I'd rather they acknowledge Alec as the inspiration/source for this post at the beginning and explicitly, rather than just mentioning the video in passing midway through, but at least they do link to it!
I'd hoped it would be a way to share my own opinions on it, summarise my own personal concerns, as well as adding my own recommendations - but totally appreciate if you feel it is derivative, and I appreciate the call out. As a big Technology Connections fan I certainly don't intend to steal his work.
It's also intended as something you can link to your friends and family that might be a little more digestible than a 30 minute video.
I get what your advice is about but to add some nuance which didn't cover... you should consider that I learned of Alec's Technology Connections channel 9 years ago because the Youtube algorithm suggested it to me.
Why did Youtube do that? It was because I had watched Ben's Applied Science excellent video showing vinyl grooves under an electron microscope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCdsyCWmt8
So the first Alec video I got exposed to was his related topic on vinyl records (click "Oldest" to see them) : https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections/videos
I'd argue that the Youtube algorithm is very good at finding adjacent videos of interest especially in educational topics and DIY repair tutorials.
You're suggesting people go to Youtube subscriptions feeds but people have a list of favorites in their subscriptions often because of the algorithm. There's a bit of chicken-vs-egg situation going on there.
What a good algorithm does is help users with the Explore-vs-Exploit tradeoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...
- Explore --> Youtube algorithm sidebar recommendations of related videos.
- Exploit --> add a worthy creator to subscription feed and get alerted to new releases from that person
The "explore" part is helped by algorithms because they can suggest videos you would have never thought of because you don't know the keywords or jargon to type into a Youtube search box to get to it directly. "You don't know what you don't know."
But don't use the algorithm for politics or click on anything that has a thumbnail with the shocked Pikachu face. That just starts a feedback loop of crap.
Arguably, the algorithms could put one into a non-productive engagement loop never to escape. Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more.
So... Algorithms can be bad ... but you can also make them work for you.
I never go to my subscription feed - the front page algo keeps me up to date on any new content from people I want to see updates on. I’ve noticed too it almost has a “shadow subscription” where even though I am not subscribed to certain channels, it knows I watch every video by them so it gets on my front page too.
The front page really has a “vibe” that follows my interests around. Watch a few too many Minecraft videos or car repair and soon you start seeing more and more of the front page being those topics. Get a new interest in pyramids? Devlogs? Nature? The front page slowly decays old interests and promotes new ones.
Which is again why I don’t check my sub feed - it’s a graveyard of interests, many of which I don’t care about right now. The algo surfaces the ones I do.
In my experience it's "watch one video outside of your recommendations and then half your next set of recommendations will be related to that". I'm scared to click on anything I'm not already subscribed to for fear of trashing the home page.
You can use the three dots to say "Not Interested" on the Shorts shelf but it only hides it for 30 days and then the insidious little worm comes right back.
But yeah, I do apologize for trying to offer solutions, as they are not perfect.
(Pretty sure uBlock works mobile too, but that's irrelevant)
I feel like clicking a video and immediately clicking off is also a negative signal they use but YMMV.
Youtube wants my money. They will never get my money when they come up with things like that. I will give them my money once they start cracking down on ads. And by that I mean actual moderated ads - not random ads with porn. As long as they serve scam ads I will never give them money - and it does not look like I will in my lifetime.
I wish Premium provided some way for me to predict how many of these kinds of ads are in a video I am considering watching (e.g., by requiring the creator to tell YT how many there are and imposing consequences on creators that lie) but YT does not.
There is an extension called SponserBlock that will automatically skip them and other marketing / time wastes. Otherwise I just skip ahead (the highest peak in the watch graph playbar at will usually be the end of the segment)
I want YT to pay them out of what I pay for YT Premium.
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276
[1] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/introducing-premium-lit...
Is it that hard to look at all the BS and say - no not my money?
