“If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San
Francisco will bring you to life.” ~ William Saroyan
“Anyone who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me.”
~ Anthony Bourdain
“I can walk down the streets of San Francisco,
and here I am normal.” ~ Robin Williams
Although I normally make videos on fairly serious topics, when I watch YouTube, I almost
always watch light entertainment. This is a typical list of my recommended videos — British
and Australian comedies. However, on New Year’s Eve, this video kept popping up in my recommended
list — The Bridge documentary. As you can tell from the picture, the topic of the video
is a rather gruesome one. It takes a look at a particularly morbid aspect of San Francisco’s
Golden Gate Bridge. I didn’t watch it as I wanted to kick back and watch some light
entertainment, however, yesterday (on New Year’s Day), this video recommendation kept
popping up again. Often, I watch repeats of an Australian comedy show called Thank God
You're Here. But yesterday, when I started typing in the title, “th”, this came up:
Recommendations to watch The Bridge documentary. So last night, I gave into temptation and
watched the movie in full. I figured, YouTube is really pushing me to watch this video,
so maybe there’s more to it than I think. After watching it, I realised it was exactly
what I thought it would be — A video that showed people making the quickest possible
departure from the Golden Gate Bridge with no intention of ever coming back.
My question. What the f*** are YouTube thinking? It’s New Year’s Eve — a time when many
people are probably feeling lonely — and they’re recommending this to them. I thought,
maybe it’s just me that they’re recommending it to, so I looked through the comments section.
Almost everyone was saying the same thing: “It’s crazy that so many of us got this
video recommended on New Years 2019”; “Is YouTube evil, or just YouTube Algorithms?”;
“This is the saddest thing YouTube has ever recommended me...”; “Everyone: Happy New
Year! YouTube Algorithm: You should totally watch this awesome video!”.
So what’s going on here? Some of you might be thinking, it’s just the YouTube algorithm.
It just recommends videos that are popular at the time. But my rebuttal to that is this:
I’ve never been recommended this type of video before; I’ve never done a search or
watched a video about the Golden Gate Bridge; I’ve never done a search or watched a video
about San Francisco. Why the hell are they recommending The Bridge documentary on New
Year’s Eve? Is it for money? No, I don’t think so. I’m pretty confident this video
can’t be monetised due to its content, and I doubt any companies would want to advertise
on it anyway. I mean, my videos get demonetised at the drop of a hat. There’s no financial
motive for YouTube to recommend this video. Then what is it?
I think there can only be one of a few things going on here:
One, the YouTube algorithm is broken and needs fixing. I mean, YouTube are the self-proclaimed
protectors of the Internet. They have super-strict policies on harmful, dangerous, and graphic
content, especially content that could harm children: “Don't post videos that encourage
others to do things that might cause them to get badly hurt, especially kids.”; “It's
not okay to post violent or gory content that's primarily intended to be shocking, sensational
or gratuitous.” By recommending The Bridge, it seems like they’re directly going against
their own policies.
Two. Somebody in YouTube bears a grudge, so in order to embarrass YouTube, have started
pushing these sorts of videos to viewers’ recommended lists. I don’t know if anybody
at YouTube actually has this power, but it is a possibility.
Three. And this is the most sinister of all. YouTube are experimenting with video
recommendations
to see how it affects people. I hope this is not what they’re doing as it could be
seen as downright evil. I’m hoping the reason behind these morbid recommendations is just
incompetence. Somebody forget to turn on the filter for videos that might encourage people
to jump off tall structures.
It doesn’t take much searching to find that this is an ever-growing problem in the US.
Rates have been going up at least for the last decade. Hopefully there’s no correlation
with the rise of YouTube and the rise shown on this chart.
Anyway, that’s it for me. What do you think? Is this just a conspiracy theory on my part,
or is there actually an evil plot? Perhaps YouTube is just incompetent? Either way,
it doesn’t look good for YouTube.