New study reveals what we all know: YouTube's recommendation algorithms are terrible

It's a fairly common joke among the intensely online — that you can look up guitar overdrive pedal reviews on YouTube, and within three steps, somehow still end up on some extreme conspiracist right wing bullshit video. But that joke's not funny anymore, or perhaps it never was, according to a recent Mozilla study that was highlighted thusly in the MIT Technology Review:

Mozilla researchers analyzed seven months of YouTube activity from over 20,000 participants to evaluate four ways that YouTube says people can 'tune their recommendations'—hitting Dislike, Not interested, Remove from history, or Don't recommend this channel. — Read the rest