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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

> I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times.

Interesting new opportunity for YouTube here. Detect your usage patterns and near bed time show you increasingly boring content until you fall asleep, then fill your head with subliminal messages in these long ads.

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I fall asleep to YT sometimes watching speed runs when I have a hard time sleeping. When I wake up it is mostly running live streams of religious chants going in a loop. Hindu, muslim, orthodox christian. Or some strange genre of a Japanese anime girl making sounds.

I suspect that they are already doing that (or something like it) as I've seen certain content appear at specific times/days.

One of the smarter product decisions they made was to tweak the algorithm to show different types of content based on time (and device). If it’s past 9:30pm and it’s the bedroom tv it suggests vastly different stuff than 6:30am on the living room tv. And for good reason! I’m not watching some slow “adventures through the milky way at light speed” video when I’m waking up!

It’s very smart about that stuff!

I'm a heavy YouTube watcher (My rewind said I watched 4500 different channels last year) and agree too. The content I get recommended is different day vs night. It's also device dependent (even when logged into same account) - my TV and phone definitely have a slightly different algo.

Why would they help you sleep and take a gamble on subliminal anything working when they can just do it when you're awake?

I'm just spitballing sci-fi here, but maybe subliminal ads work better and their metric asston of computational models have told them so.

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