If YouTube radicalises people doesn't the fault lie with the "rabbit hole" algorithm that encourages people to view more extreme videos with every click? Individual content creators aren't responsible for the methods YouTube uses to keep people on its site to sell more ads.
I am tired of hearing about dataless assertions about a "rabbit hole" algorithm. If each video is represented as a point, and you put a circle centered on that point in order to pick the next suggested videos, you'll automatically get more-extreme ideas because they are within
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the radius. You'll also get less-extreme ideas, but this produces the "evidence of an algorithm that drives people to extremes" that some folks are claiming they see evidence for. But it's just the simplest possible algorithm. I am not sure why none of the people who are
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supposedly thinking very hard about bias in YouTube's algorithms seem to have noticed this. The algorithm *may* be diabolically tuned to push people to extremes, but it may not, and if the evidence is also consistent with a simple circle algorithm, well, come on folks.
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Could it be people simply give more notice to the extreme recommendations? If you see three recommendations and one is extreme while the other two are ordinary and you ignore, it doesn’t make all of the recommendations extreme
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No, it’s that people who already made up their minds about the existence of some “extreme” rabid hole algorithm look evidence that fits their preconceptions & ignore everything that doesn’t. There’s no way to tell which vid is more “extreme” just by looking at thumbnails.
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Not that the word “extreme” has any meaning. That’s just a word people throw around as if we all understood and were in perfect agreement about what exactly constitutes “extreme”.
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I'd say that a video about how the holocaust isn't real is more "extreme" than a cooking show, so yeah, the word does have some meaning
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Except that the vast majority of people that get called “extreme” these days don’t deny the holocaust. The word is utter bullshit.
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Semantics, no? Doesn't change the outcome that it's degenerate and draws people toward more extreme content. I think we can all admit it's not a healthy outcome regardless of what you call it.
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It may just be that more radical videos are easier to categorize and then more likely to be suggested when showing interest in something, but I don't think they keep any value about the video "radicalness"
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