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by anonytrary 2829 days ago
This is such a pretentious comment, but I can't disagree with it. It's not that YouTube is stupid, it's that most people watch really stupid videos and that trending algorithms are a black mirror. Everything you see in trending is the LCD of what average people are interested in.

Twitter trends are being dominated by sports I couldn't care less about, Reddit's front page is constantly bombarded with FortniteBR posts, and YouTube is being taken over by clickbait, tabloid press and garbage. Evidently, that's what people want.

2 comments

Please let people dislike trivial things without calling it "pretentious."

My comment is obviously something of a joke. It doesn't really hurt anyone except staunch FortniteBR fans, and we all know they don't have souls so that fine.

Pretentious (adjective): making usually unjustified or excessive claims (as of value or standing).

> That Youtube is awful. People are awful. Fortnite Battle Royale is awful.

I definitely used the word right, and I recognized you being facetious, but I still agree with you for the most part because there is a nugget of truth in what you said.

But you think that I'm right, so you don't think I'm unjustified. Do you think they're excessive? Should I have used like a toki-pona word or something?
I wish youtube had a way to directly and instantly influence the algorithmically created view.

For example. I like all those electronics, physics and music theory videos, but after weeks of same old same old, I sometimes crave for something completely different. I would like to be able to see an orthogonal view to what I usually get just to be able to break out of that self reinforcing recommendation loop.

I could search for stuff I am not interested in and watch videos I don't like just to reset the assumption youtube has about the videos I want to watch but that is tedious and probably does not what I want.

It can be even worse; I'm usually browsing youtube on my phone and then send videos I'm interested in to XBMC, so I see them on the big screen. Downside is that youtube doesn't count that as me having seen the video (even when logging in in the XBMC youtube app). So I get the same videos recommended for weeks. Literally the same; not just similar content. Makes discovering new things really hard.