Wouldn’t that break relativity tho if you treat the earth as a fixed point? Stuff really far out would have to be going absurdly faster than light to orbit the earth once every 24h. I feel like that’s one of the ways to tell whether or not you’re rotating, or stuff is orbiting you.
My boyfriend occasionally watches YouTube shorts, mostly for the occasional good joke or cat video. He’s told me that the shorts algorithm seemingly goes out of its way to show him Andrew Tate type content as well as general Daily Wire/Shapiro/conservative ‘libs owned’ clips. More or less, if he doesn’t immediately close out the app or swipe to the next short when one of these videos comes up, his shorts feed is quickly dominated by them.
I think the big thing is that these algorithms are often trained on maximizing watch time/app usage, and there’s something uniquely attention-catching to a lot of men and boys about the way viral manosphere content is constructed. A random poor setup to a skit is likely to get swiped past, but if the next clip comes swinging out of the gate with “here’s how women are destroying the West” there’s a certain morbid curiosity that gets some to watch the whole thing (even out of amusement/credulousness), or at least stay on the clip slightly longer than they would otherwise. If one lingers on that content to any degree, the algorithm sees that as a sign that the user wants more of it—or rather, that it would achieve its “more engagement” goals by serving up more of it.
Plus, it’s grabbing ideas on what to recommend based on user data and clustered associations. It’s very likely to test the waters with stuff it knows worked for others with similar profiles, even if it’s a bit of a reach.
I’m inclined to believe it’s one of those things that, once it enters the recommendation sphere on your account, it’s really hard to get it to go away without manually removing profiling info via Google account settings. I just remembered now, at one point he did run a personal experiment to try and see how extreme the content would get if he let it play after it started showing up. After getting kind of disturbed with how bad it got, and bored of laughing at it for amusement, he tried training the algorithm to only show him cat videos and kind of settled on where it currently is. I’m guessing his account has a lot of those older associations still tied, and the algorithm tries to rekindle them from time to time.
I’m pretty certain the shorts algorithm is kind of “its own thing” in a lot of ways. It’s a prime “your mileage may vary” system, and because so many right wing creators upload to it, it’s basically a numbers game unless you get lucky with the algorithm when it’s first getting a handle on your preferences.
While I don’t know this for certain, the only really effective way to get the algorithm to stop showing you something is to literally close the app for a while when it puts one in front of you. Combined with searching up shorts for the stuff you want, I think it’s possible but it’s really persistent if it thinks it should show you specific kinds of content.
At the end of the day, however, they’re machine learning models, and while we can gesture at trends, nobody knows the full ins and outs of how a specific model makes its decisions. Kind of scary that we trust them to the role of curation in the current environment at all to be honest
If the companies know that a strike will only last for a day/short time it’s kind of doomed from the start to achieve little to nothing. If workers are looking for concessions, that requires prolonged effort and solidarity fundraising/organizing 99 times out of 100.
Gig economy companies know this, which is why they structure their product experience both for consumers and workers to be as alienated and atomized as possible. They also run specials all the time such as “complete 10 drives in the next 48 hours for a $50 bonus” which can be a pretty effective picket line-crossing incentive for those who need the money. People from this group will likely be much harder to reach because of their financial situation demanding so much of their attention. It’s so easy for the companies to just turn up the compensation dial temporarily, and if they know it’s coming they can just weather the 24 hours with generous offers to potential scabs and then go back to business as usual when it’s over.
Organizing despite the difficulties is the only way, but it’s definitely a stacked deck.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the decisions are couched in language such as streamlined, direct, integrated, and highly manageable user experience solutions or task workflows tailored to flexibly maximize dynamic engagement metric requirements to euphemise the fact that the goal to deliberately sandbox and disempower users. Could also be the case that the pretense is dropped altogether in some contexts, like when unionization is actively being discussed as a threat model to the bottom line.
At any rate I’m glad to hear from someone “on the inside” that I’ve got an accurate assessment of the situation. Depressing how the situation is, but thanks for weighing in.
xkcd #2898: Orbital Argument ( imgs.xkcd.com )
xkcd.com/2898...
AI ‘Aggro-rithms’ target boys with harmful content within 60s ( www.vodafone.co.uk )
Uber, Lyft, DoorDash drivers in the U.S. to strike on Valentine’s Day for fair pay ( www.nbcnews.com )