this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
410 points (95.6% liked)

Videos

14285 readers
85 users here now

For sharing interesting videos from around the Web!

Rules

  1. Videos only
  2. Follow the global Mastodon.World rules and the Lemmy.World TOS while posting and commenting.
  3. Don't be a jerk
  4. No advertising
  5. No political videos, post those to !politicalvideos@lemmy.world instead.
  6. Avoid clickbait titles. (Tip: Use dearrow)
  7. Link directly to the video source and not for example an embedded video in an article or tracked sharing link.
  8. Duplicate posts may be removed

Note: bans may apply to both !videos@lemmy.world and !politicalvideos@lemmy.world

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.