Something that's hitting me now that I've been away from social media for a while: recommendation algorithms were NEVER good. Consciously, I knew that. They make money through ads which means keeping your eyes on the screen, which can mean explicitly pissing you off or upsetting you as much as it can mean "finding posts you might like," if not moreso. But only now is it hitting me, emotionally, how fucking ridiculous it is to avoid watching videos you haven't already seen in case you get weeks and weeks of trash you don't want to see because you dared watch 1 unfamiliar video. What the fuck
1 year ago · 👍 edanosborne, lykso, tm85, morgan, murdock
Check it out:
https://invidious.io/ · 1 year ago
@at_work I don't, I've heard of it before but I'm not too sure what it is · 1 year ago
Another thought that struck me: this pattern of "never discover anything new" is reinforced by the fact that, at least in my experience, recommendation algorithms usually just show you posts/videos you've already seen · 1 year ago
@smokey one of the first steps I took on the path that ultimately lead me to the smallweb was switching from the youtube "recommended" feed to the subscriptions feed, which would only show me videos from people I had chosen to see. it improved my experience enough that RSS wasn't a hard sell. being able to have content from multiple places organized in a way I like is a godsend. it baffles me that more people don't use RSS · 1 year ago
RSS all the way. Im a big boy, I can manage my own feed of interest. I don't want to have any algorithm 'suggest' jack shit to me. · 1 year ago
Do you use Invidious? I think it does not have personalized results when you search.
I also learned to add ‘sort:date’ to some searches. · 1 year ago
@moddedbear That seems to be a problem with basically everything corporate nowadays. I can't even find what I'm looking for on amazon because so many of the results are "recommended" (ie: from whoever was willing to pay the most to be at the top) · 1 year ago
Don't forget that Youtube changed their search not long ago so that at least half of the results are just "recommended content" unrelated to your search. It's so frustrating to find what you're looking for now. They really must not want people using search. · 1 year ago
@whixr the thing that I've always hated most about YT is its seeming monopoly on "tutorial" type content. Not just because its become harder and harder to actually find what you're looking for, but often a tutorial that would have been a 5 minute read ends up being a 25 minute video. whenever I'm trying to find information on something I always skip the YT links that seem to pop up early in the search (I wonder why!) unless I absolutely cannot find anything else · 1 year ago
Given the steady ahem changes to YT, when you want to search for material on a subject it seems to work better to be logged out, with no cookies etc, freshly opened so the only tuning datapoint is what you searched for.
This seems to keep things a bit more on subject (after a search or two to get rid of the mister beast / sniper wolf / late night comedy news garbage). It will pretty quickly add influencer content telling what consumer products you *need* to own related to this subject but at least relevent videos out of your bubble are unhidden for a minute :)
It is broken enough now for alternatives to take market share now, so that's something? · 1 year ago
It is wild to me that a primary selling point of places like youtube or twitter etc is a feature that actively makes the experience worse and makes you do extra work to avoid dealing with it · 1 year ago