Sophiya hit the nail on the fucking head when she said that all the sweet perks tech companies offer are intended to keep you from leaving work in the same way the algorithm is intended to keep you from leaving RUclips. I worked for a medical software company fresh out of college that had a "quirky" campus, a fancy cafeteria, a deli, and a coffee shop, on-site laundry, and an internal social media site that was intended to help you make friends with coworkers. At the time I thought that was great, but then I realized it was all part of an effort to make the company your whole life - you spend all your time there, all your friends are there, etc. Then you don't notice they're working you 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week - and of course they don't pay overtime. I lasted just a little over a year before I bounced. Now I work for a boring-ass financial company where I work only 37.5 hours a week and no one asks me about my personal life. I love it.
One important point not touched on in this episode is that a lot of the 2010s youtube radicalization wasn't just driven by RUclips's recommendation algorithm. It was driven by extremists explicitly manipulating the algorithm. And I don't just mean content creators picking clickbait titles: far right conservatives figured out they could manipulate the recommendation system by doing things such as repeatedly clicking on a normal news video, then immediately searching for an extremely far-right video. Because of how the recommendation system works, if enough people did this deliberately then it would trick the system into thinking the extremist content was related to the news video and start automatically recommending it. Effectively, groups of users acting in concert could prime the system, then let the natural feedback loop of radicalization take over. For example, this process was used to target Anita Sarkeesian's videos specifically. Gamergate-associated people would repeatedly watch her videos, then find and watch misogynistic hate videos targeting her. They would do this over and over, with the same videos, until the recommendations for all of Anita's videos were always full of hate directed at her. This is a common flaw in social media security and content moderation systems. Social media platforms will frequently build systems that are resilient to a *single* malicious user, but completely fall apart when faced with large groups of malicious users acting in concert.
I had worked for Google for a while. Their saying about "not being evil", to be meaningful, needs to recognize that social responsibility and corporate profit as goals are sometimes at odds. If profit is always the priority, then it is evil, whether it means to be, or not. I don't know if our capitalist system in general can ever take that seriously, much less Google, but if not, then it is an evil as well that eventually will suffer consequences of being evil.
Basically, whenever the pursue of any one thing is taken to be an absolute priority above all else, it will be evil sooner or later, usually sooner. Granted, some things sooner than others still. This is simply because life is multifaceted. If you're exclusively valuing one thing above all, you're not just ignoring that different are different and have different priorities and even philological needs, you're neglecting the other factors that directly affect that very priority. But if you're "succeeding" at that one thing, those requirements are both undervalued, and coming from somewhere, from someone else and at their expense. And that is definitionally exploitative by any half reasonable definition, which is evil. That is indeed where og genuine anti capitalism was born. The only way to "reform" that inherent evil out of it is to make individual accumulation of wealth and eternal profit increase seeking to no longer be an exclusive priority or one of very select few. But if you remove that, it would be a form of capitalism in name only because those are definitional aspects of it.
even when a company tries to be ethical/moral or do good deeds, they dont stay around for long. The businesses that lie, cheat, steal and exploit will always out-compete them
I was allowed to keep a medical device implanted in me after it was removed - my port, to be precise. I take it out of the drawer I keep it in and glare at it every now and then.
What drives me crazy about RUclips's algorithm is that it seems to consider me watching the first 10-20 seconds of a 3-minute video before closing it a better indication of my interest than me watching an entire four-hour video essay in a single sitting. I watched a single Khruangbin video last year, and I only just stopped getting Khruangbin videos in my recommendations.
I came here to learn about RUclips's role in enabling the alt-right pipeline. I left wanting a pornographic lenticular bumper sticker. Truly enriching content.
