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by ants_everywhere 471 days ago
> Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more.

This may also be an artifact of the fact that you are the sort of person who seeks out educational content. I.e. you have a high need for intellectual stimulation. That makes you an outlier among all people who use social media.

Personally I think technical people underestimate the negative impacts of the models that drive the algorithms. We are basically training humans via a reward function that maximizes watch time. We are also heavily correlating errors in knowledge because popular stuff gets boosted so much. Correlated errors are bad for rubustness.

1 comments

YouTube seems less of a social media site than Facebook and Twitter to me. But maybe that's because I mostly use it for educational content also. I want a good recommendation engine, but I don't care what videos my friends and neighbors are watching.