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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   21981 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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So because YouTube is an essential subscription on the internet if you want to avoid being bombarded by nonstop ads, I use YouTube Music as my primary streaming app to avoid paying for another service. I’ve been beta testing their YouTube Labs ‘AI Hosts’ feature. I’ve been noticing a distinct lean towards the kinds of things.

It is comfortable summarizing a musician or a song. It will go on about an artist’s queer journey or struggles with mental health or how a song is meant to represent the Iraq War. It will also go into a Latino accent when playing songs or artists whose names sound like they’re from Central America, though the host is a milquetoast man.

I’ve been trying an experiment where I play traditional conservative, usually country, songs to see what it says about them. I’ve been trying old Johnny Cash, that Rich Men North of Richmond song, and old Dixie songs. Haven’t been able to get the host to comment on any of these. I was just thinking about how this should work if released out of beta.

It’s pretty hard to provoke the host to talk about certain songs. Sometimes it will describe the last track or the upcoming track - or the song / artist from either in general. Not easy to predict when it will jump in between songs.

I could be wrong, but it seems odd to let an AI talk about music with left leaning undertones but (possibly..) not do the same for right wing music because it’s not as ‘safe’. But then again, there is some left leaning extremist music à la ‘Punch a Nazi’ - should YouTube not allow their host to talk about real underground punk band origins or Dixie songs?

Seems contentious and risky to let your AI potentially talk about music or musicians with extremist undertones. But what about like Kanye? What should it say about his antisemitism? Should his name just blacklisted from mention by an AI host?

Music is the one place where there is little to no appetite for outright censorship - it is very bad PR to gatekeep music, in most cases. In Kanye’s case, you might get removed from official playlists, but they’re not going to prevent people from listening to your music.

Adblock and it's mobile equivalents like AdGuard/NewPipe mean you never need to subscribe to YouTube etc.

NewPipe breaks often. I use it but it's buggy and needs updates often to get past the latest attempt by alphabet to stop it.

Ublock origin and the like don't get past the often pretty long "loading" period when the ad would have been playing.

It's often enough that when it happens, you're not surprised, but not so often that paying for a subscription makes any sort of sense.

And on the off chance it was taking them a while to update the alternative players, I never experienced the issues ublock / Brave's builtin blocker.

I do most of my YTing on my pc though, so a phone app is always of partial use to me.

So do I:

I mostly stick with FreeTube.

One minor issue that you may or may not have any idea about:

I've set the Firefox addon LibRedirect to open youtube links in freetube. When it does so, a new freetube window is not created, it'll 'overwrite' the current first/main window, regardless of any video already playing there. Any way to remedy that?

Sorry, clicking youtube link is such a rare scenario for me that I'm completely satisfied copy-pasting them like a caveman.

FreeTube seems great. Thanks!

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