Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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OK, I'll ask -- can you give some specific examples of wiped channels? What is an example of an NGO promoting one narrative and what are the other narratives being suppressed? What are countries this is happening in?

I'm genuinely interested in the specifics here. I always want to be knowledgeable about different narratives.

Because my impression was that YouTube will serve you up recommendations on any topic you watch, because its goal is to serve ads, not to further a neoliberal narrative over others. But if YouTube is hiding certain narratives, I definitely want to be aware, to understand what kinds of categories they fall into. Can you share what you've observed?

Edit: best I can tell (looking through comment history) is that the commenter is upset specifically with YouTube banning content and channels that "denies or trivializes" Russia's invasion of Ukraine:

> YouTube has also been able to operate in Russia despite cracking down on pro-Kremlin content that has broken guidelines including its major violent events policy, which prohibits denying or trivialising the invasion. Since the conflict began in February, YouTube has taken down channels including that of the pro-Kremlin journalist Vladimir Solovyov. Channels associated with Russia’s Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs have also been temporarily suspended from uploading videos in recent months for describing the war as a “liberation mission”. YouTube’s chief product officer, Neal Mohan, said: “We have a major violent events policy and that applies to things like denial of major violent events: everything from the Holocaust to Sandy Hook. And of course, what’s happening in Ukraine is a major violent event. And so we’ve used that policy to take unprecedented action.” [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/22/youtube-u...

Ya I regularly wipe my cookies and start over with YouTube and the politically charged fresh slate recommendations are definitely not Neo-liberal.

Yeah. “Neo-liberal” is defiantly not how I’d describe YouTube political content. Everything I get is far right bullshit.

I think the youtube algo just serves you what it thinks will get you engaged (hate watching?). In the past I've gotten both right and left extremist content. I eventually set my youtube settings to delete everything that is older than 3 months, my feed has been way more usable since I did that. That plus using revanced to remove all the stupid shorts and news/promo sections from the app.

YouTube always gives me the vague “people in your area and time of day” answer, which is totally bullshit. It’s content driven. You watch a video about fighter jets, or Ukraine, get Matt Walsh telling you how we have to eliminate trans kids. Watch an Alan Watts or Terrance McKenna video, get an ad about how the ancient Egyptians used magic flutes to generate antigravity fields to build the pyramids.

I worked hard to make my youtube feed mostly free of political content.

One time, PragerU stuff starts appearing in my recommendation....I cannot ban it fast enough.

I'm not sure why you were downvoted for this. Maybe HN readers are mostly far-right, lol.

I have noticed that there is a contingent that seems to downvote but not respond to new comments with leftward inclination. Usually the comments recover but presumably enough do not that it’s worth the effort.

Indeed, there is a recurring pattern of targeted silent downvotes.

Ehn, I'm not concerned about downvotes, but this is the first comment I've ever made that I have watched consistently fluctuate between 4 and 9 points each time I come back which is kind of funny.

Never worried but always interested in observing patterns of behavior from over here

It’s a very real thing.

This has also been my experience. Whenever I view the YouTube homepage signed out or in an incognito window, the video/creator selection is almost wholly alien and often very unaligned with my personal views.

Well, duh.

Its personalized.

If you signed out - how do you expect them to show you personalized results?

Of course the homepage you see is different than the default or what others see.

I'm very happy with the state of my homepage and the recommended videos they push to me. Everything is very on-topic to my interests and what I have curated as my watch history over the years.

I do agree the default experience is pretty bland and lackluster.

Youtube lacks a button “Show me something else”.

I’m stuck in a local minimum, but I keep hearing about valleys of people watching entirely different stuff. I tried searching but the search keeps returning “content I might be interested in” (ie absolutely unrelated to the search) and it’s impossible to “discover more”.

(And in France, the “discover” tab is swamped by rap videos).

A button was actually introduced a couple of years ago for that! It is called the “New to you” button: https://9to5google.com/2021/10/25/youtube-new-to-you/

I use it regularly, but it is well-hidden (usually, the rightmost tag in the ribbon of buttons at the top).

Interesting! Never noticed that before. I'll check it out thank you.

On my iPhone it is now the third tag in the ribbon right next to All.

So it is true there can be some local minimum problems. Sometimes I'll get on a random topic binge for a few days and I'll notice my homepage changing (sometimes for the worse.)

