Reject Convenience Forum

NB: I am posting this under ‘tech news’, for this is a recent development online I have observed myself. As far as I know, nobody has yet reported on it.

Many others here surely use Invidious, a proxy for YouTube. Until recently, it tended to produce related videos which, like YouTube in the 2000s, were actually related to the reel being shown, making it easy to browse. Within the last fortnight, I have begun to witness a worrying lapse. Mingled among the relevant films are what are, presumably, popular or trending results on YouTube as a whole. Sometimes, these default recommendations are offensive: a professor discussing ‘shocking truths’, or rather the same trite, hateful anti-Moslem rhetoric we have all had the misfortune to hear once before, came up at one point. Most times, the popular films are simply clutter. Invidious itself is surely innocent. I know Invidious has been struggling lately against YouTube’s hostility, and I assume that this debasement is upstream.

I have observed this mostly in Nadeko’s instance, simply because this is the one I happen to use the most, but it appears to affect other instances also. An anime clip on YewTube gives, as ‘related videos’, in the order in which they appear, a massacre in Austria (four times), Peppa Pig (twice), German as well as Austrian and (more often) US politics, the war in the Ukraine (twice), Digital Circus, an aeroplane crash and only one other link about anime. Has anybody else noticed similar trends on other Invidious instances lately, or even better, heard an explanation for it?

I use Invidious every now and then and I've noticed this too. I mostly use the yewtu.be instance, which is hosted in Germany, and most of the related videos I've seen recently were news/politics videos in German (I can't tell exactly what they were about though since I don't speak German). My guess was that something changed on the YouTube side and that it was just showing me popular videos from whichever country the instance happened to be hosted in. I don't remember coming across any hateful content like what you're describing though, that's definitely worrying.

Happily, Invidious settings allow one to block related videos. I did not know this until today, and would otherwise have used µBlock to achieve the same. If Invidious resumes suggesting actually related film in future, please let me know, but I can, at least, shut out the nonsense meanwhile.