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Dear YouTube AI, I Am Not a Nazi

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Dear YouTube AI, I Am Not a Nazi

#21

Post by nhchris »

dontlaugh wrote: post #8
logicalmonster wrote: post #6

[flagged]

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the serio…

“National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-Semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism. Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-Semitism is dangerous for the toilers, for it is a false track which diverts them from the proper road and leads them into the jungle. Hence, Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable and bitter enemies of anti-Semitism. In the U.S.S.R., anti-Semitism is strictly prosecuted as a phenomenon hostile to the Soviet system. According to the laws of the U.S.S.R. active anti-Semites are punished with death.”

―Joseph Stalin, "Anti-Semitism: Reply to an inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States" (12 January 1931)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin

Re: Dear YouTube AI, I Am Not a Nazi

#23

Post by jshaqaw »

ladyattis wrote: post #13

It's kind of funny that this is a thing too. Sometimes, I'll get the pop culture outrage grifters recommended to me since I like to dip into the current events regarding comic books. Otherwise, I get just random junk. Recommendations to view uploaded movie clips or whatever but nothing close to what I regularly watch. I always feel like the Youtube recommendation system is flakey. It doesn't even pick up the fact tha…

Exactly. Do Nazi's offend me? Sure (sorry if that's a spicy opinion for some of the people who left response comments here). But as a computer person I'm offended by how lazy and bad the recommendation system is. After two decades the system should be able to segment the person who just wants to watch cooking videos and check out the latest Spiderman news and leave the culture wars for Twitter.

It is a disservice to the end-user and to all the amazing creators for whom Youtube is as present an irreplaceable venue for distribution.

Re: Dear YouTube AI, I Am Not a Nazi

#24

Post by jshaqaw »

krapp wrote: post #12

Chances are someone you link to (either following their channel or through some other metric) has engaged with that content, and so Youtube believes that you're more likely to engage with it as well, if you have overlapping interests. It may be a relationship several orders removed from you - but Youtube still counts it. > If anything, because I was so puzzled by what was happening that I looked at who this Leather f…

"Consider deleting your view history if you haven't already. Go through your subscriptions and see who they're following. Absolutely do not click on more than one of someone's video if you don't want to get flooded with their content."

- Exactly ... which is both hard and sad. You don't always know what the content is before you click out of curiosity or otherwise. For example, I couldn't write this post before clicking on the Leather Apron guy to see what the heck was going on.

And we should be able to listen to normalize arguments from the "other side" of politics without starting a cascade ending with Nazi propaganda. And the easiest way to do that is to take the user "STOP IT" feedback seriously. Which is really the point of my post if my rant and need to keep things under 4k characters obscured the TLDR.

Re: Dear YouTube AI, I Am Not a Nazi

#25

Post by jqpabc123 »

082349872349872 wrote: post #16
jqpabc123 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the kind of content I'm supposed to like in my gender/age/status cohort. Yes. This is exactly how personalized advertising works. Advertisers pay to target specific groups/cohorts in a statistical manner. Sorry that you don't like your cohort but this is a well known and unavoidable byproduct of their statistical approach. It's like when a friend has cancer. You search for it on Google and the next thing you kno…

More to the point, personalised advertising doesn't mean you are supposed to like it; it means they like reaching you.

It means they like spending money to annoy you.

The question for advertisers --- is this really more cost effective than a simple, non-personalized, context based approach?

There is evidence that advertisers are increasingly deciding it is not. For example --- Amazon's context based ads are one of it's fastest growing areas.

https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-amazons-growing-ad-bu...

Re: Dear YouTube AI, I Am Not a Nazi

#26

Post by ladyattis »

jshaqaw wrote: post #23
ladyattis wrote: post #13

It's kind of funny that this is a thing too. Sometimes, I'll get the pop culture outrage grifters recommended to me since I like to dip into the current events regarding comic books. Otherwise, I get just random junk. Recommendations to view uploaded movie clips or whatever but nothing close to what I regularly watch. I always feel like the Youtube recommendation system is flakey. It doesn't even pick up the fact tha…

Exactly. Do Nazi's offend me? Sure (sorry if that's a spicy opinion for some of the people who left response comments here). But as a computer person I'm offended by how lazy and bad the recommendation system is. After two decades the system should be able to segment the person who just wants to watch cooking videos and check out the latest Spiderman news and leave the culture wars for Twitter. It is a disservice to…

It's kind of like the whole SEO sites that use to plague Google back in the early 2000s. Obviously today they deal with similar SEO nonsense in the form of review sites but at least if you're not looking for a review on a product then you won't usually get them in your first page results. Too bad YT devs don't have that decent of an algorithm for the front page.