I remember the exact moment when I got radicalized to the far right back like 9 years ago. Watching random videos, and seeing a girl in a thumbnail on the sidebar who looked like Boxxy. A lot of people watching who pay attention to online politics know I'm talking about Shoe On Head. Shoe all things considered, wasn'tt that terrible back then, and wasn't overtly far right, but she had a lot of connections to that crowd, via the algorithm. The VERY next video in the recommended was, I kid you not, Sargon. So anyway that's how I spent like four years of my life sucked into the online right, Kekistan, all that shit. People don't understand how easy it is to get hooked on this stuff. Literally all it took for me was seeing a cute girl in a video.
Same. Although for me I more or less started with Sargon. I feel like such an idiot for getting suckered like that. Never even realized what direction I was headed till I eventually got introduced to "some more news" when searching for more info about the food industry. I guess RUclips eventually sucked me down a lefty rabbit hole? Anyways Sargon is an awful person and he wasted a great deal of my time while trying to introduce me to people that were even worse than him. Cool and good 👍 😎
Sargon is such a try-hard. Good on you for realising what was going on. Welcome back to a somewhat more even keel, and I hope things are going well for you.
I'm trans and eventually want to get top surgery to make my chest flat and if they let me I'd want to keep the breast tissue they removed in a like a jar or something. That seems kinda fun
This is still a huge problem that bothers me. Im always seeing comments from ignorant who fell down the alt right pipeline and got brainwashed by algorithms
Wow. This explained much about why I have such difficulty controlling my data on tube. And the GD algos sent me a vid by a premier anti-woke meat head simply because he mentioned Robert...
I imagine it depends on the doctor and the body part, but they will let you keep your removed body parts. I had an art teacher that had a portion of one of his fingers amputated and he kept it.
I like how Sophiya thought the Hitler Did Nothing Wrong bit was from modern 4chan and it was representative of their beliefs, whereas it was from old 4chan which had no beliefs except making jokes out of shit
Contrapoint : The RUclips algorithm was how I first spotted the common denominator between opinion-havers I was interested enough in to let them speak (Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson before the benzos) and what RUclips determined would be a suitable digestif (Stefan Molyneaux, Black Pigeon Speaks, Gad Saal). That and the spectacular job Sam Seder at The Majority Report did of poisoning the algorithm was what caught me before I slid fully into that mental illness..
They haven't allowed that content for years yet they do own porn sites that are ran outside YT. I miss the varried views and limited censorship that just blocked the really bad stuff. Yt is turning into an AI gobbels.
idk if it's just because I use it more but the fb algorithm is even worse for this, specifically in how it either cannot distinguish between posts in support or against something or shows you posts it knows you disagree with to drive engagement. Every time I share something about, say, trans rights, I get bombarded with transphobic suggested posts, and it infuriates me to think about how many naive liberals have been funneled into far right radicalization by the 'actually it's the privileged people who are oppressed!' propaganda that's so popular on there
RUclipss solution to all this nonsense? Incredibly heavy handed AI comment moderation. Any four letter word just yeets your comment into the aether, its gotta be the worst way to deal with a bad problem
I remember back in the day watching legit documentaries re the Holocaust, and being recommended a few "independent" ones that turned out to be anti-Semitic and either revisionist re the scope or just flat-out denial. Here i think I'm going to hear a heartfelt story about maybe a grandparent who survived or was a liberator or resistance fighter... Nope! To their credit, I believe YT has since taken most (if not all) of those misinformation videos down. But if i were younger and more impressionable, I can see where a legit curiosity can be hihacked and misinformation can spread.
