This change from YouTube may shorten up those rabbit holes we have all fallen down.

Back in the day, you’d only find people claiming the Earth is flat or that fluoride in the water supply is dangerous at the farthest flung reaches of the internet. But then YouTube started offering it up. Now, noting that some such content may violate their community guidelines, the video publishing site says they will no longer put similar ones in their recommendations.

From the official YouTube Blog:

You might remember that a few years ago, viewers were getting frustrated with clickbaity videos with misleading titles and descriptions (“You won’t believe what happens next!”). We responded by updating our system to focus on viewer satisfaction instead of views, including measuring likes, dislikes, surveys, and time well spent, all while recommending click bait videos less often. More recently, people told us they were getting too many similar recommendations, like seeing endless cookie videos after watching just one recipe for snicker-doodles. We now pull in recommendations from a wider set of topics—on any given day, more than 200 million videos are recommended on the homepage alone. In fact, in the last year alone, we’ve made hundreds of changes to improve the quality of recommendations for users on YouTube.

We’ll continue that work this year, including taking a closer look at how we can reduce the spread of content that comes close to—but doesn’t quite cross the line of—violating our Community Guidelines. To that end, we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.

YouTube wants to cut back on conspiracy theory type stuff, and or medically inaccurate videos. This is the real battle against fake news.

Now this doesn’t mean that YouTube is no longer recommending anything. I check the site daily to see what is trending and always click at least one video “Recommended For You”. This was today’s recommendation for me, based on the algorithms of what I click and watch when on their page.

ME likey that I got a video trying to expose truth vs a hollywood movie! (Love that film though!)

Susan Saunders 2/11/19