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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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This is probably true.

It’s also the origin of complaints about an alt-right “pipeline.” You watch one Peterson meme and your recommended videos will be destroyed by FACTS and LOGIC. Never mind whether or not you actually cared about Shapiro or whoever, YouTube knows that some people are really into both, so that’s where you’re sorted, bucko.

I’m of the impression that the effect waxes and wanes based on YouTube’s current algorithm. Though it could just be trends in how much vocal notice it receives? Either way, this phenomenon applies to the left as well. “Breadtube” was explicitly created to harness similar network effects. It’s best known for Contrapoints and I think hbomberguy. People make long-form talky videos and try for algorithmic cross-pollination.

It does seem to create weird trends. I like to watch videos of people building things. One day, I watched a video of somebody building a bizarre contraption termed a turbo burn barrel, which involves connecting a automotive turbocharger to a sealed metal barrel full of burning wood and starting the turbo going with a leaf blower. Pretty amusing, I thought. Well it seems either this was a Youtube creator trend or the algorithm decided I loved it (or both), since I kept seeing a constant stream of turbo burn barrel videos for the next few weeks, which I mostly did watch. Then all of the sudden it just stopped and I hardly ever saw them anymore. I saw a few hints suggesting videos in that genre were still getting made, but it seemed more like the algorithm just decided to stop showing them to me for some reason.

I saw that one in action! Thing was terrifying. I have no idea how much thrust a regular turbo is supposed to produce, but it certainly looked like a lot.

However, it didn’t mess with my recommendations. No idea why.

Depends which one - at least 5 or so channels that I saw built them, probably more.

Those automotive turbos aren't supposed to produce thrust at all, the exhaust is supposed to be run through the usual mufflers. With bare exposed turbine exits, it'd be just a little. You'd probably need to build a proper nozzle to generate much thrust.

I got the turbo barrels too! Does youtube push them to people in a broad demographic or do they have an implicit characterization of people wherein we both fall into the same narrow bucket of turbo-woodstove-video susceptibility? I honestly find this question rather disturbing, in that unless I choose to buy print media it's getting harder and harder to tell what's going on in the general populace. As in, how am I to tell whether something gets to me because it's in general circulation, as opposed to having been precisely targeted?

The YouTube algorithm is notoriously opaque from the end user perspective, and truly is hasn't been transparent since YouTube made the first major adjustment to it by disincentivizing clicks over watch time and website retention. Back when they were on their meteoric rise in popularity, the Paul twins were famous for directing their viewers to their brother's videos and using each other's channels to 'trick' the algorithm and they both got really famous really quickly as a result. The algorithm correctly identified that viewers who watched Jake Paul very often watched Logan Paul videos, so as soon as you click on one of their videos in your 'Recommended' tab, YouTube had already started the process of tailoring your user profile to watch videos from the other brother.

Information about how and why the YouTube algorithm was changing from 2015-2020 would be so incredibly valuable for contextualizing a lot of the social movements we've seen recently, but too bad that this is information we will probably never get publicly.

Many successful youtubers emulate this by having multiple channels even if all of them have basically the same type of content. They just advertise content on the other channel during the video and maybe with a link in description. Sometimes this secondary channel gets even more popular than the main one, so this crosspollinating definitely has some effect.

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