Re: Dear YouTube AI, I Am Not a Nazi

#27

Post by bardan »

jshaqaw wrote: post #19
neonnoodle wrote: post #15

The YouTube recommendation system is optimized to direct all users toward pools of content that have the highest amount of watch time. The AI has learned about various paths that get users to watch for longer amounts of time. One of those paths is right-wing polemics. Another path is, say, makeup tutorials. It's not inherently political. Purely by its own machine learning, the YouTube algorithm becomes sophisticated…

I absolutely get the recommendsation progression. I'm a pragmatist and a capitalist. I'm not demanding a ban on anything. But when a user explicitly says "NO NO STOP YOU HAVE IT WRONG" and it has no impact then it is not optimal design, it is bad design, and not possibly revenue maximizing. Fixing it would also be a great way for these companies to stop stepping in public relations unforced errors.

I wonder if their attitude is "hey, you clicked on it once buddy. chances are you're a little curious, and people really engage with this material"

Re: Dear YouTube AI, I Am Not a Nazi

#28

Post by neonnoodle »

bardan wrote: post #27
jshaqaw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely get the recommendsation progression. I'm a pragmatist and a capitalist. I'm not demanding a ban on anything. But when a user explicitly says "NO NO STOP YOU HAVE IT WRONG" and it has no impact then it is not optimal design, it is bad design, and not possibly revenue maximizing. Fixing it would also be a great way for these companies to stop stepping in public relations unforced errors.

I wonder if their attitude is "hey, you clicked on it once buddy. chances are you're a little curious, and people really engage with this material"

Pretty much. It costs them nothing to keep pecking. The odds of a user actually leaving YouTube for good are pretty minimal.

Re: Dear YouTube AI, I Am Not a Nazi

#29

Post by jtode »

I have very nerdy and musical follows, no violence of any sort that I can think of other than the occasional snarky vlogger but even those tend to get pruned. I did find that the NI/DRTC method did help me to prune all political content - I do subscribe to one political show for sure because it's genuinely funny (even they rarely get much of a watch these days though), but with a concerted effort over a good week of daily instruction I got it to stop recommending all the talentless pandering pundits of the same stripe who desire my attention.

The real concern is if Google really has accepted money from this channel in exchange for access to the feeds of people who are into violent content. To say that scenario is believable is an understatement, but to believe it is dark. I'd prefer not to.

Re: Dear YouTube AI, I Am Not a Nazi

#30

Post by Udo »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #11
Udo wrote: post #5

I regularly get recommendations for extremist content on Youtube, even though it's not thematically related to anything I already watch. The most harmless ones are Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate videos, but not too far behind is conspiracy stuff, fundamentalist religious channels, "spiritual" videos about faith and ghosts and living the Matrix. Like you, I used to click on the options to little effect, so now I just…

It's the kind of content I'm supposed to like in my gender/age/status cohort. Yes. This is exactly how personalized advertising works. Advertisers pay to target specific groups/cohorts in a statistical manner. Sorry that you don't like your cohort but this is a well known and unavoidable byproduct of their statistical approach. It's like when a friend has cancer. You search for it on Google and the next thing you kno…

I fully agree, although in my case it's not advertising per se. I'm on YT Premium, I don't get ads as such. But they're still trying to "sell" me engagement, of course. There is very little doubt in mind my that extremist content is maximally engaging, especially for the many people who actually fall down the rabbit hole and get their filter bubble permanently modified.

While YT staff may not actually hold these extremist views themselves, my guess would be they're nevertheless actively pushing it for commercial reasons. Just like it turned out that the supposedly liberal pre-Elon old guard of Twitter had special protections in place that made accounts such as LibsOfTikTok immune to getting banned, I am quite certain Youtube has the same protections for extremist channels that would otherwise run afoul of its T&C on the daily.

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