To me, the "best of the best" is its own thing. I do not watch romance movies in general, but I've had good experiences watching what people call the best of the best of the genre. Similarly for a lot of genres, media types, etc. Even just the "best of the best" of "cute animal video" can be fun every once in a while.

But I have to keep a heavy hand on the YouTube watch history and remove many things that I may have enjoyed as an exception, but don't want to see endlessly offered up forever. Some of the strange attractors in the algorithm are very, very powerful, like the aforementioned "cute animal videos". Another problem I hit is situations like, I watched the video because, say, a parrot was doing a very good impression of Captain Picard (just making this up, sorry) which was given due to general sci fi interest, but the algorithm sees "a ha! another hapless human who likes cute animal videos! Après cette vidéo, le déluge!"

At least YouTube has that knob, and does generally seem to honor it. The algorithms that don't are very hard to keep from degenerating into the lowest common denominator, because the slightest hint that you like some extremely popular thing or have an interest in a very lucrative ad keyword almost immediately swamps my actual interests.

▲ pixl97 2 days ago | parent [-]

>Some of the strange attractors in the algorithm are very, very powerful

[Watches video on WWII]

Youtube: Congratulations on becoming a Nazi, here's instructions on how to join a supremacy group in your area.

▲ pessimizer 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

And it's so far from where it should be. I don't want a bunch of recommendations of Nazi videos even if I watch a Nazi video. I don't want endless recommendations of Nazi videos even if I spend the entirety of one day of my life watching Nazi videos.

If I watch a bunch of Nazi videos over a long period of time, yes, gradually start shoving them into my suggestions.

People are avoiding listening to anything outside of their bubble because they're afraid their bubble will get totally shattered, and they won't be able to find their way back in. People like their bubbles, and they like venturing outside of them every once in a while. If leaving my house to go to a party at someone's house I just met destroyed my house, I'd never leave.

Also, seeing all the giant shit videos getting recommended reminds you that on a backend somewhere some shit-lover flag has been flipped, and now your government, your insurance company, your boss, and people who sell shit pornography are now being sold your information.

	▲	godelski 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		My favorite is when you watch 1 minute of a 30 minute video and then your feed is just fucked for the next month. Like did I not clearly express my disinterest? Give me the dislike. Give me the "I don't like this". Give me the "never ever show me this garbage again you piece of shit". While I'm a big fan of Approval Voting I'm an even bigger fan of Score and STAR. I can't for the life of me figure out why: - we created a score system where if you didn't do bullet voting you messed things up - we saw the above problem and said "might as well do 321, since that's what everyone effectively does" (up/no vote/down) - we decided that we should just switch to approval - the whole industry seems to have this psychotic belief that data is objective, with only a singular interpretation - we've had the ability to do semantic interpretation with AI for over a decade and decided ham fisting chatbots into everything was a better usage than differentiating types of engagement (people commenting because they like a video vs commenting because they hate a video), and treat it all as "engagement" Everyone already understood the Score system in places like Netflix (0-5 stars). The reason people weren't using it to its full power is because they were black box probing the algorithms and figured out the algorithms didn't give a shit about nuance

▲ inigyou 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Serving Nazis is just good business. They have money, they aren't afraid to spend it on each other or supporting their narrative, and they cause news articles to get written about your platform, which is good publicity that attracts users.

	▲	graemep 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		No. Good business is showing Nazi content to people who are enraged by Nazis. Engagement is everything.