I get recommended right leaning videos and videos with ads for manscaped and I'm neither a conservative or a man. It's super weird so I tend to separate my interests into two apps: the YouTube web app for "junk food content" and FreeTube when I want to learn and focus. It's the only way I've found to not be fed the random content carrots while falling down the rabbit hole.
Right now my homepage seems to be
- construction/DIY videos (Perkins, B1M, Megaprojects, Matt Risinger, NS Builders)
- video game dev (blackthornprod)
- "indie game of the day" channels (Aliensrock, Nialus)
- military videos (Battleship New Jersey, Ryan McBeth)
- freerunning / urban exploration (STORRER)
- movie & tv analysis / commentary (Frame Voyager, Corridor Crew, New Rockstars)
- chess (agagmotor, Magnus)
- Minecraft (Mumbo Jumbo)
- random documentaries (fern, Stewert Hicks, Half as Interesting)
- egypt / pyramids (History for GRANITE)
- science / engineering (Adam Savage, Colin Fruze, Applied Engineering)
- coding (Tsoding)
From just a quick scan of the topics / channels.
Algorithmic feeds don't give us that opportunity - they're designed to require minimal effort and to keep the dopamine coming without any conscious decisions.
I'd rather use a lens more like all the open-source/free-software concerns about controlling your own computer:
1. Can I see how the recommendation algorithm is intended to work? The site-owner says it works for my benefit, but what if they're mistaken, or lying?
2. What has it recorded about my interests, and how can I fix bad records that don't represent them?
3. When it's not working well--or harmfully exploiting my baser weaknesses--how can I change to a different one?
"Whose problem is it that it solves?"
It's possible to get some benefit from an algorithm/process, just as a side effect, that was never designed to work in your interest and is an opaque cloud service. Maybe the service is solving the network owner's problem of selling you to advertisers. If you want to maximise for "interest and relevance to my life goals" there's nothing to stop you running your own "algorithm" of course, except any obstacles put in your way by the data network owner. For that reason it's more important to pay attention to the freedom of the network (open API, federated, maximally distributed etc) than the algorithms that run on it. If you control the former you control the latter. HN (the network) seems to allow a lot from the plethora of viewers I've seen.
I also read "Technopoly" recently, and while it didn't have quite the same impact on me, I can't deny that it accurately describes the techno-political moment we're currently living in. Well worth the time.
I have no complaints about my Instagram and YouTube feeds. They give good recommendations.
TikTok in particular sneaks politics into everything. Even if it's not explicitly political.
I asked Deepseek once to walk me through what it knows about TikTok and it claimed the Chinese version uses an RL approach to sprinkle socialist core values into your feed even if you explicitly don't want politics. It also claimed TikTok absolutely promises it doesn't do this in the US. I'm not really convinced Deepseek knows what it's talking about but it was pretty plausible technically.
But in practice it's easy to tell if someone even in the US spends a lot of time on TikTok base on their strongly held opinions even when they explicitly say they never watch political content.
I doubt other social media companies do this because they aren't created specifically for political propaganda like TikTok is, but it's possible they do.
People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model.
Mixed economies with social welfare guarantees are mainstream economics. Actual socialism in the style practiced in reality by countries implementing socialism is mainly characterized by the absence of human rights (including zero worker rights), mass murder, poverty, and a ruling elite that are functionally oligarchs who have enslaved the rest of the population. And on top of this, all socialist states that I'm aware of have re-introduced markets in some form but retaining the dictatorship structure.
Socialism in the past (e.g. in the 18th century) has referred to other ideas, but it doesn't really anymore.
But even if you were to believe somehow that there's some morally redeemable version of socialism that has somehow just managed to hide all this time, the actual version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US.
Yes. This is what people in the US mean when they say socialism in general conversation. They don't mean pure Socialism as Marx talked about it. Similarly when people say the US is a democracy, we know they don't mean it's an actual pure Democracy where everyone votes on every issue.
