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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34390 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Is YouTube's business model imploding in slow motion?

They've been pushing more inane bullshit in recommended with zero prompting, and the algorithm just seems totally broken from too many manual overrides at this point. I don't see video ads thanks to Vanced, but the image ads are getting increasingly schizo or just plain weird. Who is actually paying for them any more?

Their personalization obviously isn't working too well either, given all my ads for menopause meds and Israeli flag lapel pins. Do they think I'm a republican congressman with a Bulwark subscription or something?

I'll say their search system is impressively bad lately. Every search gives you maybe three results for what you're actually searching before recommending you things you've already seen that are completely unrelated. The only explanation I can think of comes from my experience in a completely different field. My boss will often have me make adjustments to our site or ad network that, without getting too into it, essentially trade a little bit of the system's health or user experience for a short-term bump in impressions/clicks.

With the search problem I described, it's possible that a PM had a bonus or other incentive to increase the clickthroughs on the "recommended" tab. Not being able to make this increase through genuine growth, they tell the engineers to cannibalize the search feature to also promote recommended videos to the user. The engineers ask "are you sure about this?" before just doing their job. And then another part of the user experience is shortsightedly consumed.

Any other ideas/explanations as to why this happens?

I dunno, but YouTube is convinced I am a huge Jordan Peterson and Fox News fan. I have yet to click on a Fox News link and only occasionally watch a Jordan Peterson video.

You really need to click the ... in the bottom right of the video thumbnail and select "not interested", or "dont' recommend channel", I find that this fixes the annoying increase in weird recommendations after I watch a single video outside what I usually watch.

I've been doing that, and all it seems to do now is cause all your recommendations to be generic kiddie phone-zombie shit like in the first pic.

It feels like there's a watershed threshold, where the system realizes that there's a big split between blue and red tribe videos/creates and their fans. The system defaults to blue but if you manage to convince it you swing the other way, it will push red stuff hard and stop showing you blue stuff. I'm sure there this is not the only axis though.

I had almost no political videos in my home page. I watched one redneck compilation video, and all of sudden I got tons of Fox News, Daily Wire, etc. videos.

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