In terms of getting out - hard to say. I rarely if ever use search on YouTube or even most of the discovery features unless there is a very specific video I'm looking for. I don't search specific topics or interests to find content. I don't even use the "subscriptions-only" view because I like seeing the algorithm recommend new things to me and I know good content from any of my subscriptions will bubble up if it is good. A few YouTubers I do watch religiously and will personally check their page every so often.

Most of the content I watch and people I subscribe too I found pretty organically. Something will pop up on the homepage that I like. I'll check out more of their videos. Then the next day that person and similar channels will start showing up in the algo. Eventually I'll subscribe if its consistent quality. Rinse and repeat.

My current homepage consists of indie gamers playing new games, some technology channels like LTT or similar, low-level electronics and circuit board design, a few programming channels, documentaries for speedrunning history, some DIY channels for DIY or furniture building, Ancient Egypt and its conspiracies, game devlogs. I have a guilty pleasure for Minecraft but its been a few weeks since I watched anything related so looking now its completely fallen off the algo.

Every so often I'll get a channel rec from reddit or here and I'll check them out.

Oh - don't be afraid to curate your watch history. If I watched something I didn't like I go into my watch history and remove that video so it no longer has influence on the algo. I like my history to be an archive of what I have watched so I can find it again though so this is rare.

Replied here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36112597

That is not upsetting. Article you mentioned proves that YouTube is used as weapon of censorship, denying that is Westsplaining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westsplaining

From the Wikipedia link, "Westsplaining" is about characterizing the situation in Ukraine as a US-Russia great-powers conflict (Russia vs. the West), and how that denies and ignores the role of the Ukrainian people for self-determination.

But from your comments, you seem to be interested more in the Russian narrative which similarly denies Ukrainian self-determination.

So it actually seems that you yourself are part of the "Westsplaining" problem. In contrast, YouTube is ensuring that Russian disinformation about what's happening in Ukraine isn't crowding out Ukrainian's own voices and testimony.

I'm not saying whether YouTube's policies are good or bad, but they certainly are not a version of "Westsplaining". It's the exact opposite, in fact.

Also curious about some specific examples.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34907079 Is one example OP has posted about before, but light on details.

YouTube bans basic daytime adverts because of American puritanical beliefs.

Which daytime advertisements are you referring to?

I'm very interested in this as well. When I clear cookies and go to YouTube I always see crap for kids, Mr. Beast, and lots of feel-good stuff. The 3 front page recommendations right now on a fresh browser are about a shelter dog getting adopted, a movie called The Policeman, and a video with different versions of the song "one, two, buckle my shoe".

I experience this with Twitter too - people complain their default twitter is alt-right, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, etc. and I don't see any of that in a fresh browser. It makes me wonder what people are watching and visiting so much that the algorithms throw alt-right stuff in their faces with such regularity. I follow Elon Musk and all the other expected tech people a tech person would follow and I don't experience this version of Twitter and Youtube everyone seems to complain about.

In my experience the default does not lean right. But it is very easy to start getting recommendations that way and once it starts it doesn’t seem to stop.

My take: YouTube provides the tools, then people use them in a biased way. If liberals in your country are good at technology and conservatives are not, the liberal point of view will look like it's being pushed.

Something happened yesterday to me that really drove it home. An AI scam started showing up for me. Before I realized a scam, I made a comment pointing out that what they were saying was incorrect. They deleted my comment, reported my email address to YouTube as a scammer so shutting me down real quick. It was then I noticed they had 50k subscribers despite only being a couple of days old and they had a product to sell in the description. Clearly, the people behind this account were tech savvy.

tl;dr: The viewpoints of tech savvy groups in your country are going to win out. Info promotion and suppression is not a conspiracy of tech companies.

> If liberals in your country are good at technology and conservatives are not, the liberal point of view will look like it's being pushed.

Awareness of the rules makes a difference too.

If a particular political group is frequently posting videos that flagrantly break the TOS (as might happen with particularly polarized members), they're much more likely to get reported and banned before they make much headway. It's creators that sit firmly within the rules or carefully run right up alongside their boundaries that do well in the long term.

> If a particular political group is frequently posting videos that flagrantly break the TOS... they're much more likely to get reported and banned before they make much headway.

They are also able to get feedback and learn how to adapt, in the cat-and-mouse game of spam/SEO/wrongthink. IMO, these groups are the ones that know how to exploit the algorithms best, because they have a ruthless survivalship happening.

It’s not just that. There’s a very real outrage machine on the right that works the refs so they get a breaks for what are very obvious TOS violations.

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