The Nordic model is the sort of economy and political structure that the 19th century socialists explicitly reacted against and rejected. It's a representation of mainstream liberal democratic theory not of socialism.
On the other hand democracy was always understood to be representative because you can't make every decision by plebiscite.
It has to do with being accurate rather than being "pure".
Go on a socialist forum and ask them what they think about markets or mixed economies. E.g.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/w03n2p/what_...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/19558...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/19ewm26/can_...
- https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+socialism+mixed+econo...
It's harder to search other socialist forums like the darknet ones, but you see the same patterns there
This oversells what China is. China is were government and oligarchy are in a strange symbiosis. Capitalism is worse in China in many ways. You are more free in China to exploit others on a large scale. H1B Visas seems to be an authorian idea to me and something that is heavily exploited in China.
What the US and China have in common is a strange kind of nationalism that I can not define, might be because I come from a smaller country.
All socialist states have been functionally authoritarian oligarchies in practice. I'm unaware of an exception. Someone once claimed Yugoslavia was, but I'm not familiar enough with it to have an opinion.
It's also confusing because there's the notion of State Capitalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism#Maoists_and_a...) that I believe Marx also wrote about but I don't remember the details off hand. I think this may more or less be the same idea as authoritarian capitalism, but it's also what socialist regimes eventually look like when they realize they need to re-introduce markets to prevent economic collapse.
My take is that the idea of socialism, communism, and capitalism are deeply muddled in theory and even more muddled in practice. Muddled or not, we have people who consider themselves socialists and followers of Marx, their theory is incoherent, and in practice they try to spread violence and destroy any country they take over. We don't really have people clinging to capitalism in the same way, although some right wing factions in the US tried in the 70s during the cold war to make a capitalistic sort of political religion modeled after the success of socialism.
We'd be better off not having to deal with any of these concepts except for the fact that some people have a strong allegiance to these concepts and there's no changing that in the short term. To me it's a bit like when people killed each other over ideas like how to interpret the tripartite Christian God. Is the son a separate person or the same person, and how does the holy spirit fit in? You get an entire tree of ideas, most of which eventually became heresies punishable by death. None of them made any sense but that didn't stop it from being a motive historical force.
This may also be an artifact of the fact that you are the sort of person who seeks out educational content. I.e. you have a high need for intellectual stimulation. That makes you an outlier among all people who use social media.
Personally I think technical people underestimate the negative impacts of the models that drive the algorithms. We are basically training humans via a reward function that maximizes watch time. We are also heavily correlating errors in knowledge because popular stuff gets boosted so much. Correlated errors are bad for rubustness.
Something that will filter out the anger, but keep the insight. I vaguely remember someone posting about a tldr for twitter. Anyone know of tools like that?
It probably helps that I only permit a handful of specific topics: physics, fun math, synthesizers (but not modular), tiny bit of music theory/training, StarCraft 2 (not SC1/BW), and recently the Nvidia/AMD GPU release saga.
Google, Facebook, and the other algorithm-driven tech companies have been aggressively enshittifying their products at least since 2020. "I got fun/useful videos out of the YouTube algorithm in 2016" says nothing about what that algorithm is like in 2025, given that they can change it silently on a whim.
We all know that gambling addicts exist and how destructive it is to their lives, the casino exploits behaviors and gets all their money. As a result people know casinos are dangerous, reasonable people avoid them, are warned about them, and the government forces regulation to reduce their ability to exploit vulnerable people.
Imagine if none of these controls existed and nobody talked about or generally knew that casinos were dangerous. Imagine if the casinos were 100x better at exploiting you and you were forced to walk through a casino every time you leave your house. You’d get a lot more people having their lives destroyed.
So what this video tries to do is important, naming the term, “algorithmic complacency”, allows it to be recognized, discussed, and actively kept in check by users. Ideally regulated by the government as well, just like casinos.
