I watched an interview that Curtis Yarvin gave on Tucker Carlson (about an hour long...interesting at least).
Now youtube is sending me all these conservative "talk show" people that I have absolutely 0 interest in.
Same thing: I think I watched some video about guns a while ago. I think guns are neat, but I absolutely do not care about watching dozens of videos of bros broing down in the woods with the machine guns.
And what's worse is that it's the same set of ads. Like before I cancelled Hulu, they would show the exact same ad over and over again, just to make it as irritating as possible.
EDIT: Not leather belts though, nylon with magnetic buckles or something
Everyone who wants people to buy their leather belts advertises to people who have searched or previously looked for "leather belts" and that is you...
In a perverse way, it's actually good for you to keep getting belt ads. If you just stopped getting them all of a sudden I'd get worried because it means the purchase data of belts was sold and combined with your past search data to server you new ads in an even more devious way.
It would be smarter to look for pools of products and be less targetted. E.g. to know that people who buy long lived leather belts may also be interested in long-lived leather wallets, or long-lived shirts, or glass containers instead of plastic, etc, and then rotate all these products in, rather than this targetted barrage of non-stop belt ads for the next year. This just can't be the optimal advertising strategy, there must be diminishing returns to this level of specificity.
At the end of the day, advertising space is auction based and if the belt companies want to bid the highest for that space, they win.
If I bought a nice leather belt, perhaps I should get ads for nicer leather shoes or some other item, maybe a leather polish/waterproofing kit to keep my belt nice and new. The failure of the Advertising-Industrial complex in that regard has been disappointing to say the least.
i instinctively open everything else in incognito now. i have noticed less tracking, less ads, and a more pleasant browsing experience.
Every decade or so it needs a new strap. For a while, I was able to have one made by a young man at a leather shop in Camden ME - the old shop having disappeared from Harvard Square with the 70s.
Finally, the now old man in Camden retired and passed the business on to his son. The son doesn’t know how to work leather - he just brings in finished goods from offshore.
The current method is to find a belt in Camden that is sufficiently heavy and has a removable buckle. Throw away the trashy buckle and snap in my old one.
I’ve probably got one more strap in me.
You might find a suitable buckle at an Army-Navy store. If there still is such a place.
You have at least two straps in you! I believe in you :)
Take care.
Good denim can last years and degrades stylishly.
It's really too bad that there's a $825 Billion apparel industry that thrives on fads and replaceable goods.
On the topic of YouTube tunnels ... tool/appliance restoration videos are pretty cool. There's a ton of them too.
Just make sure to hide the stuff you don’t want to see on your homepage. I go as far as removing dumb videos from my watch history (or watching them in incognito in the first place).
I find that most people who complain about the YouTube algorithm expect it to just work out of the box with zero tuning. It’s not that good and to be honest I personally don’t want it to be that good. But if you put in a LITTLE effort I promise you it’s an absolute recommendation beast. I have hundreds of hours of content in my watch later list just because of it. It’s all super high quality and I’m rarely disappointed hitting random videos in my homepage.
My youtube recommendations are incredible. I've spent a lot of time liking and subscribing to things that interest me, and now my feed is full of videos about history and trains and machining and woodworking and science and all kinds of stuff that I could watch for days.
A lesser issue is that if I don't watch the videos from a certain channel or genre for a while, the algorithm decides that I must have lost interest and stops recommending those content altogether when that's not really the case. And the "related videos" on the side bar never goes beyond a list of videos from the same channel.
Literally any time you see a video you don't like, do this. It only takes one or two "Not interested"'s to dramatically improve your feed.
I find I have the same issue on Spotify as well. I don't listen to Spotify a whole lot, but when I go to the gym I'll use it and listen workout style music. For me the stuff that gives me that energy and focus is often hip-hop/rap style music. But ironically it's probably my least favourite genre to listen to outside of the gym. But since at least half my time listening on Spotify is listening to that kind of music all my recommendations are terrible.
I really wish these services gave better options to manage your interests. I would love to just tell Spotify to just ignore certain genres from recommendations. Part of the problem is that I also suck at discovering music. So it would actually be beneficial to me to have better suggestions on what to listen to.
Which is sad considering how great youtube recommendations used to be around the time Stripe was launched. Remember when people used to go down the youtube rabbit hole to see where they'd end up? Now there is no breadth nor depth to the recommendations. Youtube used to be a vast ocean, now it's a puddle ankle deep and no more than a step wide.
Hover your mouse over a recommendation you don't like, click the three dots that appear to the right of the title, click "Not interested". Results change very quickly.
Not like Google doesn't know exactly who I am anyway but I prefer not staying logged in.
Youtube eventually learned to stop showing it to me, and due to my downvotes, may be now restricting showing them to anyone.