> I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop. Insanely exaggerated thumbnails, dumb recommendations of the same tired topics, truly terrible idiocracy-grade content. I'm sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me.
Why does this happen to some people and not others?
Most of my YT recs are videos from Technology Connections, CCC, 3Blue1Brown, Tech Potato, Welch Labs, Developer Voices, Ringway Manchester, some LegalEagle and UnderSparked (which I watch as mindless entertainment during household chores), and a fair bit of random lectures from top US universities and tech-related conferences. In other words, mostly videos from channels I have already watched and am very likely to watch more videos from.
Sure, there's a fair bit of slop; mostly things like "the unbelievable technology that powers the entire internet" or something where they're just describing asymmetric crypto in layman's terms, and there are periods where it gets more or less prevalent, but the feed is nowhere near unusable on most days.
My X feed is pretty much the same thing; very little spam, not that much politics, and when it does appear, it's not MAGA, plenty of academics and smart software engineers talking tech and AI. TikTok and Reddit are more geared towards mindless entertainment, but I do use these pretty differently, so that actually makes some sense.
With that said, I never disable personalization, try to stay logged in, share my data with companies freely, and accept the vast majority of permissions / consent prompts, which probably makes me unusual among the HN crowd, so that could be the reason why my experience is so different.
Why does this happen to some people and not others?
Most of my YT recs are videos from Technology Connections, CCC, 3Blue1Brown, Tech Potato, Welch Labs, Developer Voices, Ringway Manchester, some LegalEagle and UnderSparked (which I watch as mindless entertainment during household chores), and a fair bit of random lectures from top US universities and tech-related conferences. In other words, mostly videos from channels I have already watched and am very likely to watch more videos from.
Sure, there's a fair bit of slop; mostly things like "the unbelievable technology that powers the entire internet" or something where they're just describing asymmetric crypto in layman's terms, and there are periods where it gets more or less prevalent, but the feed is nowhere near unusable on most days.
My X feed is pretty much the same thing; very little spam, not that much politics, and when it does appear, it's not MAGA, plenty of academics and smart software engineers talking tech and AI. TikTok and Reddit are more geared towards mindless entertainment, but I do use these pretty differently, so that actually makes some sense.
With that said, I never disable personalization, try to stay logged in, share my data with companies freely, and accept the vast majority of permissions / consent prompts, which probably makes me unusual among the HN crowd, so that could be the reason why my experience is so different.