Yep got completely sucked down by red pill stuff. Saw an Alex Jones video after david ike vid. And thats all it took. It took a while a to get deprogrammed.
tbh youtube reccos have worked really well for me. I am a researcher so it involves a lot of wait time in between and my subscriptions are filled with queer and lefty channels I discovered off the recommendations. it's how i found this podcast. You know you can always click "do not recommend channel" or "hide video" for the kinda stuff you don't like. I have literally never been recommended crowder and his ilk. I also have autoplay turned off. you can't be lazy and expect things to work. have to do your due diligence.
ok me too but you understand that the problem is that many many Many people either don't know this or don't care enough to do it because they're not obsessive little weirdos like us, right? people aren't born with the innate ability to peg suspicious video thumbnails/titles/whatever from a mile away & nuke them without even watching them. I agree that it's important to learn how to spot bullshit & curate yourself the fuck away from it but WAY too many social media websites &cetera have algorithms that function in a way that's hostile to that goal because it's what will let them make the most money the most easily. people without good mentors in the field of "being online without getting bodied" are rarely if ever going to build those skills on their own. Which sucks!!! It would be nice if we could get them to stop doing that!! But yeah in the meantime go teach some teen boys or whoever the fundamentals.
Good for you, but while you're busy patting yourself on the back don't forget that the only reason e.g. global warming is still a problem is that the vast majority of people are - often intentionally - too under-educated, too busy, or too tired to do what you do.
The video algorithm is one thing. The shorts feed is a whole different beast. At least TikTok remembers I’m not a bigot, Google’s taken so much Daily Wire and Prager U dollars that they have a financial obligation to shove right wing content into everyone’s feed. I don’t know how many times I’ve disliked, clicked don’t recommend, straight up reported them, but they won’t get out of my shorts feed. Drives me nuts, this week it’s been the Andrew Tate sigma content.
maturity is realizing that "THE ALGORITHM" isn't some outside entity, it is YOU. You are the algorithm. if you're a degenerate that falls for RW bs then you'll inevitably go down that rabbithole
To be fair, youngsters don't have the worldview to automatically understand nonsense to be nonsense. A teen just looking into things can be easily led astray by recommended videos, especially when rightwing videos are more profitable, pushed and common than leftwing ones
No, not at all - the reason that the McCarthy got 50% positive approval and only 20% negative, or accepted the individuals-litter-don't-regulate-industry campaign of Keep America Beautiful, was because of social conditioning, and the same thing can be done by the biasing of any media-exposure system.
![Kumamoto Masters Japan 2024 | Gregoria Mariska Tunjung (INA) [5] vs. Akane Yamaguchi (JPN) [2] | F](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EIjZybhsWqA/mqdefault.jpg)
RUclips saw me watching this and suggested Matt Walsh.
Malsh _does_ also have a beard, a diaper fetish, and nazboi talking points, so you can see why The Algorithm would Reinforce that...
i got a recom for sam harris
lmao
Sophiya hit the nail on the fucking head when she said that all the sweet perks tech companies offer are intended to keep you from leaving work in the same way the algorithm is intended to keep you from leaving RUclips. I worked for a medical software company fresh out of college that had a "quirky" campus, a fancy cafeteria, a deli, and a coffee shop, on-site laundry, and an internal social media site that was intended to help you make friends with coworkers. At the time I thought that was great, but then I realized it was all part of an effort to make the company your whole life - you spend all your time there, all your friends are there, etc. Then you don't notice they're working you 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week - and of course they don't pay overtime.
I lasted just a little over a year before I bounced. Now I work for a boring-ass financial company where I work only 37.5 hours a week and no one asks me about my personal life. I love it.
Yep
gonna take a guess and say, Epic? lol
@@Asylumrunner8 nailed it
Sad that you'd want to work somewhere with so little solidarity between workers.
@@aldenkahl8703 "solidarity" means making sure everyone gets fair pay and good treatment, not asking what I did over the weekend.
15:58 Sophie laughing her ass off at people being rude to Robert is one of the best parts of BtB
Sophie has a great laugh in general, the spontaneous laughs at people Roasting the Host give me a tangible lift
"the murders involved with this episode were all adults, the _mol°°tations_ involved in this episode were all babies!"
God damn it, Robert.
