[infinitifall]

I've noticed that unless you spell out channel names, you will only be shown videos from verified/checkmark accounts, no matter how far down you scroll. The only way to see videos made by "the people" is restricting search to last week or shorter time periods. Controversy-adjacent search terms are sanitized and rendered useless. Channels and videos are shadow banned so that even if you remember exact video titles you will never be able to find them.

If despite these measures you somehow end up on an interesting video, the recommendations sidebar is scrubbed clean and shows global popular videos instead of the usual similar videos watched by other people.

Clearly optimizing for total watchtime and avoiding controversy is not aligned with creating a great search and recommendation algorithm.

[Thorrez]

>I've noticed that unless you spell out channel names, you will only be shown videos from verified/checkmark accounts, no matter how far down you scroll.

Searching "lego stop motion" I get a non-checkmark channel in the 4th result: https://i.imgur.com/Dvds7ib.png

>If despite these measures you somehow end up on an interesting video, the recommendations sidebar is scrubbed clean and shows global popular videos instead of the usual similar videos watched by other people.

Are you talking about all videos, or just controversy-adjacent videos? I know I've seen people online complaining in the past that YouTube sometimes leads to people going down a rabbit hole of crazy videos with the recommendations. If you're just referring to controversial videos, what you say sounds like YouTube fixed the rabbit hole problem. If you're referring to all videos, I haven't experienced that. I get mostly good recommendations.

Disclosure, I work at Google but not YouTube.

[concinds]

> Searching "lego stop motion" I get a non-checkmark channel in the 4th result: https://i.imgur.com/Dvds7ib.png

I believe he was referring to politics-linked searched on YouTube.

> Are you talking about all videos, or just controversy-adjacent videos? I know I've seen people online complaining in the past that YouTube sometimes leads to people going down a rabbit hole of crazy videos with the recommendations. If you're just referring to controversial videos, what you say sounds like YouTube fixed the rabbit hole problem. If you're referring to all videos, I haven't experienced that. I get mostly good recommendations.

YouTube's solution consists of two things: upranking an entire class of videos/channels (mainstream media channels) and additionally deranking other channels/videos (I've had the experience of looking up a politician by full name and never finding his high-views Youtube channel unless I click Filters -> Channel). All of that, with zero transparency (giving us the lists of all artificially-reranked channels, and the new rank weights) nor government or at least independent oversight. At Google's scale, when they promote certain views over others, that poses problems of interference with elections and with the public mind (see Manufacturing Consent). The political-interference problem existed before (when the rabbit-hole effect ended up promoting Stefan Molyneux), but has simply been inverted in the other direction, basically promoting US ideological interests.

What YouTube is doing violates Popper's 'open society' principles.