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Why is youtube recommending conservative "talking points" to me?
(lemmy.fmhy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
481 points (92.6% liked)
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You most probably viewed these types of videos a few times and the algorithm started recommending them to you. It only takes a couple of videos for the algorithm to start recommending video of the same topic. You could easily solve this by clicking on the 3 dots next to the video and then selecting "Not interested", do it enough times and they'll be gone from your feed.
This, the algorithm doesn't care whether you ~~like~~ enjoy it or not, it cares whether you engage with it or not. Even dislikes are engagement.
I'm not talking about liking the video, I'm talking about viewing the video. Viewing the video, especially a large part of it, will contribute to the watch time, therefore affecting the algorithm's recommendations.
It's also kinda dodgy what YouTube considers "viewing" a video. 3 seconds of autoplay? You viewed it. Misclick an ad trying to skip? Viewed it. AndroidTV previewed the video when you left it highlighted for too long? You guessed it, viewed.
Fortunately figuring out what it considers you to have viewed is pretty straightforward: if it's in your watch history it considers it viewed. You can also go through that and manually purge things.
Of course there's still the question of why YouTube will so consistently recommend videos that get people started down this downhill slide of absolute dogshit atrocious content.
If you don't disable the feature where it plays the videos directly in the thumbnail by hovering over it, it also counts as viewed if you let the thumbnail play for like 3 seconds. I hate it.