The New York Times recently published their first episode of a podcast about how the internet shapes society, which focused on how people's lives have been heavily shaped by the YouTube algorithm and the side effects of optimizing for watch time (pretty good, would recommend it) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/technology/youtube-conspiracy-theories.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/podcasts/rabbit-hole-internet-youtube-virus.html I know there's a lot of justified criticism of other big tech companies and I'm not at all trying to say this is somehow the worst thing to come out of a tech company. But I'd say Google has a bit of a better brand image/reputation than Facebook or maybe Amazon, and I'm curious to hear what Google employees think of YouTube and the effects of its algorithm?
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What do you think they should feel like? They’re willingly working to censor and “shape” society, I can only imagine them being unhappy because there’s not enough censorship and social engineering by the unelected technocrats.
Is this free content? I’m not giving NYT money
Yeah, I believe all their podcasts are free
Recommendation algorithms give what people want the most and it turns out most people are idiots who gobble up low tier bait. This isn't new by the way. The traditional news media have been doing fundamentally the same thing since time immemorial.
Except, the recommendation algorithms are not used for some of the what looks like "recommendations". 😂 On the YouTube app, there are rows of "recommendations", except that the second row, the propaganda row, called news, simply shows you news that has nothing to do with my profile, taste etc. I often have CNN shit there, while I don't think I have ever watched anything from CNN. It's subtle, and it's ugly propaganda.
Recommendation algos literally never give me stuff that I want to watch. I don’t want to watch some random dude who didn’t exist two weeks ago install a random Minecraft mod and mess around for ten minutes (Dream); I want to watch quality LPs (Etho, Xisuma, ilmango, even PDP).
I’m pissed they tried for years to be hands off but when they decided to start censoring, they acted like they hired a censor committee made entirely of soccer moms and political morons.