Meet A Developer Pulling Back The Curtain On How YouTube Sees You
"There are actually way more conspiracy videos on YouTube than I initially thought."
Welcome to Extra Garbage Day! Every other week, I’ll be dropping a bonus Thursday issue just for paying subscribers. To start, these will be Q&As with interesting people I’ve been dying to interview. Let me know what you think.
It can be really hard to wrap your head around the size and scale YouTube. It has 2 billion monthly active users, making it the second most popular website in the world behind Facebook.
While YouTube’s algorithm can seem old and stale compared to the hyperactive AI at the heart of something like TikTok, its recommendation engine is still incredibly powerful and incredibly influential. And its promotion of conspiratorial videos is one of the main drivers of misinformation movements like QAnon.
But identifying what exactly the YouTube is doing to our brains and our society is difficult. Its impact is both too large to fully comprehend and also too personal to separate from your behavior.
I’ve recently been using the platform to learn about music production. I have a question like, “how do compressors work?” I type it into YouTube. I find a video that seems like it could my question. In the recommendations beneath that video, there are more videos listed covering related topics. I click on a few of those, as well. What started as an active 15-minute search to fix a problem has become an hour of passive watching. Not only that, but after a few weeks of doing this, I’ve started to recognize channels that show up more often than others. When means that now I have favorite music production YouTube channels — Underbelly, Ocean, and Ash are ones I watch a lot. And of the top 10 videos suggested to me on YouTube’s front page, only one this morning was not music production related (It was a King Of Hill remix of the Neon Genesis Evangelion opening). YouTube has decided I am a music maker. Two months ago, my front page was all videos about comic book movies and anime. I am in a new category now.
Is it weird to feel kind of sad about that? I haven’t personally decided that I am a new kind of person, but YouTube has. I know I will always care about comic books and science fiction and anime. I’m not sure if this new electronic music production Ryan will be as permanent. And yet, YouTube has made its decision.
The minor nagging existential questions YouTube inspires made me really interested in TheirTube, a project created by Amsterdam-based developer Tomo Kihara.
TheirTube is a YouTube simulator that allows you to assume the role of another kind of user. It currently offers six personality types to explore.
The Fruitarian: The videos it recommends focus on organic eating, natural diets, and vegetarian and veganism. This morning, it suggested a video showing off vegan pub food, a four-hour music video of meditation music, an instructional video about vitamins from a chiropractor with 2.95 million subscribers, and an episode of an anti-vax radio show.
The Prepper: This morning it suggested a video about World War II, a video listing good foods preppers can stock up on, a video guide to various survival gear, and a video offering tips on how to prep in an apartment.
The Liberal: Admittedly, this one feels the fuzziest to me. It suggests BreadTubers like Destiny and Vaush, but also more center-of-the-road liberal content from Trevor Noah and the New York Times. Perhaps that’s just the radicalization effect of the algorithm compressed into one page of videos.
The Conservative: This one is playing all the hits — Steven Crowder, Rebel News, Paul Joseph Watson, Ben Shapiro.
The Conspiracist: What I find most interesting about the Conspiracist option is it combines QAnon videos, Joe Rogan interviews, and more playful content like Shane Dawson and BuzzFeed Unsolved. But it makes sense. The result is something that doesn’t look wholly different from the History Channel. Want to watch videos about ghosts? What about ancient aliens? Well, here’s a video about how satanists run the Democratic Party. It all feels like entertainment until it’s not anymore.
The Climate Denier: And finally, this one is all based around “debunking” climate science. This morning all of the videos were focused on explaining why the California wildfires aren’t actually due to climate change. Interestingly though, it also offered a Fox News video.
Kihara and I connected a few weeks ago and I was able to ask him a couple questions about how TheirTube works. He told me his biggest surprise is that conspiracy content is way more prevalent on YouTube than he thought.
Can you tell me a little bit about the kind of work you do? It seems like a lot of the projects you've made have this great wholesome vibe that emphasizes connection.
I like to develop products that challenge difficult social problems. One of the themes I am interested in is how to make products that change how people look at the world after experiencing it.
I know YouTube and its effect on the way we see the world is this huge topic right now, but was there anything specific that inspired you to make TheirTube?
Seeing the YouTube top page of someone different who has very conspiracist views of the world. It made me rethink the nature of how we live in different information environments.
I read that the TheirTube personas are based on interviews with real YouTube users who experienced similar recommendation bubbles. Did you conduct those interviews or?
Yes, I reached out to people on YouTube comments. I contacted several people I found that fall under the category of the biases I wanted to further explore. I looked at the popular videos in each genre and contacted the people who were commenting favorably to the notion mentioned in the video and was also subscribing to the channels related to that notion.
What was the biggest surprise you had building TheirTube?
There are actually way more conspiracy videos on YouTube than I initially thought.
And what have the reactions been like since you released it?
It went huge on Reddit, and I was quite surprised how people were comparing their own YouTube feed to the feed on TheirTube, and trying to understand what kind of bubble they were in. I guess this really helps people to gain somewhat of objectivity in their own recommendation environment.
I played around a bunch with it and I thought the user archetypes were really interesting and made a lot of sense. I was wondering what kind of other types of users are you thinking about adding?
I was thinking of making, the following personas
unboxer → for unpacking products
the kid → for watching videos
What's the most important thing you want people to take away from TheirTube?
That your feed is always unique and tailored to your taste, so always beware of that.
And lastly, YouTube feels such an overwhelmingly large machine to wrap your head around. Do you feel like, after putting TheirTube together, you have a better sense of what YouTube actually?
Not really, because it is too big and the TheirTube project takes only a snapshot of the entire picture. Guillaume Chaslot's project AlgoTransparency project gives you a better grasp on how the recommendations works by showing the most recommended videos from a set of 1000+ information channels. My project only shows a small part of it.
And I have no intention of criticizing Google or Youtube on the filter bubble problems they created, as what they are dealing with is too big for any kind of human intervention to work. But I do hope [TheirTube] allows users to choose what kind of information they are getting, which I think is a step towards solving the filter bubble problem.
Thank you for supporting Garbage Day. Your subscriptions have helped make this newsletter into something bigger than I could have ever imagined. Make sure to check out previous Extra Garbage Days like my interview with extremism researcher Sarah H (@nezumi_ningen on Twitter) and my interview with YouTube musician Skatune Network.
Oh, and here’s that King Of The Hill Evangelion video YouTube recommended me.
***Typos in this email aren’t on purpose, but sometimes they happen***