The act of interacting on YouTube used to be an entirely public matter. You could say anything you want as long as it didn’t break any laws and trust it to be thrown into the public. Nowadays you comment on something, and there’s a 75% chance of you being shadowbanned without knowing why, with the video owner being the main filter of what people see, forcing feuds to take place not in comments but in back and forth videos, since this means everyone’s content has become their own little echo chamber, which means a stable argument is impossible, and combined with the fact YouTube is highly indifferent to even most of its most important rules broken, as well as combined with the fact popularity is based entirely on luck now, means anyone can use it as a platform to slander any person or topic completely unchallenged if they’re the one who gets popular while the challenger cannot. And because YouTube once had a reputation for being the best platform for information, most people who grew up with this reputation who have never had to deal with its modern incarnation don’t think to question anything. It’s a literal den of snakes now, you got misinformation trolls coming out its wazoo. What ways have you used to circumvent the issue?

  • plm00@lemmy.ml
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    3 days ago

    Strictly from a viewer’s perspective, I use a YouTube client alternative (like GrayJay, Freetube, NewPipe) and subscribe only to the channels I want to see content from. Then I can look at video suggestions for given videos to see relevant content. This entirely removes me from the algorithm as well as any personalization that would put me in an echo chamber. I also branch out to reliable and unbiased news sources, better search engine alternatives, and so on.