Hi, I am a guy in early thirties with a wife and two kids and whenever I go on youtube it always suggests conservative things like guys dunking on women, ben shapiro reacting to some bullshit, joe rogan, all the works. I almost never allow it to go to that type of video and when I do it is either by accident or by curiosity. My interest are gaming, standup comedy, memes, react videos, metalurgy, machining, blacksmithing, with occasional songs and videos about funny bullshit and I am not from america and I consider myself pretty liberal if I had to put it into terms used in america. But european liberal, so by american standards a socialist. Why does it recommend this shit to me, is this some kind of vector for radicalization of guys in my category? Do you have similar experience?
It sees you like standup comedy (POTENTIALLY ANTI-WOKE) and gaming (POTENTIALLY INCEL) and in your 30s (LIKELY HAS SOME DISPOSABLE INCOME)
So it’s pipelining you to the annals of YouTube that check those boxes, have very good viewer retention and have good user engagement.
The ones with good user engagement are the ones that raise your blood pressure. They make you angry. So, politics, or dirty cops, interrogations, murder stories, stuff like that.
You can resist them all you want, but stuff that makes people angry and chatty and commenty and re-watchy is like cocaine to the algorithm. It makes them money, so they spam it everywhere it even remotely makes sense to try to get you stuck in their quicksand.
This is the real answer. It’s easy to forget that for most people who are famous for their unusual political views, most of their overall content has nothing to do with that. There’s something about politics that can turn even the most open-minded of individuals into raging idealogues.
It’s hilarious to me that Joe Rogan is now known for his like 3 conservative views when I mostly remember him as the guy who hosted Fear Factor, did every drug known to man, interviewed scientists in every field out there, and did that really popular interview with Bernie Sanders a couple years ago.
The point is that every hobby and niche interest has someone who gets way too hung up on one particular issue and devotes way too much time to talking about it, dragging the whole community down with them.