE IS THE TWO MINUTE HATE PROPAGANDA VIDEO CITIZEN you sometimes get on other platforms.
Edit: As a weak comparison I think about Prime Streaming vs YouTube or Hulu. Ignoring that ads suck. Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it. YouTube throws whatever highest paying garbage at you as much as possible. I tried Hulu once with ads, painful, every like 7mins you are getting an ad and often the same ad over and over.
> Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it.
Sure, I just stopped using prime when they introduced ads. It's also the number one complaint about the service and it regularly shows up any time the service is mentioned. I also can't remember a single ad played that was actually relevant to me.
Curiously, I hear this less about Hulu despite them being equivalently bad in my experience. Perhaps hulu has better content.
I feel like Hulu established early enough that they were partially (or fully) ad-supported. I watched a show for free on Hulu with ads many years before I ever would have considered paying for a streaming service at all. Prime, on the other hand, is something people already pay for (usually for reasons other than just streaming, but that also reinforces that they're paying), so the ads probably come off as worse because of that, even though it's kind of backwards in some ways.
Not sure how they managed to screw that up, but screw it they did, and nowadays the sidebar, or even the plain search, has become unusable.