Men's Liberation
This community is first and foremost a feminist community for men and masc people, but it is also a place to talk about men’s issues with a particular focus on intersectionality.
Rules
Everybody is welcome, but this is primarily a space for men and masc people
Non-masculine perspectives are incredibly important in making sure that the lived experiences of others are present in discussions on masculinity, but please remember that this is a space to discuss issues pertaining to men and masc individuals. Be kind, open-minded, and take care that you aren't talking over men expressing their own lived experiences.
Be productive
Be proactive in forming a productive discussion. Constructive criticism of our community is fine, but if you mainly criticize feminism or other people's efforts to solve gender issues, your post/comment will be removed.
Keep the following guidelines in mind when posting:
- Build upon the OP
- Discuss concepts rather than semantics
- No low effort comments
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Assume good faith
Do not call other submitters' personal experiences into question.
No bigotry
Slurs, hate speech, and negative stereotyping towards marginalized groups will not be tolerated.
No brigading
Do not participate if you have been linked to this discussion from elsewhere. Similarly, links to elsewhere on the threadiverse must promote constructive discussion of men’s issues.
Recommended Reading
- The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, And Love by bell hooks
- Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements by Michael Messner
Related Communities
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My boyfriend occasionally watches YouTube shorts, mostly for the occasional good joke or cat video. He's told me that the shorts algorithm seemingly goes out of its way to show him Andrew Tate type content as well as general Daily Wire/Shapiro/conservative 'libs owned' clips. More or less, if he doesn't immediately close out the app or swipe to the next short when one of these videos comes up, his shorts feed is quickly dominated by them.
I think the big thing is that these algorithms are often trained on maximizing watch time/app usage, and there's something uniquely attention-catching to a lot of men and boys about the way viral manosphere content is constructed. A random poor setup to a skit is likely to get swiped past, but if the next clip comes swinging out of the gate with "here's how women are destroying the West" there's a certain morbid curiosity that gets some to watch the whole thing (even out of amusement/credulousness), or at least stay on the clip slightly longer than they would otherwise. If one lingers on that content to any degree, the algorithm sees that as a sign that the user wants more of it—or rather, that it would achieve its "more engagement" goals by serving up more of it.
Plus, it's grabbing ideas on what to recommend based on user data and clustered associations. It's very likely to test the waters with stuff it knows worked for others with similar profiles, even if it's a bit of a reach.
Edit: minor sentence structure stuff
I use YouTube Shorts quite a bit and have never seen that kind of content. It's all gaming and cooking stuff for me, which matches my search history.
I'm inclined to believe it's one of those things that, once it enters the recommendation sphere on your account, it's really hard to get it to go away without manually removing profiling info via Google account settings. I just remembered now, at one point he did run a personal experiment to try and see how extreme the content would get if he let it play after it started showing up. After getting kind of disturbed with how bad it got, and bored of laughing at it for amusement, he tried training the algorithm to only show him cat videos and kind of settled on where it currently is. I'm guessing his account has a lot of those older associations still tied, and the algorithm tries to rekindle them from time to time.
YouTube has a setting somewhere to only hold your view history for 3 months. I can't recommend that enough.
Been using that setting for a couple of years, and it changed a bit how the algorithm recommends things to me cause if I somehow get into the cesspool sphere, it will stop in about 3 months.
I can't imagine being so beholden to a for profit company that I spend three whole months putting up with shit I don't want to see in the hopes that eventually it will get better.
It's just crazy to me how important YouTube is to some people.
Meh, can't really disagree with that.
I tried using NewPipe for a while on mobile, but the issue is that surprisingly, no algorithm is almost as maddening as a algorithm that went batshit insane.
I love newpipe for exactly that reason. I don't like being suggested videos, I want to search for something specific and watch those videos about the specific knowledge I'm seeking at the moment. If I want to waste time then I take a moment to think about something I was wondering earlier that day, and look that up.
If I'm going waste time I might as well learn something about whatever.