This is a key reason behind my discomfort with social media. The algorithms that seem unresponsive to clear signals of intent was the last straw. Ended up leaving YouTube over the incessant push to new channels and ragebait shit.
Anyway, lemmy might be a cesspit at times, but its a cesspit I can choose/not choose, to engage with, and thats some nice anti-monopolisation of my online experience in the design.
I checked my phone’s location settings, and sure enough, Instagram had recently accessed this information.
The average tech-illiterate journo is always going to be dogshit at these “experiments” because they don’t understand how most of the underlying tech works.
Other additions to my feed were harder to explain. … One video featured a woman in a sari frying up South Indian dumplings called kuzhi paniyaram — an obscure dish my mum would make when I was growing up.
Yes, numbnuts. Your precise location, plus a hundred other data points you’re ignorant of, associated the account with your mum. This journo probably doesn’t even know that location access likely means visibility of all the wifi and bluetooth devices in your radius.
If this is late stage cap journalism, in the age of omnipresent surveillance capitalism, it’s time to pack it in. We’re well and truly cooked. Welcome to costco, I love you!
Journalism is dead. Capitalism killed it, because they did not want any reliable witnesses to or records of what they are going to do to humanity and the planet. History is written by the victors, and they have already crafted their own narrative of technological enlightenment. And we’re not in that story. At least not in any way we’ll recognize ourselves.
Journalism’s not dead. The fact of the matter is that people don’t want to read journalism, they want propaganda and tabloid; if this wasn’t true ProPublica would have the readership that the Sun does.
I like NewPipe for this reason.
My feed is what I’ve subscribed to and only what I subscribed to.
Turning off your history on YouTube prevents them from sending recs to the home screen. I only use the subscriptions tab
My YouTube feed seems okay, recently they started promoting new crap but pressing “don’t recommend channel” and “not interested” silenced it.
If I watch something from a channel I don’t want to get recommended I remove it from my watch history and I never press “like” on videos.
It’s good to see all the comments with ways to manage your YouTube feed, good to know if I end up in the same situation with a poisoned algorithm.
Its been two or three years now since i dipped out, the way you describe using the ‘don’t recommend’ and ‘not interested’ options seems to have a clearer result than when i last used them. If they’ve changed that functionality in the meantime i’m glad.
Yeah, some of peoples suggestions here are good. I liked that user who only looks at their subscribed channels tab, if i ever go back maybe i’d try that. Though the only youtuber i miss is adamsomething, one day i might jump onto his patreon.
I don’t have an account but my partner does. We normally get videos on the main page from people they’re subscribed to, or videos we already have watched (which is annoying.)
One day, one of the top videos on the main page reccos was what I can only describe as a terminally-autistic person (like we’re both autistic too but) hand-holding a camera to video capture Tamodachi Life on the DS and narrating the experience. It had like 37 views when we clicked on it. We looked at their channel and it was like their 1300th post playing the same game. It was amazing.
I like pipepipe and freetube since there isn’t really an opportunity for either to offer a curated algorithm of content it thinks I would be interested in. And I can block channels which had been a game changer. Especially on the tech and game side, since search results tend to be dominated by a few big youtubers on the first pages.
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The best way to use YT, is to have a bookmark folder linking to the recent video list (Descending by release date) of the channels you enjoy.
YT/Google by definition (large American technology company) cannot be trusted.
Even better: YouTube still provides RSS feeds. You can “subscribe” to your favourite channels by adding them to your RSS reader.
And for desktop, there’s also FreeTube.
Word of caution because you may be under the impression that youtube isn’t suppressing videos that are supposed to show up there:
Youtube is known to skip certain videos and never surface them in the chronological view of subscribed videos. They explain it by “technical issues” every time, but intentional or not, the experience is the same, Youtube does not want you using it
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the case, but since we are using YT to start with (I do use Peertube, but it’s a lot smaller), this is a good baseline approach IMO.
Use YT as hosting/player service, not as a discovery/library management service.
My wife and I have been saying “I’d really like to try parasailing” or “I wonder what parasailing is like?” or variations on parasailing, to see if it eventually pops up in our youtube feed. Two weeks so far and nothing yet. Said it about twenty times so far.
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I share your hate of YouTube.
But FYI Odysee is run by a hyperneoliberal Trump-adjacent CEO who jokes with his friends about selling user data for top price. I’ve been in the room with them. Disgusting people
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