Literally busted out laughing at that. 😂
One important point not touched on in this episode is that a lot of the 2010s youtube radicalization wasn't just driven by RUclips's recommendation algorithm. It was driven by extremists explicitly manipulating the algorithm. And I don't just mean content creators picking clickbait titles: far right conservatives figured out they could manipulate the recommendation system by doing things such as repeatedly clicking on a normal news video, then immediately searching for an extremely far-right video. Because of how the recommendation system works, if enough people did this deliberately then it would trick the system into thinking the extremist content was related to the news video and start automatically recommending it. Effectively, groups of users acting in concert could prime the system, then let the natural feedback loop of radicalization take over. For example, this process was used to target Anita Sarkeesian's videos specifically. Gamergate-associated people would repeatedly watch her videos, then find and watch misogynistic hate videos targeting her. They would do this over and over, with the same videos, until the recommendations for all of Anita's videos were always full of hate directed at her.
This is a common flaw in social media security and content moderation systems. Social media platforms will frequently build systems that are resilient to a *single* malicious user, but completely fall apart when faced with large groups of malicious users acting in concert.
I had worked for Google for a while. Their saying about "not being evil", to be meaningful, needs to recognize that social responsibility and corporate profit as goals are sometimes at odds. If profit is always the priority, then it is evil, whether it means to be, or not. I don't know if our capitalist system in general can ever take that seriously, much less Google, but if not, then it is an evil as well that eventually will suffer consequences of being evil.
Basically, whenever the pursue of any one thing is taken to be an absolute priority above all else, it will be evil sooner or later, usually sooner. Granted, some things sooner than others still. This is simply because life is multifaceted. If you're exclusively valuing one thing above all, you're not just ignoring that different are different and have different priorities and even philological needs, you're neglecting the other factors that directly affect that very priority. But if you're "succeeding" at that one thing, those requirements are both undervalued, and coming from somewhere, from someone else and at their expense. And that is definitionally exploitative by any half reasonable definition, which is evil.
That is indeed where og genuine anti capitalism was born. The only way to "reform" that inherent evil out of it is to make individual accumulation of wealth and eternal profit increase seeking to no longer be an exclusive priority or one of very select few. But if you remove that, it would be a form of capitalism in name only because those are definitional aspects of it.
even when a company tries to be ethical/moral or do good deeds, they dont stay around for long. The businesses that lie, cheat, steal and exploit will always out-compete them
Thank you for this. I try to explain this all the time and people don't get.
I was allowed to keep a medical device implanted in me after it was removed - my port, to be precise. I take it out of the drawer I keep it in and glare at it every now and then.
They have taken all my kidney stones. Bummer.
Seriously Sophia, may you be well. 👍
The day my dad died, I smoked a whole pack of cigarettes, haven’t had a smoke since, but you are right something about unlit cigs
They let my brother keep his. Chemo port, not tumor.
What drives me crazy about RUclips's algorithm is that it seems to consider me watching the first 10-20 seconds of a 3-minute video before closing it a better indication of my interest than me watching an entire four-hour video essay in a single sitting. I watched a single Khruangbin video last year, and I only just stopped getting Khruangbin videos in my recommendations.
I came here to learn about RUclips's role in enabling the alt-right pipeline. I left wanting a pornographic lenticular bumper sticker. Truly enriching content.
What is alt-right?
@@elezabethathisayamany3009Rationalwiki has a well-researched page on it.
@@elezabethathisayamany3009R a t i o n a l w i k i has a good page on it.
@@elezabethathisayamany3009Google it.
@@elezabethathisayamany3009The ‘alt-right’ is another name for the extreme right wing, such as Nazis and Nazi-adjacent types.
They let me keep my impacted wisdom teeth.
