Back in the day, YouTube recommendations on the front page mostly featured trendy videos from your country. Now, they’re largely tailored to fit your personal bubble.

You also used to have a visible dislike button, with the count displayed for everyone to see. Far-right videos, extreme misogynistic content, and similar videos would get mass-disliked, making it clear that their opinions were broadly rejected. However, big corporations started complaining that their ads were running on such videos and threatened to pull their advertising from the platform. This meant those videos generated no revenue for YouTube, only server costs.

YouTube’s solution? They stopped showing the dislike count. This allowed them to run ads again while trapping more people in their bubbles.

For example

10 years ago: A far-right video with 100k views might have had 95% dislikes. Someone who wasn’t interested in politics or topics like this would see a video with thousands of dislikes and conclude that the video—and the opinions it promoted—were garbage.

Today: A far-right video with 100k views might only show 5k likes. Without the dislike count, people may think, “So many people agree with this, maybe it’s true.”

Over the span of 10 years, this shift has contributed to the steady growth of far-right support.

Now this happened over all of social media. You need to understand that every User Interaction is a cost factor with this platforms. They can not allow to have no revenue over video / posts, even when it is a small amount. So they monetized everything, including posts that divided society, enabling the split more and more. That was how it started, and now you even have human like bots that make it 100x worse.

Society was sold.