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Videos @lemmy.world

Bell @lemmy.world

9mo ago

Am I the only one whose "shorts" feed is all basically softcore porn?

I almost never watch "shorts" but my suggestions for it seem to have an...uhhh...adult theme. I don't watch any such thing with YouTube. Does everyone see garbage like this?

224 comments

Bro you should have investigated the actual answer to this question before asking it publicly 😃
It's not to say you're watching lots of soft core porn but the algorithm has definitely decided that you'll like it
- There's alot I could argue with but maybe the best answer I have is: why just the shorts? The rest of my YouTube feed kinda sucks but it isn't porn or titillating at all.
  
  Theyre separate algorithms so its prolly the only type of shorts youve clicked or hovered over for a some time
- Well that’s just not how recommendation algorithms work. A part of it will be content based, directly related to what the user can be associated with.
  However, the largest part is collaboration based filtering of content. That means, our user is put in a group based on his other preferences, let’s assume nerdy tech stuff, and then is shown content that he has not liked yet but his group of peers has, meaning he could probably like it too.
  In other words - he’s not the one in fault here, YOU are (you pretty much have to be nerdy tech folks to be here).
  Please, could everyone here stop clicking on this stuff so that OP don’t have to be associated with your filthy behavior, thank you.
  
  that’s just not how recommendation algorithms work
  I didn't say anything about how they work -- only that it shows you stuff it thinks you will like. Which is basically what you said.
  However, the largest part is collaboration based filtering of content. That means, our user is put in a group based on his other preferences, let’s assume nerdy tech stuff, and then is shown content that he has not liked yet but his group of peers has, meaning he could probably like it too.
  Yes, based on other user patterns and how it categorizes him, it thinks he could probably like soft core porn too. That is, in fact, how it works. Glad we agree.
  In other words - he’s not the one in fault here, YOU are
  Please, could everyone here stop clicking on this stuff so that OP don’t have to be associated with your filthy behavior, thank you.
  So it's perfectly realistic that everyone could be clicking on soft core porn to feed the algorithm these ideas, in contrast to OP, who couldn't possibly be clicking on it? You've decided they're the one and only person who definitely isn't doing that when clearly someone is?
  How could you write this hostile and condescending message when I actually made a specific point to highlight the exact point you're making ("It's not to say you're watching lots of soft core porn") in my message? If a little more succinctly. I wasn't blaming OP in any way, just explaining (just as you did) that the algorithm based on his viewing patterns is what decides what to show him.
- I've gotten sexualized ads in my work Gmail which I only use for work emails and nothing else. Pretty sure step one of Google's algorithms is "is man? Show titty"

I got a lesbian lumberjack. She's jacked. I'm not even mad.
Edit: For the curious https://youtube.com/shorts/U87Y4HnGQWY
- Look how energetic she is
  
  Ah, to be young and a lesbian.
- holy shit lmao the first wood just gave up
  
  She knows her way around a maul.
- She's great. I saw a video of her a while ago using a sword that's designed to cut trees down.
- Lovely!
  
  She really is. She has the radiance of youth and fantastic muscle tone. Long may she lumberjack. 🫡
- I remember when she got a sword! She's fantastic.
  
  Oh WOW. I'd not seen that! Thank you.
- But if I click, will I start getting recommendations like OP’s feed?
  
  That's a good question. Usually I will delete from my viewing history when I don't want recommendations but it may work differently with shorts. The YT app has an incognito mode, but I think you will get ads (even if you pay for no ads) while it is on.
- She is peak wholesome+handsome content. The fun she's having decimating those logs is infectious.
  Quality recommendation 👍
- I wish I had committed massive fraud so I was sentenced to death and be be able to choose to be chopped down alive by her 🥺
  
  Dark but oddly relatable. Have an upvote.

Before anyone rails on OP too much let me tell you this. My shorts feed was full of tech stuff. Then one day I clicked on a hot girl and watched a few of the shorts. Big mistake. Now even though I'm not clicking on them again my feed looks like OPs.
I guess the lesson here is. Never click on these shorts ever if you don't want to get spammed by them.
- agree, I do have some other things in my feed, but I'd definitely say the algorithm has certain preferences.
  Probably has to do with most of my interests being pretty nice compared to 'ooh pretty girl'. So when it compares what I click on it's easier to find high frequency recommendations based on other peoples likes. I know fuck all about the algo that makes feeds, but my guess is that's how it works.
  
  Good point.
  There is probably also a lot more of these "pretty girl" videos than "5 Fun Facts About JavaScript" or "Here is a Mistake Everyone Makes in C" so it's easier for the algorithm to serve them.
- That's what it looks like when I'm logged out. It's just a bunch of nerd shit when I'm logged in. Don't click the tits, not even once.
  