I remember the exact moment when I got radicalized to the far right back like 9 years ago. Watching random videos, and seeing a girl in a thumbnail on the sidebar who looked like Boxxy. A lot of people watching who pay attention to online politics know I'm talking about Shoe On Head. Shoe all things considered, wasn'tt that terrible back then, and wasn't overtly far right, but she had a lot of connections to that crowd, via the algorithm. The VERY next video in the recommended was, I kid you not, Sargon. So anyway that's how I spent like four years of my life sucked into the online right, Kekistan, all that shit. People don't understand how easy it is to get hooked on this stuff. Literally all it took for me was seeing a cute girl in a video.
Same. Although for me I more or less started with Sargon. I feel like such an idiot for getting suckered like that.
Never even realized what direction I was headed till I eventually got introduced to "some more news" when searching for more info about the food industry. I guess RUclips eventually sucked me down a lefty rabbit hole?
Anyways Sargon is an awful person and he wasted a great deal of my time while trying to introduce me to people that were even worse than him. Cool and good 👍 😎
Sargon is such a try-hard. Good on you for realising what was going on. Welcome back to a somewhat more even keel, and I hope things are going well for you.
Early 2010's, YT was hardcore suggesting right wing vids to me and it baffled me. Def not my bag
Fun fact: if you type "Bastard RUclips Nazi" into the search bar this video is what comes up.
The fact what unsmoked cigarettes smell so good and smoked smell like death of death, - is such a hook, such a disappointment for new smokers
As a smoker a lit cigarette is so much better smelling, cuz my brain is like aw yeah get ready for that nic boi
All i know about crowder is that hes best mates with Cody Johnson....odd pairing that.
Are you thinking Trae Crowder? Appalachian liberal comedian?
@TheNaldiin it's a joke based on a video Some More News made about how Stephen Crowder needs a friend.
@@Taurox220 ah, I forget the other Crowder exists for weeks at a time. Good moments.
It's also a matter of religious liberty when they won't let you keep the stuff they cut out of you.
Tom Russel is someone I grew up listening to
I'm trans and eventually want to get top surgery to make my chest flat and if they let me I'd want to keep the breast tissue they removed in a like a jar or something. That seems kinda fun
This is still a huge problem that bothers me. Im always seeing comments from ignorant who fell down the alt right pipeline and got brainwashed by algorithms
I couldnt keep my cist from under my left ass cheek. It looked like a dinosaur embryo and i wanted to cast it in amber resin so it looked real lol
Wow. This explained much about why I have such difficulty controlling my data on tube.
And the GD algos sent me a vid by a premier anti-woke meat head simply because he mentioned Robert...
Gd?
@@KOTYAR1 god damn
I imagine it depends on the doctor and the body part, but they will let you keep your removed body parts. I had an art teacher that had a portion of one of his fingers amputated and he kept it.
I like how Sophiya thought the Hitler Did Nothing Wrong bit was from modern 4chan and it was representative of their beliefs, whereas it was from old 4chan which had no beliefs except making jokes out of shit
15:10 was unexpected and great
Contrapoint : The RUclips algorithm was how I first spotted the common denominator between opinion-havers I was interested enough in to let them speak (Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson before the benzos) and what RUclips determined would be a suitable digestif (Stefan Molyneaux, Black Pigeon Speaks, Gad Saal).
That and the spectacular job Sam Seder at The Majority Report did of poisoning the algorithm was what caught me before I slid fully into that mental illness..
tbf number 2 name for the new mt dew was gushing grannies
I watch all kinds of content on RUclips. Like this
Oh crap, Sophie speaks Russian? That is freaking amazing, i will absolutely check her Private Parts Unknown podcast
Oh! This is Sofiya, not Sophie. They have the same first name, so it’s understandable.
Who jacks it to RUclips ?!?!
They haven't allowed that content for years yet they do own porn sites that are ran outside YT. I miss the varried views and limited censorship that just blocked the really bad stuff. Yt is turning into an AI gobbels.
