On Safer Internet Day 2024, Vodafone released a new film ‘The Rise of the Aggro-rithm’ to highlight the harmful AI algorithms targeting Britain’s teen and tween boys.
I’m inclined to believe it’s one of those things that, once it enters the recommendation sphere on your account, it’s really hard to get it to go away without manually removing profiling info via Google account settings. I just remembered now, at one point he did run a personal experiment to try and see how extreme the content would get if he let it play after it started showing up. After getting kind of disturbed with how bad it got, and bored of laughing at it for amusement, he tried training the algorithm to only show him cat videos and kind of settled on where it currently is. I’m guessing his account has a lot of those older associations still tied, and the algorithm tries to rekindle them from time to time.
YouTube has a setting somewhere to only hold your view history for 3 months. I can’t recommend that enough.
Been using that setting for a couple of years, and it changed a bit how the algorithm recommends things to me cause if I somehow get into the cesspool sphere, it will stop in about 3 months.
I can’t imagine being so beholden to a for profit company that I spend three whole months putting up with shit I don’t want to see in the hopes that eventually it will get better.
It’s just crazy to me how important YouTube is to some people.
I tried using NewPipe for a while on mobile, but the issue is that surprisingly, no algorithm is almost as maddening as a algorithm that went batshit insane.
I love newpipe for exactly that reason. I don’t like being suggested videos, I want to search for something specific and watch those videos about the specific knowledge I’m seeking at the moment. If I want to waste time then I take a moment to think about something I was wondering earlier that day, and look that up.
If I’m going waste time I might as well learn something about whatever.
I like being suggested stuff based on my subscriptions, otherwise I would not find anything worth to watch. This also helps when someone you are subscribed to releases a new video, but for some reason or another, you didn’t notice it.
There’s also the issue of not having an alternative on desktop, so you are going to use YouTube anyway
I use YouTube Shorts quite a bit and have never seen that kind of content. It’s all gaming and cooking stuff for me, which matches my search history.
I’m inclined to believe it’s one of those things that, once it enters the recommendation sphere on your account, it’s really hard to get it to go away without manually removing profiling info via Google account settings. I just remembered now, at one point he did run a personal experiment to try and see how extreme the content would get if he let it play after it started showing up. After getting kind of disturbed with how bad it got, and bored of laughing at it for amusement, he tried training the algorithm to only show him cat videos and kind of settled on where it currently is. I’m guessing his account has a lot of those older associations still tied, and the algorithm tries to rekindle them from time to time.
YouTube has a setting somewhere to only hold your view history for 3 months. I can’t recommend that enough.
Been using that setting for a couple of years, and it changed a bit how the algorithm recommends things to me cause if I somehow get into the cesspool sphere, it will stop in about 3 months.
I can’t imagine being so beholden to a for profit company that I spend three whole months putting up with shit I don’t want to see in the hopes that eventually it will get better.
It’s just crazy to me how important YouTube is to some people.
Meh, can’t really disagree with that.
I tried using NewPipe for a while on mobile, but the issue is that surprisingly, no algorithm is almost as maddening as a algorithm that went batshit insane.
I love newpipe for exactly that reason. I don’t like being suggested videos, I want to search for something specific and watch those videos about the specific knowledge I’m seeking at the moment. If I want to waste time then I take a moment to think about something I was wondering earlier that day, and look that up.
If I’m going waste time I might as well learn something about whatever.
I like being suggested stuff based on my subscriptions, otherwise I would not find anything worth to watch. This also helps when someone you are subscribed to releases a new video, but for some reason or another, you didn’t notice it.
There’s also the issue of not having an alternative on desktop, so you are going to use YouTube anyway