If you give Abbie Richards a watch/read, she’ll educate you on how easy it is for TikTok to become a right-wing misinformation playground.
And YouTube. And Facebook. And Reels.
I had been using YouTube for years without being presented rightwing propaganda in my suggestions. I mostly just watched strategy gaming, history, technology channels and some peculiar travelling blogs. And my suggested was just mostly those things.
Then one day I used my YouTube account to cast kid shows for my niece for the first time. After that I was suggested more kid shows which didn’t interest me personally, but I also started getting suggested cat videos, which I obviously clicked. And the week after that half my suggested feed was rightwing misogynist/racist/culture war misinformation, and it took a lot of “do not recommend channel” to clean it up again.
So now I believe that there is a concerted effort by some malicious actors to train Google’s algorithm to assume that if someone is interested in cat videos, that they would then also be open to becoming a misogynist racist prick.
That’s wild. It took me watching leftist creators to actually defeat the fashy recommendations, but that’s because I watch gun and 40k videos, so, you know.
Nuke your watch history. It’ll generally go right back to your subs and start recommending “normal” stuff later.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll give it a try the next time that the algorithm goes nuts.
I loved that guy, politician I think, who said “This app is disgusting. It’s just full of nearly naked young girls!” and everyone was like my dude, it’s an algorithm, that’s on you.
If you think you’re not seeing propaganda, you are not seeing the propaganda.
“Clock App” = TikTok.
Took me a minute, not gonna lie.
I was like “they did WHAT to the clock app??”
I still had to come here to figure it out. Didn’t recognize TT either.
i like platforms where i can curate what i see
I mean, you can do that with TT. Don’t fight the algo, work with the algo
i mean, kind of.
sometimes i engage on videos on purpose just so they show me more later, even if that specific one isnt good?
What’s TT?
I’m guessing TikTok.
What is TT.
TikTok
Heavy like a brinks truck.
YT basically just sends me comedy sketches and bad sci-fi shorts. Lemmy basically sends me memes about popular culture and science… And that’s it, those are the feeds that exist, right?
Lemmy doesn’t send you anything. It is just the most active posts.
YouTube is creepy
It is just the most active posts.
If there is a whoosh moment, it’s this one. But technically, no, I browse by “new”, and that’s what I subscribe to.
About You Tube, yep, it can change in a whim just by clicking on the wrong video and watching the few seconds it takes to discover it’s some crazy piece of shit. Anyway, there’s fun stuff there.
Probably at the point they went to the app store, searched TikTok, and clicked “install”.
Ah yea, that’s why you gotta get island and install it only to the sandbox!
Is that an interrobang‽
Hahahaha I remember when TicTok was newish a friend of mine (who never once actually used TikTok) boomerly complained that it was “just underage girls twerking”.
He then proceeded to get roasted to hell and back the rest of the night, because Tiktock was famous for its algorithm showing you what you want to see. One boomer lying whine, and then 4 hours of being on blast and forever’s worth of random inside jokes on him.
To be fair, when you first install it/set up an account, it doesn’t know what you like, so it shows you the most generally popular material. A lot of that popular material is pretty… uncomfortable.
this is why snapchats clone is funnier
I do miss tiktok sometimes, but i had to delete it because I think i broke my algo somehow, it started showing me things i had absolutely no intrest in to the point of it being unusable… I’d love if i could get RSS feeds of tiktok pages so i could still follow my friends tho
Sorry. The algo is the product. Well, what the algo learns about you is the product…
Mine is full of big titty adults; I don’t know what y’all are doing wrong.
Did what go wrong?
Never used TikTok (which is what I assume “TT” means). Don’t have a YouTube account, use it very little anyway.
So what’s the question again?
Yea TikTok and where the algorithm went wrong for them to show em what it shows
Okay but YouTube suggested videos are genuinely way worse than they used to be. I can’t even fall down rabbit holes anymore. Trying to “curate” the algorithm is like swimming against the current. I can try and try to get YouTube to recommend me live music, but even when I manage to find something, the next video is going to be either a video I already watched yesterday or Rick Beato’s daily rant about the top 40. Every time.
I used to be able to spend hours just browsing, drifting from topic to topic. Now it’s like they’re trying to trap me in a loop of their most profitable videos
Youtube hooks me with really interesting shorts and within a couple shorts it always derails to the worst brain melting garbage. I really don’t get it.
Been different for me, found a lot of good new channels through the side bar more recently, but sometimes it is just the same channels video in the whole bar.
Back when I was using YouTubes site, about once a month shorts would absolutely hit home and they would just be great for one day. I’d come back the next day and it would just be absolute trash.
But since then I’ve decided to try to stay the f*** away from the algorithms.
Lately, I go on a 30-minute “Not Interested” spree on the recommendations feed when I need to weed things out. I burn everything that I know I’m never going to watch. I have 500+ subscriptions and the ratio of those with new content to trash the algorithm hands me is too damn low. So I have to set it straight some times. After this correcting action, things are noticeably better for about a month.
Another move is to right-click and open unfamiliar stuff in an incognito/privacy window. This helps keep similar material out of your feed.
