Youtube recommends stupid crap based on what other people like.
If I watch one stupid video not in incognito, ALL of the recommendations become stupid videos because those videos have better metrics. Youtube actively guides me away from educational content.
Even within educational videos, if I click on a click-baity channel once, that channel dominates things I've watched MANY more time. It seems to all be about click-through metrics.
I've never had Youtube recommend really upscale educational content like Zach Star before. It's quality stuff, but you gotta find it yourself.
Back when I was not particularly into YouTube and hadn't had many great recommendations YouTube insisted I should watch Sapolsky's Harvard lectures - these probably had particularly good metrics. Once I started to watch them (and was very satisfied) more and more great recommendations started to appear.
> It's quality stuff, but you gotta find it yourself.
People should start sharing curated lists of high-quality no-bullish YouTube videos/channels. Kind of like those awesome-everything on GitHub.
If all else fails, create a new Google account for separate exclusive use should do the trick.
And isn't that terrifying, in the Parable of the Paperclip Maximizer kinda way?
We can make the well-its-your-individual-responsibility bootstraps argument, but that kinda works only if you believe in the supremacy of an individual's autonomy and that the mind can't be hacked or hijacked. Everything from addictive products to the marketing industry shows that isn't the case. The youtube paperclip maximizer is maximizing for your mind's engagement.
We can say "well, it's just feeding people what they want!" But you can say the same thing about airdropping crates of opium onto the streets.
In which case (if you truly believe that), we are all fucked anyway. Then who cares? Is youtube really your biggest problem?
> is maximizing for your mind's engagement.
So has media been doing for a long time, also all writers and poets, etc. Mind's engagement is not the only meaning of life, and most people act out this deep knowledge. I don't see a problem.
What's new and disturbing is 1) the degree of algorithmic personalization, and 2) that personalization goes to the highest bidder. Put together, we've built a marketplace for population-scale behavioral nudges, and the people who play that game have war-chests, not human-sized wallets.
The Facebook/Myanmar genocide is the Godwin's Law reference of the social media debate, but you don't need to look any further than the politicization of what should be neutral medical facts being fueled by recommendation-hole conspiracy theories to see the danger of all this.
I don't believe people are mindless spiritless bots, but I do believe our industry thrives on engineering ways to hack people's attention circuits. And what's terrifying is we've put a paperclip maximizing machine at the helm of all this.