Vosyl

Yvonne MacStitch

@Vosyl

Black-Tailed Jackrabbit

Known Obscurant ▼ Anti-Social ▲ No Label
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Psychology & Criminology Student.
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A Trans Woman in her early thirties. I write,
draw, and even play music. An avid comicbook nerd,
a chess geek, and indie ttrpg enjoyer.
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I'm also a part-time supervillain.
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ϴ⨺

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Lizstar
@Lizstar

Algorithmic Men

This past week I've watched two videos by two different relatively intelligent men on Youtube (Hank Green and Anthony Fantano) where they say "My audience is mostly men".

This is almost certainly incorrect, and needs to be broadcast more.

How do they learn this information? Well, via Youtube itself of course. Youtube has info it can give you about the statistics of your channel. Okay. Well how does Youtube get that info? Do they ask every single person who signs up what their gender is? No, of course they don't. They use Algorithms.

What do these algorithms do? Well, EXTREMELY simplyfying it, let's just say they watch what videos you watch, and then if the topic of that video would appeal to men, you're a man. Hank Green's into science, that's totally a man thing. Fantano's music channel? That's manly, my friend. Why YES, men wrote this algorithm, how did you know?

I imagine there's also some kind of feedback loop. "You watch Anthony Fantano but I don't have your gender listed here. Well, the people who watch Fantano are mostly men, so you're a man".

Anyways this annoys me and people should talk about this much louder. If only because I don't want to go on Youtube and get those "YOUR A MAN SO YOU NEED MANLY SOAP" ads.

lorenziniforce
@lorenziniforce

warning, if you're trans, do not go into the settings and manually set your gender to female like I did,I did that and got endless ads for feminine hygeine products and baby formula and it activated the unlimited dysphoria works

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in reply to @Lizstar's post:

XandoToaster
@XandoToaster

I'm not saying this is necessarily wrong, but when you make a google account, doesn't it ask your gender? I could have sworn I remember it asking that the last time I set up an account for something. I always assumed the data came from that. It wouldn't surprise me at all though if under the hood they did just use algorithms to determine this because that sounds like the kind of stupid thing a big tech company would do.

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XandoToaster
@XandoToaster

Wow! That is a very strange and uncomfortable data set to see has been collected on you. I don't think I ever opted out of data collection on discord, so I'm very curious now what they think of me. Thank you for sharing that, it is insightful into how companies like this work.

And regarding times where google isn't in a position to just check your account to see your gender, even if they are using user-provided data to figure out demographics, there are still so many problems with that that I agree with the overall point of the post that this data is going to be naturally wrong in so many ways as to be virtually worthless. (A child wouldn't tell google they're 18, forever skewing their demographic info would they? :eggbug-tuesday:)

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SophiaImpetus
@SophiaImpetus

This is a thing that absolutely drives me mad when youtubers I otherwise respect who seem to have a great care for facts and stuff just. Assume that the gender youtube says their audience have is true and then make assumptions about their audience because of that.

I know for a fact google's algorithm has been hilariously wrong about me when advertising even when I set my account gender to female, but since blocking as much tracking as possible it works a lot better. I would say it says something about how just because you have the most data collected doesn't mean the conclusions you draw from it are the most trustworthy or even meaningful in any way, and I suppose that could speak for generative AI too lol.

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antimu0n
@antimu0n

It's all about marketing in the end and it is. so. very. annoying.
There are some absolutely archaic ideas about masculinity and femininity baked into these stupid algorithms, and it's kinda funny how they employ giant datacenters full of AI hardware crunching mined data to profile you, and in the end you just get the same ads for crypto and dick pills. It's the goddamn tea machine joke from Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

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echo-parallax
@echo-parallax

I have some numbers as well for it being biased: I used to co-run the YouTube channel for a university video game orchestra from 2016 to 2019 with ~20,000 subscribers. At the time, YouTube estimated our online audience as 98% men (if I remember correctly), which is laughably implausible — even more so given that the orchestra itself and its in-person audience had roughly even gender demographics (although the composers whose pieces were played were biased roughly 2:1 in favor of men, which I wasn't happy to find when I ran the numbers).

YouTube's numbers here are absolutely unreliable (not even mentioning things like segmenting non-binary users into one of two groups) and I'm even more disappointed in YouTube for creating and perpetuating these feedback loops. (Apologies for the rant!)

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