Love train videos 😭
Same.
idk if it's just because I use it more but the fb algorithm is even worse for this, specifically in how it either cannot distinguish between posts in support or against something or shows you posts it knows you disagree with to drive engagement. Every time I share something about, say, trans rights, I get bombarded with transphobic suggested posts, and it infuriates me to think about how many naive liberals have been funneled into far right radicalization by the 'actually it's the privileged people who are oppressed!' propaganda that's so popular on there
who beats off to youtube videos?
Oh sweet summer child, you must be new here.
@@williamchamberlain2263 just not 12 anymore i guess
I see I’m not the only one who remembers the Before Times
RUclipss solution to all this nonsense?
Incredibly heavy handed AI comment moderation. Any four letter word just yeets your comment into the aether, its gotta be the worst way to deal with a bad problem
I remember back in the day watching legit documentaries re the Holocaust, and being recommended a few "independent" ones that turned out to be anti-Semitic and either revisionist re the scope or just flat-out denial. Here i think I'm going to hear a heartfelt story about maybe a grandparent who survived or was a liberator or resistance fighter... Nope! To their credit, I believe YT has since taken most (if not all) of those misinformation videos down. But if i were younger and more impressionable, I can see where a legit curiosity can be hihacked and misinformation can spread.
Fred
Spoiler alert. All of us are bastards
Fredier
Yep got completely sucked down by red pill stuff. Saw an Alex Jones video after david ike vid. And thats all it took. It took a while a to get deprogrammed.
tbh youtube reccos have worked really well for me. I am a researcher so it involves a lot of wait time in between and my subscriptions are filled with queer and lefty channels I discovered off the recommendations. it's how i found this podcast. You know you can always click "do not recommend channel" or "hide video" for the kinda stuff you don't like. I have literally never been recommended crowder and his ilk. I also have autoplay turned off. you can't be lazy and expect things to work. have to do your due diligence.
ok me too but you understand that the problem is that many many Many people either don't know this or don't care enough to do it because they're not obsessive little weirdos like us, right? people aren't born with the innate ability to peg suspicious video thumbnails/titles/whatever from a mile away & nuke them without even watching them.
I agree that it's important to learn how to spot bullshit & curate yourself the fuck away from it but WAY too many social media websites &cetera have algorithms that function in a way that's hostile to that goal because it's what will let them make the most money the most easily. people without good mentors in the field of "being online without getting bodied" are rarely if ever going to build those skills on their own.
Which sucks!!! It would be nice if we could get them to stop doing that!! But yeah in the meantime go teach some teen boys or whoever the fundamentals.
Good for you, but while you're busy patting yourself on the back don't forget that the only reason e.g. global warming is still a problem is that the vast majority of people are - often intentionally - too under-educated, too busy, or too tired to do what you do.
The video algorithm is one thing. The shorts feed is a whole different beast. At least TikTok remembers I’m not a bigot, Google’s taken so much Daily Wire and Prager U dollars that they have a financial obligation to shove right wing content into everyone’s feed. I don’t know how many times I’ve disliked, clicked don’t recommend, straight up reported them, but they won’t get out of my shorts feed. Drives me nuts, this week it’s been the Andrew Tate sigma content.
YEAR after this and all I want is to see Trump's side after Biden's Last SOTU to compare and YT will only show Heir Biden.
Yeah, it does swing the other way sometimes.
Heir Biden is donezo now
maturity is realizing that "THE ALGORITHM" isn't some outside entity, it is YOU. You are the algorithm. if you're a degenerate that falls for RW bs then you'll inevitably go down that rabbithole
To be fair, youngsters don't have the worldview to automatically understand nonsense to be nonsense. A teen just looking into things can be easily led astray by recommended videos, especially when rightwing videos are more profitable, pushed and common than leftwing ones
liberal anarcracker take
No, not at all - the reason that the McCarthy got 50% positive approval and only 20% negative, or accepted the individuals-litter-don't-regulate-industry campaign of Keep America Beautiful, was because of social conditioning, and the same thing can be done by the biasing of any media-exposure system.