I don’t need to “trust” anything other than my eyes. I watch shorts often and never get anything close to “brainwashing” content and it is always tailored to what I watch. I don’t know what your goal is with this comment - are you trying to convince me that that isn’t the case?
My goal is to inform you that your N=1 is unrepresentative, I came in to say: “shorts algorithm suggestions were completely out of wack to my YouTube account(too!)” so now we have at least n=3, and if we can trust each other to say the truth, your ‘its a you problem’ is false. That’s important, because you accused someone of having certain interests, based on their experiences with that algorithm. I think that’s pulling the gun and putting too much ‘trust’ in a commercial YT algorithm, that worked for some (you I guess) but not for all.
I’ve had the same experience as Maalus. I don’t get served right-wing content on videos nor do I get dancing teenage girls.
However, I’ve told YouTube that I’m following about 20 different channels which gives the algorithm a decent idea of what I like and I’ve told YouTube a few years ago not to show me Ben Shapiro videos when it tried once.
I have to ask, if you get right wing videos, do you click on the “Do not show videos like this” button?
With shorts specifically, on my old now non existant account, which had a scary good profile of me, I got washed with right wing bullshit and transphobia when it shoehorned shorts in my life. It knew very very well who I was and that I would not enjoy any of that. I notified YT through don’t show me this again buttons, and when it wouldn’t stop I informed them they had 7 days to get this out of my recommendations or I would close my activity at their website. They did not react, they did not make shorts an option, they did not get the right wing garbage out of the 3 shorts they managed to throw in my face somehow every day when using YouTube. This account was over 10yo. Seeing how good their normal recommendations were, I can only conclude it was broken or bought for shorts, and thus you should be extremely reticent/reluctant blaming it on the users when they get wierd stuff.
