Comment by alecco
5 days ago
I just tried this: browse YouTube with incognito and watching 3 engineering vids only (Veritasium, Real Engineering, and Practical Engineering).
The home page shorts are about 50% thirst traps. There is creepy stuff, click-bait, and American politics/news (for and against Trump).
The worst one is a short "this is why ram costs $900" by "discord memes" showing a young girl with revealing clothing. Almost 1 million views.
I closed my YouTube account years ago because it was just pissing me off.
I feel this issue has started to slowly become worse and worse as we've been able to build better "preference profiles" based on small amounts of data. I notice it often when watching a single YouTube video in incognito mode, the sidebar is usually full of fairly racist Australian content (I am Australian). This is something I would never normally see, and not something that's likely coming from whatever video I've decided to watch in incognito. It's likely just assuming based on what's a common trend in my location.
If an algorithm knows you well, it's usually pretty okay, but until that point you're being bombarded with lowest common denominator content based on your demographic. Shorts seems to be even worse; mine is mostly science facts and comedy skits, I didn't understand the "brainrot" descriptions until I looked at a few in incognito mode.