Folding Ideas
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2017–2023
14:24 · 1.3M views · Nov 22, 2017
Folding Ideas examines weird, algorithm-gamed children's content on YouTube, from automated toddler videos and educational spam to exploitative prank channels. It looks at how autoplay and recommendation systems reward this material.
HN people cite it as an eye-opening summary of Elsagate and the manipulation of YouTube's algorithm in threads about bot-made and kids' content.
5 comments from Hacker News
It's pretty reasonable, and smart I'd say. The kids content on YouTube has been heavily gamed by content farms optimizing content for SEO, making absolutely bizarre and sometimes disgusting content. Bit of a lengthy watch, but this video is pretty eye-opening: this video (It's a few years old at this point, but not a lot has changed, and possibly has gotten worse)
A video analysis of the related phenomenon: "Weird Kids' Videos and Gaming the Algorithm" this video It talks about possibly using machine learning to create many videos targeted at toddlers and using techniques to ensure the next autoplay item doesn't change to another channel.
I get what you're saying, but "the internet" has evolved alot. Even knowing the dangers that are present, and how marketers try to short-circuit your brain etc etc (which we did do, I'm very clear with my kids that every law needs an explanation and they are provided with explanations) I think 13 is still too young to be left alone. Really I don't believe there is a minimum age, it's more who can resist addictive behaviors, so you tell me. I'm not going to presume your age but at least when I was growing up, the internet was more like a giant flea market: you go in, and yes there could be things that might be bad or useless or creepy or diddly, and you really learn where the quality stuff is by poking around. Internet then was very analogous to going out into the real world where you learn risk through experience and can walk away. With the walled gardens we have today?... it's more like dropping an open kilo of cocaine in front your kid, saying "you can snort it, smoke it, shove it under a toenail, put it on your wee-wee and it will make you feel good for a bit, but then really, really, really bad. So be careful" then turning on a fan pointed in their direction as you walk out of the room... Everyone working on user engagement at FB, TikTok, Insta and the rest, they know how to keep you on with dopamine hits. The second a kid logs in, the hyperoptimization forces the most addictive, useless crap in their suggestions or feed no matter what their search is, such as the box ope
I don't see how this solves any problems. How would this hypothetical reddit coin work? Does reddit mint them or do the users have to buy them? How are they distributed? (e.g. based on interaction vs awarded by users) If this is to be a payment system, then these coins have value, value which can be taxed. Sure, meeting up with some dude and paying cash might avoid it, but the success of Coinbase shows convenience is king, and the demographics of reddit are far different than the initial Bitcoin crowd, so these exchanges would pop up much sooner. Even if reddit manages to dodge the tax situation by minting coins themselves (vs charging sales tax on purchased coins), the tax man will be more than happy to collect records from exchanges. You may be right in that distributions of virtual coins may not fall under any existing labor regulations, but I don't see that as a good thing. "Just think how much money we could save by skirting labor laws through paying people in crypto" is only a win for the employer. But even if these coins have no real value and can only be used on reddit for virtual goods reddit wholly owns (e.g. reddit gold), considering how people farm karma, a meaningless virtual number, I can only see more perverse incentives being created for those running repost bots. Edit: Much has been said about the state of Youtube monetization over the years and how infuriatingly often that yellow "limited/no ads" icon appears for seemingly no reason, about the drop in payout
> He knew exactly what to say to the responding officer to cover his ass Replacing human judgment with algorithms is a terrible idea for many reasons, but this might be the worst. Algorithms are deterministic, and thus they can be manipulated. "SEO" services exist in spite of Google's efforts to protect their ranking algorithm. Does anybody seriously believe their local government will be more successful than Google at preventing people (i.e. police, prosecutors, etc) from "optimizing" their input to the algorithm? edit - justification for the claim that a bail algorithm would be easy to manipulate: The recent single-pixel attack[1] against image classifiers. [LINK] Google's failure to recognize obviously inapropriate videos in their "youtube kids" app ("elsagate") [LINK] (a good summary & discussion this video )