Dear YouTube AI, I Am Not a Nazi

I think I've spoke about this here previously, but I do feel YouTube radicalised me in my early 20s. In my case though it was from the left, not the right, and ack then there was no real recommendation algorithm. There was trending videos and subscriptions, but if I remember correctly the only recommended stuff was basically just related content next to videos.

Personally I don't know if the current recommendation algorithm is any worse than the subscription feed. I think we humans might actually just be drawn to more extreme or "pure" versions of our own beliefs. At least I feel this is true for myself as it's something I have to actively fight all the time.

A good example of people being drawn to more extreme versions of their own beliefs is TV news. People who watch CNN don't watch Fox News and people who watch Fox News don't watch CNN. This self-selection of media content serves to amplify political division and radicalise people because most people will only watch and read what they already agree with when they have to pick the content.

So I think there's an argument to be made here that while not perfect the YouTube recommendation algorithm might actually be better than the old way of consuming content by personal selection. And I guess the fact you were recommended something you so strongly disagree with that you wrote this post you're kind of proving what I've been thinking. This recommendation clearly didn't serve to radicalise you, but for better or worse it might have helped you understand what people you wouldn't normally interactive with actually think on some subject matter. And sometimes you had the perspective, but I find I often that's not the case.

So yeah, while YouTube sometimes recommends me crazy stuff, I no longer have a list of 50 far-left videos waiting for me when I open the site. And while I find what I'm recommended is still biased to my personal preferences, it's less biased then myself.

My personal answer to all of this is that YouTube is a failed product for me. It may serve some general consumption/ad revenue production use case but it is a terrible product for a self-directed “power user.” I see the situation analogous to Twitter. The benefits of the platform are too powerful to entirely leave behind but horribly deficient to what they could be and there is no real alternative because of monopoly. YouTube in my view long ago stopped focusing on providing more value in a two sided market between content consumers/creators and shifted to pure monopoly resource extraction. I’m sure there are alternative emerging platforms but the logic of natural monopolies in two sided markets makes it brutally hard for any of them to reach critical useful scale.

But I realize I’ve gotten very lazy over the past decades and outsourced far too much power to the platform companies. Business is always some combination of providing value to your customers and extracting value for yourself but too many of these platforms have lost the balance. I’m tired of being the product even when I try to provide an alternative paid revenue stream to opt out of that deal.

Annoying and painful as it will be (I’m at a point in life where I no longer have bandwidth to self-hack every thing) I am going to have to reclaim big chunks of my digital autonomy. Thanks all for the great discussion here.