this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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I've massively reduced my time spent with youtube over the last year or so when I noticed that the overall experience was just getting worse and worse.
Previously I'd watch a video, and from there jump to another interesting video, and so on - now pretty much all the top level suggestions are useless already, and it's rare that after watching a video you get something worth watching recommended.
I assume it's not just youtubes fault - while I do think youtube is pushing those videos even from people I used to like I now see more videos where they go on for 20 minutes about something that should've been said in 3 minutes max.
I now almost exclusively use youtube to watch videos from people I've subscribed years ago, and as they either become annoying to go with youtubes algorithm, or eventually stop/slow uploading my usage goes down. Nowadays I often enough don't open youtube for two weeks, while previously there rarely was a day without checking at least a few videos.
Ok people, time to decide. Do you want targeted recommendations or do you want privacy?
Because the only way for YouTube to figure out what you may find interesting today is to go through your watch history, rummage through your engagement metrics, and suck up your profile details. Then collate and process a ton of data about you and your preferences, compare that knowledge against a vast library of channels & streams to try and figure out what would likely make you click on a given video. All while fighting spam, misinformation, and people trying to game the system with SEO and clickbait. All in real-time, as over 300,000 hours of content is being uploaded every minute.
To be clear, I'm not defending YouTube or Google. I'm just saying it's not all cut-and-dried as many people think.
While most of the rest is true, clickbait makes you click, so it isn't something YouTube necessarily wants to combat.
Same with "rage-bait", or content that you'll click on just because it's so preposterous that you'd want to criticize it in the comments.
Both are trash, yet not against YouTube's interests.
This is my view. I went the privacy route. The result is the addictiveness of the service went way down. For me, that's a win.
There are other ways to give us content we might like. For example, have a list of topics and categories we can select. This reduces invasiveness while providing some benefit.
The problem is that does not give Google what it wants out of the relationship.