alt Hacker NewsSomewhat related: open YouTube in an incognito window.
Search something rather innocuous like "news". Click the first thing then go back to the main page. You have to watch through the ad.
The amount of slop you will get suggested as soon as the algorithm warms up is nuts. The ad you are first served might also be slop. I mean AI generated video advertising overt bogus cures (a memorable one recently - "did you know the Bible has the answer to Alzheimer's?") over AI slop footage.
When I compare to my normal/auth'd Youtube experience, it feels like a totally different app. I have never really experienced such a cheap illustration of the "Youtube rabbit hole" effect. The degree to which AI authored advertising is participating in this is imo pretty concerning if you have, in particular, older parents or relatives.
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Part of me would like to stop paying for a youtube premium family subscription because they keep raising the price, but my mom watches it a lot and I don’t want her to see (or have to see) those ads. They’re so unbelievably bad. It can’t be good for your brain to watch, the few times I’ve seen them on my work computer I can’t help but watch part of them.
>Search something rather innocuous like "news". Click the first thing then go back to the main page. You have to watch through the ad.
>The amount of slop you will get suggested as soon as the algorithm warms up is nuts. The ad you are first served might also be slop.
This did not happen for me. I got news about the SpaceX rocket and then more suggestions for news on the homepage, many related to politics.
I did notice that a bunch of the videos were in languages I did not understand though.
Youtube is pushing a lot of AI features without creators' consent. Some of it can be turned off but others cannot. It's becoming a major problem. Can't wait till they lose so much money on the infrastructure that they have to remove it all.
By the by, if you watch a video while logged in that someone sent you as being batshit crazy, and it's affecting your recommendations, you can go into your watch history and delete it from there so you don't get recommended similar videos.
I tried this experiment out and it is right on the money. The ad I got was AI generated video with AI script & audio selling fake 16TB SSDs. Wonder if anybody has some insider info on how these ads are produced at scale / who's behind them