LOL What subjects is your YouTube home page OBSESSED with suggesting videos about?

I didn't know it until after watching, but I NEEDED to see that.

 

That's it exactly. One day there won't be channels, or TV, or shopping. You'll just sign up to subscription services that serve you with weekly groceries, nicknacks and stocking fillers; videos, films and programs; entertainment and news; all based on an impossibly sophisticated psych profile crafted by AI, and you rate products in an app and the packages just get more and more accurate.

It sounds like tinfoil hattery but YouTube is about 75% there already, I'm just waiting for Amazon to launch their AI Loot Crate service.

 

Mine is suddenly hell bent on showing me woodworking videos that are all basically the same thing:

"Make this amazing <thing> using only <junk>"

And leave out rest of the title presumably due to a character limit because it should finish "...and decades of wood/metalworking experience, a massive workshop with $40k of tools, and a literal full time week-to-month of your time, by which point you probably should have made it out of something that's not literal garbage and have something really nice instead of something that's 'pretty nice considering it's made from junk'

 

I also watch Gun Jesus, but Youtube seems to think that because I like Forgotten Weapons I will also like all other gun channels and I must also want ot watch Alt-right 'personalities' too.

Almost every day I watch a Gun Jesus sermon and the home page fills up with THE TRUTH and FACTS and people sitting puling that weird insincere sideye into the camera that only alt-righters seeem to do. Every day I click not interested. It's weird.

 

I feel like I'm the only one getting even moderately accurate suggestions..

Right now I've got;

Doug DeMuro - I've watched a lot of his videos, but not subscribed.
The Escapist - Slightly Civil War - I've watched all of the long-form discussions on Youtube, so.. Kinda makes sense
Hardware Unboxed - I've watched one or two, but given the subscriptions it also makes sense
xLetalis and some Witcher details I probably missed - Fair, I've watched a few of his videos.
Finnegan's Garage - Yup, subscribed, makes sense
Uncle Roger - Yeah, I've watched a few of those
LockPickingLawyer - Watched a whole heap of those, but also not subscribed.. Kinda makes sense.
Late Show with Stephen Colbert - Watched a few, watched a lot of the Colbert Report back in the day, so that makes sense too I guess.

I scrolled down a bit, and found something odd - ClownC0re.

But given I watch a lot of random music videos on Yotube, that also kinda makes sense.

 

There's a home page? I cannot think of the last time I went straight to youtube. I mostly watch videos that people have linked to.

I stop clicking and looking at suggested video when I realised that it was worse than following links in Wikipedia. Same time sink but far less enriching. Can I sound like a bigger tool? When I did look, it was mostly "You won't believe...." or "Next level..." Probably because in the early days I foolishly click a few of these before I learned my lesson.

 

Hah I got clowncore a while but no longer do. So much lockpickinglawyer though. At least the algorithm no longer thinks I want to live in a van.

 

Mine has just gone nuts on "AMAZING RESTORATION" videos. Ancient rust pile tool/vehicle/whatever, transformed into a gleaming new piece of engineering. As Mister Tad says, at a certain point you wonder what the purpose is beyond simply flexing engineering skills. 100 hours of time to reuse a few KGs of scrap metal isn't actually that environmentally friendly (humans have a carbon footprint just existing after all, to say nothing of making and powering all the machinery used).

I do love watching them, though.

 

I've been getting a few of them turn up on mine as well. I find them quite good for getting me to sleep at night.

 

I get this same problem - the most recent one is an American channel which reviews often lethal shooting incidents for both police and civilians in various scenarios for tactical awareness etc, all with the purpose of "improved self defence". Lots of them quite gauchely celebrate their attackers/criminals being killed.

I watch FW for the engineering fascination more than anything, if we were allowed I'd probably own guns and know how to use them, but I've no interest in shooting another human being.

 

I'm honestly not sure I could ever shoot another human being, in any circumstances. I used to shoot rabbits and pigeons as a kid but hit some internal wall with it around age 21, found I simply couldn't stomach it any more for some reason. Taking life feels really icky to me, even small animals. It freaks me out how blasé a lot of Americans are about the "it's me or him" self-defense killing rationale. They don't even pay lip service to the fact that due to their chosen method of self-defense another human being will, y'know, no longer exist.

And in a lot of the American 'self-defense' or vigilante hero-wannabe shootings I've seen online, there were clearly other routes available than lethal force. One would-be Batman shot an armed robber in the back as the armed robber was leaving the shop. The 'hero' probably traumatized and jeapoardized the bystanders more than the criminal did.

 

I discovered that most of the problem is liking videos. Unliking helps.

I looked at my 'liked videos' playlists and saw the same weird subjects I'm getting spammed with (so if I like one video in 2009 showing a goal from Newcastle v Leeds 1993, now in 2021 I'll be spammed every day with videos of Newcastle v Leeds or Aston Villa v Man Utd 2003). I only ever liked about 100 videos so I've gone through them and unliked nearly all of them, and now no more bizarre Top Gear and James Bond spam because of one video I liked when YT was born.

 

I don't mind YT suggestions too much, because normally I know exactly what I want to watch and I often find the recommendations interesting. I also tend to watch it on the TV in the sitting room, which is especially nice because there are no comments to worry about - it can get pretty toxic in there.

YT is my go-to for streaming media while I work, whether it's a music playlist, a vlog, debate, lecture... I'm not sure I could manage without it.

 

God knows what I liked or watched, but I'm getting hit up with a lot of https://www.youtube.com/user/periodicvideos/videos recently.
Super annoying as I'd sooner have bamboo slivers shoved under my finger nails than do chemistry, and yet they're really easy to watch and enjoy.

 

Forgotten Weapons is great, and I never had any issues with dodgy recommendations after watching it, but maybe I'm not paying attention. A few other guns channels are okay too, but a number give off "I'll hand over my guns over my cold dead body" vibes, even if they aren't directly political.

In general, I rarely get anything overtly political, and I really am not keen on getting politics/opinions from YouTube as a platform, other than the occasional technical overview on particular issue (if you even consider that politics). The thing I find annoying is the YouTube trending when they show a bunch of conventional media sources on current affairs topics. I know why they do it (to combat misinformation) but frankly I want to be less invested in partisan day-to-day squabbles (maybe I'm just too used to BBC online news).

 

Even the BBC has caught the bug, in my opinion. Their website has, over the last 10 years, gone from being a kind of stodgy, formal reflection of their TV News programming to being a sort of poor man's MSN/Daily Mail wall of awful clickbait, human interest tripe and angry partisan polemicists rambling on about social issues.

 

Obviously, I've learned to avoid the youtube homepage like the plague. Most of my 'tube use is streaming music, and "lofi hiphop for studying" always shows up...in the middle of all the heavy metal suggestions.
Lately, the official artist/topic streams that break albums up into individual song videos have started tacking really odd things on to the end. Recently, one was some kind of Indian dubstep rap horsesh*t. After that I had to do a cookie purge because my feed went 100% Indian.

 

My reccomendations are usually drawn from my subscriptions:



Looks about right tbh. About the only other thing missing is motorbike videos, usually Roadcraft Nottingham or The Missenden Flyer (both of which I'm also subscribed to).

 

I'm regularly recommended all but two of those channels, but including The Missenden Flyer. We're Google demographic segment neighbours