  Soon, titty recommendation-free Google accounts could be a hot commodity.
  
  Don’t click the tits, not even once.
  This comment requires and deserves an epic reply of some kind, but I got nothing right now.
- This comment visualized
- I think the real lesson is: do not login and purge your cookies and browser storage regularly.
  
  Also Freetube, Newpipe
- I think it's been done for a minute, but YouTube definitely thought I was a furry for a hot minute.
- Thank god my feed is filled with dogs, kittens and birbs instead of this shit

Mine started out like this but eventually was replaced with gaming content and cars. Does anyone know how to get the porn back?
- Watch more porn.
  
  Doesn't work. You ever tried to buy sex toys on amazon? They will not let you run a proper search.

Mine isn't like that but there can be a few reasons I'd guess at:
YouTube recommends you things other people in your household watch (which can extend to random people if your isp uses cnat and doesn't give you an individual ip).
This one is more of a guess, but I'd assume a lot of people would click on that content, so if you never watch shorts maybe their algorithm just gives you the default recommendations.
If you watch adult content without protecting your privacy it's most likely associated with your account in their recommendations.
- I actively avoid clicking any videos with horny looking thumbnails, even if I really like the creator. Even still, I get shit like this. What exactly the fuck does this have to do with KSP? Why does google think I wanna see this?
  
  Yeah the YouTube algorithm is one of the worst recommendations engines I have seen tbh. It actively removes types of videos I repeatedly search for from my recommendations, and fills it with garbage I never watch.
  But in the case of op it looks like a 100% horny content ratio which seems excessive, even for yt.

I disabled shorts because it's brain-melting garbage, just like TikTok, which its based on.
- How do you disable them?
  
  u can hide shorts with uBLOCK. https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
  
  Depends where you're YouTubing. I believe the main solutions are browser extensions and app mods.
  
  Browser extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-youtube-shorts/) and ReVanced on Android.
- To be fair, the normal length videos are brain-melting garbage too.
  
  A statement that generic about a content-base as vast as Youtube's is just stupid.

I don't know why there's so much soft porn on every platform, skirting the rules and hiding just enough to be allowed.
The real porn is still there. You can just go look at it.

Yes u horny and they know, mine is all nerd shit like the other guy said

Lol that algorithm has you in that demo for a reason I'm sure. Not sure I would've asked this publicly.
Also, who's is a contraction of "who is" or "who has". You want the possessive "whose"
- Ty for the grammar lesson, I corrected it
- Not sure I would've asked this publicly.
  The horror of liking good looking women
- Not sure I would’ve asked this publicly.
  At this point I think everyone knows that everyone else does the same thing.

FYI: when you disable YouTube history it'll disable recommendations too
- My issue with that is that then you see default youtube, which is also terrible.
  
  It looks like this:
- Sort of. It pretends to disable recommendations, but things like shorts that show up in feeds a related videos are still skewed toward you. They just disable the ability to really scroll through them to try to encourage you to turn it back on. You can trust their profile on you is still kept up-to-date ;)
- Stop threatening me with a good time.
- Wow

Way to out yourself. Their algo depends on what you spend time watching. Lol
- Eh. Pretty much all of my viewing is related to physics I don't understand, astronomy I don't understand, and weird history stuff. I still get the soft porn algorithm on shorts.
  Closest I come to viewing is when I'm scrolling and my phone interprets that as a click. Then I get pissed off because that fraction of a second for the algorithm is like letting a single pregnant cockroach into your kitchen.
  
  Try to remember to select the 'Don't recommend this channel' any time you see those sorts of videos. I've been doing that a ton lately and my shorts feed is mainly shit that's actually interesting, and the more I ban those shit vids, the better my feed has been getting.
  
  Yeah, the simplicity and also effectiveness of advertising algorithms are sometimes overstated.
  There is a huge amount of data that is stored about users, and that does definitely make its way into the ads that we see. Grouping all the user information into ad categories is not a simple task, so there's a lot of mismatch that happens. But a lot of the time it's also location-based, time-based (when who views what) or even just what the biggest spenders want us to see based on our demographics. Tits and ass are fairly demographic agnostic, so they appear in a lot of feeds regardless of preference or orientation.
  Right-wingers are fairly desperate to push their viewpoints and pay a lot to so, so we end up with a lot of vague associations or fully non existent ones resulting in that kind of content appearing in feeds. I'm a left leaning, queer and trans woman living outside the US and I see these bullshit ads from time to time (which for obvious reasons is pretty infuriating). I honestly think that having a small online footprint and using adblockers, privacy-friendly browsers and operating systems, etc. is going to become more and more common just as a mode of self-care.
- This is just untrue. Shorts defaults to the same for me as a gay man who has never clicked on a single one of them.
- I had a phase, where it suggested loads of shorts from turkish cigarrette factories. I never watched anything cigarrette related and my subs contain mostly science communication, makers and some commentary channels
- Idk when I made a new account on Facebook all it did was show me fake pages with porn. After a while the algorithm caught up to my style and now I have to go find it randomly lol
- I constantly get pro right wing, pro Christian garbage in my feed. I keep spamming do not recommend channel and not interested and yt keeps shoveling that garbage in my shorts feed. Ads are also "suggested" based on geophraphic area.
- While that is true, it's also true that if the algo has no data on you it just shows you what most other people want to see, which is usually boobs
- Yeah, it seems to show me mostly comedy stuff, tool and hardware stuff, and some computer and retro gaming stuff. But almost none of this kind of stuff.
- Obviously not.
  
