[sixothree]

Wow. Your feed is pretty messed up. Here is my youtube shorts feed:

- how programmers actually review code

- 3D Printed Latch Mechanism

- I Always Thought This Border Was Straight (about a border in australia)

- You need to go to a “better” place! (rescue of an injured raptor)

I think YouTube is a lot like twitter (5 years ago), in that what you view and follow affects what you're fed.

[refulgentis]

I'd say I get the adult baby videos 1 in 15 "swipes" and the bodycam / court stuff are for long form, and is definitely because I watch true crime - i.e. I found courtroom videos of long trials fascinating because I wanted to be a lawyer growing up

It's important to note it's not about individual feeds, but the basins that algorithmic content settles in given the data they have.

As things evolve, they optimize for brutally efficient production. "true crime" starts as "NPR award-winning podcast phenomena" and very quickly come to mean a swath of "DUI arrest" videos.

That's because the initial click, averaged across all of us, is *hyper*optimized for a thumbnail with an attractive scantily clad young female saying COPS DAUGHTER THROWS TANNTRUM AFTER BLOWING 0.24! It's not about individuals, or individuals feeds, it's about these niches get hyperdominated by nonsense because that's what best practice is. c.f. document's comments re: thumbnails vs. mine.

Note also, for instance, the curious absence of any programmer influencers making anywhere near the views of pretty much any other topic on YouTube. t3.gg is the top in software engineering videos by a mile, and they pull in 1/10th of what a bodycam video does.

[bear141]

I am intrigued by this Cops Daughter video. Do you have a link?

[refulgentis]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5gdXvfve8A

not exact match, if i see the bac one again i'll share it.

but this is somewhat typical of the drama, only missing element is a generic slop voiceover that interjects every 2 minutes with two sentences: 1. vague statement about what's happened so far that could apply to any video. 2. "...but they weren't prepared for what happened next!" (nothing crazy ever happens) (except on the 'cop gets arrested for DUI' ones where they think they're gonna get a favor like its 1994 still)

EDIT: this ones a good subtle example of the adult baby video https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jan_KjEZd20

[someothherguyy]

These "adult baby videos" are the default content on TikTok.

My paranoid take is that it is a type of hypnotism or mind control yet to be deciphered.

In reality, it is just a cheap way of generating (remixing/stealing) content with TTS voice overs and algorithmic selections of video clips. I would bet there is software tailored for it, but I am not interested enough to find out.

[someothherguyy]

> I think YouTube is a lot like twitter (5 years ago), in that what you view and follow affects what you're fed.

Clear your cookies, cache, local storage, stay logged out, and see what happens. The baseline is junk.

[taberiand]

This is true, but it's a constant fight with the recommendation system, requiring a fairly strict approach to flagging "not interested" and "do not show this channel again" etc - as soon as you watch one junk-food video in a lazy day, prepare for another round of moderating tangentially related garbage.