Luckboy28

Every time I read "them" instead of "it", my brain does a double-take. XD

Thanks for the write-up. =)

As a programmer, I just wanted to add: These types of algorithms are built with the objective of making the site interesting, and thereby making ad revenue. So the code does things like compare your video watching patterns to other members, to guess at what you'll want to see. Programmers rarely (if ever) sit down and say "I want to increase extremism", etc. That's an unintended consequence of showing people what you think they want -- and it can be incredibly difficult to program "anti-bias" into algorithms.

WHERE'S THE PARTY AT?? WOOOOOO

The problem is, there's no good way to fix it.

The algorithm is designed to show you things you'll want to click. If you reverse that part of the algorithm, then you could have it send you videos of people clawing a chalkboard with their fingernails, and then success! you've stopped clicking on videos and you haven't seen any extremist content.

But that's not really a solution, since all that does is push you off of the site. If YouTube did this, they'd go under, and somebody else would make a video website that did have this algorithm.

The problem is that there's no good way to track which videos are "extreme" in a programmatic way. So there's no good way to steer people away from those videos. And even if they could, people would scream about free-speech, etc.

There currently isn't a good solution.

Every RPG has things that can kill you. That doesn't make it a "survival" game.