  I've never had anything softcore-adjacent even, mine are filled with magicians and obscure shorts that are not sexual in any way, at any point in history. They seem highly targeted toward my viewing history at any given moment in time.
- I'll say that at least a few months ago, on a brand new system I went to YouTube and it looked pretty much like this, with a fresh history and no login. I thought it was unusual and then I logged in and they mostly went away.

Mine shows 90% videos from channels I've either subscribed to or at least watched before, and 10% random pop culture stuff.
Then again, I don't actually use YouTube very much, and if I come across a video on Lemmy or wherever I never open it with a logged-in browser. Maybe I've inadvertently gamed the system.

Youtube Shorts hasn't done this for me (I actually follow some creators that make shorts so it's usually them) but Facebook's version is infuriatingly just like this and also I can't get rid of them. Every time I see one I go to the dots and select "don't see any more of these" but they just keep showing up and it's always some girl doing a yoga pose in a bikini, camera decidedly pointed directly at her vagina.
- “This one’s called downward kitty”

Works fairly well for me when I'm on the shorts doomscrolling. Your mileage could vary of course.

It only seems to show me the same 15-20 shorts since they first started featuring shorts on the main page. They're relevant to what I watch, but they're all hella old and I've seen the ones that interest me already. IDK why it never updates.
- Do you run an adblocker like PiHole or ADGuard on your network?
  
  I do have a PiHole. Why would that change the recommendations?
- I watched them mindlessly for a while, starting recently. But then the algorithm just started showing me like the same 15 videos and nothing else. One or two new ones here and there, but it's definitely fully lost any interest I had.

My shorts feed mostly consists of videos about the signs of depression and mechanical keyboards.
- You might want to stay away from mechanical keyboards.

Google has more info on you that any other company on the planet... they know what you are into. You private tabs were never really private.

Depends on whatever psychological profile google has created for you I guess. Currently mine is mostly about exotic guns, because I found that fascinating for a while. I don't own any guns and I am not a supporter of lax gun laws. But google does google things.
- You bastard LAX is a major international airport. We can’t afford to have lax security there.
  
  I am not a native english speaker. But according to the dictionary lax meand loose or casual. Is it uncommon?

My FB has loads of this and I am convinced it's because someone in my friends list is going wild on Asian cam girls
- Someone is the asian cam girl

I have my YouTube history off and before they disabled shorts feed for people with no history this is how it looked like, creepy af

On my subscription page, it shows shorts from my subscribed channels. On my main page, it's girls in bikinis playing on a guitar, violin or drums. I wantch a lot of independent musicians doing instrumental covers, but I don't recall seeing any of them wearing skimpy clothing.
I guess it's sort of like facebook, to increase engagement. I stopped visiting there about a year ago, but I didn't close my account. I now get one friend recommendation daily, and it's always sexy looking girls I've never heard of. These sites register me as male, so they always combine my interests with sexy females, to entice me to spend more time there.

Mine is hydraulic press and video game shit. Idk dude.

Here's my secret trick for making YouTube usable again:
- I'd like to do that but that's also how YouTube indicates which videos you've already watched, which YouTube will frequently re-serve in your recommendations.
  
  Oh, don't worry, reccomendations will be dead too! Fun fact, I turned off my Watch History 5+ years ago, but 6 months ago YouTube decided they, "needed," my history to give me recommendations. I decided that was fine, so now the Homepage tab is disabled, the Shorts tab is disabled, and now I just have a subscription list from creators I like! I still get related videos when watching a video, and that's more than adequate to discover new content. I don't have time to watch all my subscriptions anyway, so if YouTube can't reccomend 30 videos I've never seen before under every video I watch, what do I care?

Mine is entirely alt right "comedians" and helldivers 2. I'm pretty sure the algorithm thinks I wholeheartedly endorse the SuperEarth ideology.

Yeah buddy that's definitely on you mine is all science and homestead content.

