Isn’t this how all propaganda works? Algorithms are just the latest form, so are you against algorithms and propaganda or just against their use against anarchism?
Patreon blocks both my current VPN server which I can’t be bothered to change for its sake and Tor, so I can’t currently see whatever was linked to. If there was some kind of preview or text describing what’s there, it might provide an incentive to work around that problem.
But anyway, I have opinions. Not every recommendations algorithm need be designed to promote lowest-common-denominator stuff to every single user regardless of their preferences. Youtube’s archive contains hundreds of thousands of amazing, enlightening, surprising, informative, well-crafted, entertaining videos. Enough to keep me watching for the rest of my life. But I’ll never see most of them, because there is no way to find them. Their algorithm does not serve those of us who want to see novel and interesting things on a wide range of topics — it serves those who want to watch the same specific thing again and again. It’s a design choice. They could do better.
Instead they usually seem to do worse, pushing everyone towards commentary on the latest Donald Trump news by default.
I don’t think you meant to respond to me.
Thanks. Now I feel obliged to read it…
Perhaps I don’t know what “breadtube” is. I knew it only as a reddit sub, on which people would post links to youtube videos generally having something to do with perspectives seen to be on the left of the traditional political spectrum. This was a few years ago. There was no ideological consistency at all. Not much anarchism either. But it was not homogenous. When an anarchist video did turn up it was typically not “shunned and ridiculed” — according to my memory it was more often welcomed in the sub as being unusually on-topic.
I don’t know whether my differing perception of it is because “Breadtube” (with a capital B) refers to something else, or because youtube has evolved in some way to subvert it, or just that the community changed since the days when I was on reddit.
Certainly it never steered me anywhere near Stalinism. The Youtube algorithm does not treat everyone equally; perhaps if I’d watched more of the mediocre influencer-socialist stuff it would have done. It’s hard to guess what’s going on. A more convincing explanation of it would require more reference to specific examples.
