this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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A slightly unusual video from the fantastic Technology Connections channel. It articulates a lot of my own thoughts on social media, "algorithms" and AI.

What surprised me the most was the statistic that only 3% of author's views come from the subscriptions feed. This is wild to me because subscriptions are pretty much the only way I have ever used YouTube.

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[–] Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

So, context: I’m still fairly young (right now in college), from Europe and fairly into politics (US and otherwise), this all happened when I was still in high school. On YouTube I watch primarily tech/educational content. And then the algorithm starts pushing TLDR news on me. That’s fine, those guys are generally ok and their sources are reliable. Besides, I already have plenty of European news sources and want to catch up to the US. Then slowly new channels were introduced. At first confirming my beliefs, how healthcare is terrible et. all(in the US). Then it started planting small lies, like how there are “only two federal holidays”(it took me a while, even after quitting to dismiss this as a lie and actually checking my sources), and it started escalating, trying to push me left and towards more radical solutions. I’m not yet sure exactly when or how, but at some point I smelled bull crap and realised I was being messed up with. At which point I quit and started curing my own feed.