[moron4hire]

YT's curation keeps trying to shunt me off into neoconservative conspiracy theory videos, which I never click on, but occasionally auto play if I've left the window in the background. About all I can figure I've done is watch some videos about military-themed multiplayer video games. I don't actually play these games, but sometimes the commentary is funny.

Facebook kept trying to sell me an Oculus Quest weeks after I had already bought one ("look at the metrics! 95% of people who saw the ad also bought the headset", "you're reading the graph backwards").

To me, it lays bare the myth of advertising analytics. All this data, all this tracking, and none of it is actually all that useful for the stated purpose. Makes one wonder if it's really all for fleecing advertisers or if it's to keep totalitarian regimes happy.

[jaywalk]

You can go into your YouTube watch history and delete videos that you don't want influencing your recommendations. I do this all the time because if I watch something out of the ordinary, my recommendations will be bombarded with similar stuff that I don't want to see. I just wanted to see that one video with the dog doing funny things, damn it!