Hi, I am a guy in early thirties with a wife and two kids and whenever I go on youtube it always suggests conservative things like guys dunking on women, ben shapiro reacting to some bullshit, joe rogan, all the works. I almost never allow it to go to that type of video and when I do it is either by accident or by curiosity. My interest are gaming, standup comedy, memes, react videos, metalurgy, machining, blacksmithing, with occasional songs and videos about funny bullshit and I am not from america and I consider myself pretty liberal if I had to put it into terms used in america. But european liberal, so by american standards a socialist. Why does it recommend this shit to me, is this some kind of vector for radicalization of guys in my category? Do you have similar experience?

    • Max-P
      73•1 year ago

      This, the algorithm doesn’t care whether you like enjoy it or not, it cares whether you engage with it or not. Even dislikes are engagement.

        • @yukichigai@lemmy.world
          29•1 year ago

          It’s also kinda dodgy what YouTube considers “viewing” a video. 3 seconds of autoplay? You viewed it. Misclick an ad trying to skip? Viewed it. AndroidTV previewed the video when you left it highlighted for too long? You guessed it, viewed.

          Fortunately figuring out what it considers you to have viewed is pretty straightforward: if it’s in your watch history it considers it viewed. You can also go through that and manually purge things.

          Of course there’s still the question of why YouTube will so consistently recommend videos that get people started down this downhill slide of absolute dogshit atrocious content.

          • Karu 🐲
            2•1 year ago

            If you don’t disable the feature where it plays the videos directly in the thumbnail by hovering over it, it also counts as viewed if you let the thumbnail play for like 3 seconds. I hate it.

        • Max-P
          14•1 year ago

          I meant like as in “enjoy” not as in click the thumbs up button, sorry for the confusion. Even a video that pisses you off, that you thumb it down along with every comment is considered engagement and it not only feeds you more but also boost the video as a whole.

          All it cares is whether it keeps you on YouTube. It’s like news, outrage is profitable even if everyone hates it.

    • @Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz
      33•1 year ago

      I am constantly bombarded with Jordan Peterson videos despite disliking them and telling the algorithm to show less like this.

      I’m not sure how it profiles people, but it sucks.

      • @BarrelAgedBoredom@lemmy.world
        19•1 year ago

        Go into your watch history and remove them after disliking it. I find removing stuff from my watch history to have a bigger impact over disliking stuff. You can also have YouTube stop recommending specific channels to you. Odds are if they’re posting Jordan Peterson content, you’re not missing anything of value by blocking them

    • LemmyLefty
      6•1 year ago

      I don’t know how much a Not Interested designation does. I’ve done that for channels where I don’t want to see THAT video, but still like the channel in general.

      What I do is just block the channel: if this is what the channel wants to espouse then I’ll do better by eliminating it entirely.

    • @phorq@lemmy.ml
      3•1 year ago

      Yeah, I get those too. Am always a little surprised, but I’ll be honest I’m interested in knowing what the other bubble is telling themselves… If it gets to be too much I’ll click not interested, but right now it’s just a bizarre break in my feed.

      Edit: Just remembered this quote that fits “I’m fascinated by trash TV. The poet must not avert his eyes” - Werner Herzog

    • @Eldritch@lemmy.world
      2•1 year ago

      You don’t even have to watch those types of videos. I got watching Star Trek lore videos etc. And got off on to one channel in particular. Whose videos always ended up devolving into rants against SJW and leftists. This from someone who posts lore videos on a show about luxury gay space communism. But simply because of apparently a large portion of his viewership also engages with the bigotry and hatred. I started getting tons of recommendations for shit that I have never watched and would never watch.

      But yes Mark not interested and delete from history was the best way to get it out.

    • Vegaprime
      1•1 year ago

      My shorts is the worst. Regular seems fine. Especially the pods dunking on women. “So who should pay on the first date?”…