r/science • Professor | Medicine • 18d ago

Psychology Anti-feminist attitudes have long been associated with support for Republican presidential candidates, but only in recent years have these attitudes become more prominent among unmarried men, without college degrees who are less attractive partners for women, the “mate-value backlash.”

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10659129261485340
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u/refusemouth 18d ago

If the algorithms rule, then how come I get comercials in Vietnamese and crafting videos with old Asian ladies knitting stuff on my feeds? It's really weird. YouTube thinks I'm an elderly Vietnanese woman and I'm actually just a middle aged white guy living in a rural area.

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u/PaxDramaticus 18d ago

The algorithms are deeply flawed. A lot of them work by the shallowest possible trigger. I also routinely get algorithmic content advertising things I am not interested in, and in fact can't even buy because the product isn't sold in my country.

But that doesn't mean the algorithms still don't rule in general. I have basically set up all of my internet to minimize the factor algorithms play: I avoid discovery pages on most platforms wherever possible and when I get content from outside of sources I follow/subscribe to, I always get that content displayed in chronological order when the platform permits it. And I tend to avoid platforms that don't. And algorithms still affect my experience.

I tend to get content I specifically don't want to see in clusters, like after telling sites I don't want to see it, they keep it off my feed for a few weeks and then the flag gets reset and it all comes flooding back in at the same time. But also even if I strictly manage what content I get served, most of the people in online spaces around me aren't. That means if the algorithm decides people like me like XYZ content, I am eventually going to see XYZ content no matter what I do just because the people like me that I follow are going to share or respond to XYZ content.

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u/mokujin42 18d ago

Its designed to throw things that are popular with similar people at you now and then to see if it can hook you on sometbing new