Thanking the Algorithm: Discovering Prosocial Communities through YouTube Music Recommendation Pathways

What pathways through algorithmic music recommendations help users discover prosocial comment communities? Building on algorithmic awareness and music discovery literature, this exploratory, naturalistic study follows four user personas on YouTube through four music genre seed queries and ten layers of recommendation depth, to analyze the frequency and nature of the prosocial comment communities they encounter. Our results suggest that prosocial communities are accessed more frequently by personas who defy algorithmic classification in their use patterns, and that within prosocial communities users express not just awareness of the recommendation algorithm, but gratitude directed explicitly toward it. This exploratory, context-bound study contributes to understanding how users and algorithms co-construct musical meaning and community, offers methodological insights for studying algorithmic experience and recommendation pathways, and reflects on the ephemerality of prosocial communities within black-boxed discovery platforms.