I would say about 35% of my feed correctly anticipates my nerd interests in content in mathematical foundations, theoretical physics, and computer science. About 35% of my feed anticipates my interest in various martial arts and combat sports. The rest of my feed is for random walk curiosity topics I’ve dipped into over some recent time period.
There are a strangely high number of gun videos. All sorts of things from guys running around promoting tactical training to gun reviews etc... I like martial arts and combat sports. I don’t like guns. Maybe you like guns. Good for you. We all have our things. Not for me though. Maybe that makes me such a statistical outlier that it just breaks any attempts to mathematical model me. If only there was some way to tell the algorithm it has something wrong. Oh wait – there is. I click “Not Interested” and “Don’t Recommend This Channel” to gun video I see.
As far as I can tell those buttons aren’t connected to anything on the back-end. They seem to exist to provide the user with some comforting illusion of control but have no. This is pretty absurd on its face. I mean we can talk about artificial intelligence until we are blue in the face but when the actual human keeps slamming a button saying “NO THE ALGORITHM HAS THE WRONG OUTPUT TRY AGAIN” and it has zero impact then what kind of choices are being made at Youtube. Like what are all those people actually doing all day. But OK, I’m a big boy. I don’t like guns but I’m not triggered and I gloss on by.
But yesterday I got a whole new level of WTF. Yesterday I got a full on Nazi propaganda video. Not Nazi in the sense the term gets over-used as internet rhetoric. No, I’m talking about the kind of guys who would be proud to be called Nazis. Some doofus called the Leather Apron Club appeared on my feed with a video explaining how overrepresented Jews are on Joe Rogan and how dangerous this is for “us.” It turns out this is a whole lovely channel with 30k subscribers devoted to warning good white Christian American folks about the insidious Jewish media domination conspiracy.
I’m not calling for this to be banned. This isn’t a free speech thing. This is a serious questioning of what the hell any of the Youtube engineers and managers have been doing for the past 17 years. 17 years. Youtube isn’t a new product which popped up last month. They have had almost two decades and virtually unlimited resources to file down the rough edge cases. And yet here I am – a sucker actually sending $12 to Google every month– being recommended Nazi propaganda. Sure I can click “DON’T RECOMMEND” and “NOT INTERESTED” until I’m blue in the face but based on prior experience I doubt that will have any effect. If anything, because I was so puzzled by what was happening that I looked at who this Leather fellow was, Youtube’s trillion dollar “AI” tech stack will probably serve more and more of this stuff. In which case I just exit. I leave Youtube and take my $144 of bloated 99% margin revenue with me. A+ business job managers.
I’m just baffled here. Everyone is terrified of AI taking over the world and here the world’s biggest AI entity after two decades and billions upon billions of spending seems to have a recommendation algorithm with precision I could hack together in Microsoft Excel over a weekend. You have legions of very highly paid business managers who haven’t realized that this is a great way to not make revenue. How is this product such a flaming pile of dog poo that this can systemically happen? This is Hacker News. I’d sure love it if some people with current or former insights from the Youtube team can help explain.