YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
This was addressed more broadly in "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads" by Zeynep Tufekci on TED.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014</a><p>She remarked that Youtube's recommendation system invariably pushes people towards more extreme views on <i>anything</i>, not just politics. Interested in vegetarianism? Here's something about veganism. She has a hypothesis it works this way because the goal is to make people spend as much time on a site as possible, and feeding people progressively more extreme content works for that.<p>My comment: what does it say about us humans that we fall for progressively more extreme stuff? Perhaps that few people actually hold balanced views and nowadays a compromise is looked down upon and a mark of a weak character?