It’s YouTube music, which is showing popular “podcasts” on its explore page. Must be just because it’s popular because nothing in my algo on either youtube or YouTube music would suggest this shit.
It’s YouTube music, which is showing popular “podcasts” on its explore page. Must be just because it’s popular because nothing in my algo on either youtube or YouTube music would suggest this shit.
My assumption is the bias is unintentional, at least partially, and just the priorities of recommendations is weighed heavily to encourage engagement above all else, and stoking fear and anger drives engagement. Also the distribution of content could be a factor. On the right, it seems like everyone is trying to get in on the grift of advertising elk meat or trump coin to exploit their viewers, meanwhile high quality journalism and news is under funded. For every Climate Town or A More Perfect Union, there’s tens or hundreds of right wing fearmongering videos.
The rage-stoking flamebait is definitely a real thing on all social media to drive engagement. But the only explanation for searching for an exact video name with the name of the creator, and the desired video not being in the top few hits but rather buried below dozens and dozens of other results is suppression of that creator. And it happens repeatedly for left-wing creators. That can’t be explained by the ‘I need to feed attention all the time’ algorithm.
There’s actually a simpler explanation. Companies will purposefully make their products worse to keep you using them longer. By prioritizing the algorithm over your search results you’re staying in the app longer, seeing more algo suggestions, and more likely to give up on your search and click something else.
Good examples of this are Google purposefully crippling their own search, or Netflix making it impossible to see what movies they actually have. So they kneecap the product. What are you going to do? Stop using it? If the answer is no, then there’s room to make it just a little worse…
That is another real thing, that doesn’t fit this example.
If it did, any video on other topics would not be in the top few results - and yet in my unscientific testing of several random video titles and authors, they all come up in either the first result or in the first row.
Different experience for searching leftist videos.