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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Youtube's recommendation algorithm means that the people who see these videos are already predisposed to believe what is in them. That overrides the usefulness of the Like and Dislike buttons.

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Also, even if people outside of those bubbles see and dislike those videos, the Dislike button is more likely to feed and reinforce their primary audience's persecution complex than to cause them to reconsider.

I am reminded of the videos we have probably all seen of Flat Earthers doing experiments that are supposed to show whether the Earth is curved, the experiment does show a curve, and then they start to question why their experiment is failing rather than question their beliefs. Beliefs are a pretty strong thing.

It is much easier to stop harmful ideas from spreading rather than trying to argue down these harmful ideas once they have already taken a foothold in someone's mind.

I know at lest 2 flat earthers who were given anti-psychotic medication and stopped being flat earthers.

> It is much easier to stop harmful ideas from spreading rather than trying to argue down these harmful ideas once they have already taken a foothold in someone's mind.

It’s fucking terrifying that anyone holds this view, considering the implications. That’s CCP logic. Pro-censorship, “for their own good”?

Have we lost our fucking minds?

Do you think Germany lost their fucking minds when they outlawed Holocaust denialism?

You have full access to facts here. Nothing is being truly hidden. Hell, all of these videos can still be shared a million other ways. It’s insane, systematic misinformation that YouTube doesn’t want to actively help spread.

Down votes cause of whole set of reactions. Many of which prompt further inquiry and research. Humans have a wide range of reactions to things. An analysis that lumps them into a narrow set of reactions is useless.

So perhaps the problem actually lies with the recommendation algorithm, and youtube should do something about that.

No argument here. I would imagine a good deal of the people who think misinformation is a serious problem on Youtube would agree that the recommendation algorithm is a huge problem.

I wonder if this would be less of an issue if these videos were unlisted or shadowbanned instead. I'm fairly sure YouTube already does this (either intentionally or through unintended consequences of the recommendation engine) so why couldn't they do that here?

Not really. I see a couple videos about guns and YouTube fills my recommendations with nut jobs. I see a couple of video game reviews and YouTube assumes I want to watch videos about SJWs performing white genocide. And so on.

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