It's one thing to get recommendations in a place where recommendations are appropriate, and the dangers of the feedback loop you are talking about. It's another thing entirely to actively push it in other contexts.
"I know you are searching for programming topics, but might you be interested in this political outrage instead?"
We can thank Netflix for starting the trend of "we don't have this, but how about this other thing that we do have?"
Google does not give a fuck what you think you want, because they know better than you
How long is that typical list? How often do you pick the things at the bottom of that list vs the results near the top?
I don't think that can be assumed at all, actually. At least, it sure doesn't look that way when I search for most things, on YouTube or elsewhere. Most of them run out of relevant results pretty quickly and then start including obviously irrelevant results.
And if I wanted to find more in depth material to support my firmly held beliefs I just had to go to the right bookstore.
How do you know it works well? How do you know it misses nothing? How do you know it's not subtly biased (intentionally or not) in a way you would not notice, or you would think it's good enough?
> I can read articles against my view and still get only what I want. My world view will become increasingly polarized, and it's already quite biased.
Yes, of course we all do, but it's another thing to involve a third party in this process.
I wish I had your experience. My YouTube recommendations can definitely be said to be “my fault” in some sense of the word, but wherever the blame lies they’re still mostly terrible. YouTube will watch me skip a video for a whole week, but keep showing it to me “just in case.” I’d rather it were just a dumb search at this point.
I might feel more kindly toward YouTube recommendations if they did this for me.