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Comment by _uhtu | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed an interesting thing in terms of "youtube rabbit holes" towards extreme content. I'm what American society would generally consider "liberal", and I watch a lot of videos about fixing climate change, medicare for all, etc. Interestingly, I don't usually get "liberal" recommendations on my home page.

However, if I watch a video from a conservative angle, even just one or two videos, I almost immediately get extreme right wing content in my recommendations. Stuff like PragerU, ReasonTV, NRATV, etc. Even watching videos that I wouldn't consider right wing, just critical of certain left wing sects, like h3h3 for example, tend to almost immediately lead me into videos like "DUMB FEMINISTS GET OWNED - COMPILATION".

It's strange the rabbit holes almost always take me deep into right wing territory, but never really into left wing territory.

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You are suffering "annoyance bias". You remember more the few videos that are annoying and you obviously don't want to see again, than the good recommendations (that are hopefully more usual).

For example I clicked a few months ago in a link in HN to a video of a moron that claims that can cure type I diabetes with a diet that avoid certain kind of food [1]. Now I get from time to time recommendations to see the videos of this moron and it's totally annoying, because it's clearly wrong.

I also get recommendations for music I don't like, food channels I don't like, news channel that I don't like, channels that are somewhat related to what I like but I don't like, ... Perhaps some new video appears in the recommendations for a few days. Anyway, they are not annoying enough to be remembered.

[1] It's not sugar, or HFCS or other food additive that is somewhat related to diabetes, or can cause type II diabetes. It just doesn't make sense.

My theory is that we're seeing the "exploration" part of exploration vs. exploitation in action [1]. I use Youtube almost exclusively for music videos and tech lectures. One day I watched this music video created by somebody who has uploaded a lot of Jordan Peterson fan content:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK72U02TUsI

I was getting JP and right-leaning politics recommended to me for a month afterward, even though I never use Youtube to watch JP or political content of any kind. But maybe I was getting that content recommended because I had no prior indications of interest in that conceptual space. The recommender could be exploring previously untouched territory in hopes of finding something with high exploitation value.

A value-blind system trying to maximize engagement is going to find that some niche content performs well on some users, and will try to explore that space for other users to see if it has high exploitation value for them too. So start out watching videos about health and it's natural -- from a data perspective -- to surface some conceptually adjacent videos that include anti-vaccination conspiracies. If you watch one or two of those -- even without saving or liking -- then the exploration may expand into conceptually adjacent videos about other Things "They" Don't Want You To Know, and so on.

The Youtube recommender works pretty well for discovering new music, in my experience. The problem is that the process that gradually takes you from a Top 40 hit to a less popular musician to somebody who recorded their first song last month isn't always benign when "music" is replaced by "health" or "world news."

[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/reinforcement-learning-demyst...

what about PragerU or the NRA is "extreme" right wing? Only as "extreme" as MSNBC is left...

If you think PragerU or ReasonTV are "extreme right wing" content, respectfully I think you might be lacking perspective. I would describe PragerU as mainstream within the conservative sphere. Their presentation is almost always high-quality in terms of production, respectful in its delivery, and even-keeled. You might disagree with the content (or their values), or find factual errors, but it is easy to find flaws with a wide range of content producers on the left as well. ReasonTV is even closer to center, and is near-right libertarian, and definitely not extreme right.

As for your experience with recommendations - I am not sure why you would not see recommendations similar to the videos you like. I see videos from multiple ideologies regularly and get content recommended from all of them. I haven't had my feed dominated by one side. What I think is happening is that people _notice_ videos that incense them, and incorrectly perceive it as being dominant when it truly isn't.

> high-quality in terms of production, respectful in its delivery, and even-keeled

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM7BgrddY18

"Why you should love fossil fuels", "It is easy for feminists to forget that men gave women the right to vote, gave up their monopoly on power, and invented birth control." -- even-keeled?

> it is easy to find flaws with a wide range of content producers on the left as well.

More importantly irrevelant, since the criticism isn't that imperfect right wing videos are presented instead of perfect left wing ones.

> I haven't had my feed dominated by one side.

So? It's perfectly possible for you to be in a different testing bucket. Don't assume what you see is what everybody sees, and that they are just interpreting it differently than you do. I might as well say "nah, you only think you see videos from multiple ideologies".

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