The casino also provides a service, entertainment, there’s nothing wrong with a reasonable person attending, spending some money and being entertained. But we as a society recognize that a company exploiting behaviors to get all of a person’s money, is bad, and try to limit that negative outcome even though we still allow casinos to exist.
Time, attention, and focus is so abstract people don’t even realize they’re spending it, or how modified their behavior has become because of the algorithm’s exploitation. As a result we let companies who are 100x better at manipulation than casinos operate without so much as mentioning they’re doing it, and steal increasing amounts of a user’s time.
On a related note, for those looking to access diverse content without regional restrictions, reliable proxy services can be invaluable. NodeMaven offers high-quality proxies that ensure secure and unrestricted browsing. I can drop a link for everyone as Iir realy helped me during mu thesis https://nodemaven.com/proxies/residential-proxies/.
In my personal experience, "edutainment" can certainly be addictive, and more often than not, consuming it is "unproductive" because (1) consuming content aimlessly is intrinsically mostly passive, (2) passive consumption is ineffective for retaininig knowledge or building understanding, (3) content is often superficially interesting because of a spectacular and/or highly simplified presentation.
This is only a counterpoint to the idea that educational content is limited in its potential to be addictive/unproductive; there is still, obviously, a great positive potential to high-quality educational content.
It focuses on the harmful nature of infinitely scrolling content. Cutting out all infinite scrolling apps has had a hugely positive effect on my productivity and mental health.
Do you use the noprocrast settings? Does HN just fit differently into your brain? Something else?
Things like hn or old.reddit still carry most if not all of the negative effects of infinite feeds.
What I would give credit to hn for is that being text only, it forces you at least to think a bit and not blindly consume a video for example.
It isn’t infinite the same way TikTok will or YouTube used to keep playing something you haven’t seen yet.
How you justify your addiction is entirely up to you though ;)
It’s the same way that infinitely-scrolling Google results don’t have the same effect as infinitely-scrolling content chutes, which exploit the hunch that there might be something gold just around the next swipe…
Ublock Origin: ! 2020-10-11 https://news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com##.morelink
The worst part is, it feels like he's making the same mistakes he's warning others about yet doesn't even realize it. He claims the bad BlueSky users are the result of algorithms, but doesn't (from what I can tell) see that his problem is that he's paying attention to a feed that brings those people to him. He complains about social media turning everything into a monolithic good vs. evil outrage generator, but then he does the exact same thing when talking about the New York Time's Canada editorial. You can say he's justified in that, but isn't everyone going to believe that they're the exception and that their outrage is justified?
I've seen this kind of criticism before, where it feels like someone is captured by something, can't escape it, gets annoyed by certain elements of it, and then creates a criticism of it that's more about venting their personal frustrations than actually escaping it (since they can't see how trapped they themselves are).
I find this claim unlikely, since there have always been crazies on the internet, and main issue is that a single crazy person can be online 24/7 with an output that dwarfs a dozen normal people.
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-conce...
I asked in Tesco and the young lad who worked there (probably 18-19) had never heard of it.
I still dispense it from a Finish powder bottle I've had for more than a decade.
These are my fellow people that will happily watch a 20 or 40 min video about how dishwashers work, or his more recent video about replicating old style Christmas lights.
I also dumped a crappy beverage cooler in my office for a cheap as hell box mini-fridge, which actually maintains temperature enough that I can store cream for coffee and ice down here, and it uses less energy then the unit before.
Algorhitms, "changing how one thinks" is real, and ultimately good. The social changes, when they start expecting you to Anki your work contract (which would, if the Anki was monitored, be highly legally effective against you); or requiring you know Kellyed Bayesian decision theory because that's a prequsite for getting reasonably priced insurance, or simply, surviving, that is unknown. I give 37.7% confidence Elon Musk was gaming in 2025 U.S. politics using construct akin to a Bayesian decision tree.
It would be great if one didn't have to change how one thinks, whether they delve into CLRS or TikTok.