My YouTube is well-trained, but this is how my Instagram is. Didn’t use it or follow anybody on it for years. Recently took to scrolling and watching funny dog videos on there. I was showing my GF a funny pupper and accidentally tapped the search loupe at the bottom. BOOM. Bouncing boobies and butts covered my screen. I just kind-of stared at it in disbelief, saying “What the hell?” She got a laugh out of it. I guess this is a big part of instagram now.
- If youtube shows me anything but music video's in my home page I tag them as do not like and don't show this type of content

Instagram is way more aggressive. I can't search for anyone on there without being blasted with highly questionable content and softcore
- Search for cats for a week or so and you'll only see cats.
  
  Can't decide if it's worth the effort to search for cats or just abandon ig

The algorithm makes sense to me, in that on my main PC I pretty much exclusively watch nerd shit on youtube. Tech stuff, 3D printing, machinery, motorcycles, that sort of thing. Youtube therefore probably assumes I am male, so in my Shorts feed seems to be comprised of about 90% boobies, and 10% clips about guns.
But then the algorithm doesn't make sense to me, because on my living room PC we pretty much exclusively watch cat videos, bird videos, and videos-for-cats (the ones with all birds and squirrels and stuff), How Ridiculous, and Gavin Free. The Shorts feed there is also roughly 90% boobies, but in fairness the remaining 10% appears to be cats.
(Neither instance is logged in to a Google account or anything.)

YouTube = Alphabet = Google Search
They know.
- YouTube = Alphabet = Google Search
  That, or his ISP.

I downloaded an extension on Firefox that blocks all shorts.
- Is there any way to block them on the Xbox app?

My shorts is mostly what I watch on long form and vice versa

More of a you think, I think. My shorts feed mostly comedy stuff, DND stuff, art stuff, and music stuff. Well, and the odd Christian preacher, which I assume gets wrapped up with the atheism content I also see.

I'm always on an anonymous VPN and for work am never logged in to YouTube and this is the unfiltered garbage I see too on suggested content.

Honestly, I recently created a fake Facebook account and the first things to pop up in the "shorts" was all actual porn (soft but nudity and all) so unlike others I don't think this MUST be your own doing

Mine is a bunch of podcast clips and reality TV drama slop.
I guess it suggests whatever is popular in your country?

First, why do you even have a shorts feed? Get rid of that trash. Second, stop clicking on porn and it'll stop recommending you porn.
- But how are you going to watch porn if you don't click on it /s
  
  Psst. There are other sites where that's also available, for free, with better quality.

YouTube lately has stopped attempting reccomendations entirely, instead they berate me for having history turned off lmao.

I disabled shorts everywhere. Before I saw your post, I couldn't even recall YouTube having shorts.
Also, Google tracks your everything, not just your YouTube history. You likely use Google Search a lot for adult content. Even a VPN and browsing on incognito mode might not save you. They have lots of ways track you.
- Then why am I not seeing uh … never mind

There are Firefox extensions to: disable shorts, make your homepage your subscription page.
- Also revanced can disable shorts on mobile and smart tube next on tv

Never touch the YT homepage. Always went straight to Subscription tab and watch stuff you subscribe to or search for the stuff you want to watch yourself. Also turn off watch history and web activity.

Jelly- mine is all electronics, home building, and plumbers. Oh yeah, and a bunch of standup comedy.

I'm just getting REAL tired of YT recommending these shit channels that have <300 views, <10 thumbs up, and yet have 20k+ subs and their just ripped videos from other sources with obviously AI generated text to voice.
I've reported a few, and YT has removed them.
Here's an example of one, https://www.youtube.com/@WorldViewtheory973/videos
Putting out a video on random topics every 2 hours.

Mine's the same. For some strange reason, full of hot chicks. I also don't watch shorts. Maybe they know I'm male and figure that will draw me in.

YouTube shorts are something I hate so much, that is why I removed them thanks to the extensions available for Firefox.

click on the non-horny ones for thom to stop suggesting it to you

There's plenty of extensions to block shorts entirely. I'm on YouTube for a good reason. If I was interested in under 10min videos I'd be elsewhere.
- You can also just block element with uBlock to get rid of it, no need for an additional extension.
- I just deactivated recommendations completely. If I want to watch something new, I'll just use certain search terms.

Google knows!!!!

Obligatory Viva La Dirt League Video
Trying to stop the tiktok dancers
- this video's timeline tells you all you need to know about the subject

Yes you are.

Hahaha. Whoa! So different. Mine is All stand up comedians and military training things and toolmakers DIY stuff.

I ended up installing an extension that blocked all shorts, most of them are trash waste of time anyways.
- Dunno what you are subbing to or your interests but mine are almost always sciency (chemistry/physics), engineering, tech, gaming, IT or comedy related.
  
  Most of mine were short cropped clips of videos I've already seen, so it was a big waste of time having them up.

224 comments