this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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Youtube seems to base my suggestions on shoots wall of videos with a shotgun style of recommendations.
I do everything in my power to stop Google from tracking me, but when I'm watching youtube videos on youtube, it should be able to gifure itself out.
And "don't recommend this video to me, I don't like it" does nothing. Just to see how long it will keep this up, I keep telling it I don't want to see let's play videos of star trek online. But it sure wants me to see them, dozens of them, daily, sometimes recommending the same video I already told it not to.
And its really been pushing me to watch right-wing conspiracy videos and flat earth videos after whatever I just purposefully clicked on, despite most of my content views being future Sci fi with either apocalyptic levels of devastation on galactic scales, or "post-scarcity utopia where energy is virtually limitless and energy/matter manipulation is easy peasy, usually liberally peppered with anti-capitalist and progressive themes"
And of course "female leads bad because feeeemale".
YouTube constantly suggests right wing side of things. Watch a video about Captain Marvel/Brie Larsen once? Get bombarded by YouTube shorts on why she is killing the MCU. Watch something about Star Wars? Get shorts on Gina Carano talking about "woke" Disney. Doesn't matter that the political commentators that I subscribe to are progressive. Although I will admit to likely being at fault because those shorts tend to have more scantily clad versions of the characters and I am certain I look at them a split second longer while scrolling because boobs.
Hilariously, after watching a channel that did some comedy skits based on "life in star trek" and very clearly, vocally supportive of progressive ideals, literally one being "work unions are good and necessary even in the Federation where things should be great for everyone" I got a ton of reccommended videosafter each one, from red hats wearing oakleys sitting in trucks looking down at their phone to yell, one of which was literally titled "unions are destroying America"
My favorite though has to be a video discussing progressive ideals clearly displayed in the original star trek shows from 30+ years ago (The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager, and Enterprise) and their tackling of modern socioeconomic and political issues. Non-binary species, white/black patterned species, extremely on-the-nose metaphors for the holocaust and palestine/israel/Gaza, and literally outright showing "fuck your racism here's a kiss between a white man and a black woman with great hair"
And the "up next" video was "NUTREK IS TOO WOKE" by a very angry looking man with a confederate navy jack on the wall.
I can't say I ever recall seeing anything right-wing in my recommendations. No anti-woke rants, no conspiracies, nothing like that at all. I'm glad whatever curse you guys have isn't affecting me.
Only engage with things you want to see more of. Downvoting and Not Interested are both forms of engagement.
Engagement metrics allow YouTube to show advertisers that you're actually looking at the page and not just letting it run in the background
I don't down vote, just "not interested"
I can see that being exactly how YouTube is thinking, "if they're too busy hate-blocking that means their eyes are glued to the screen!"
Instead of click Not Interested, I recommend igoring them. It might take a few days or even a week, but I they should start to disappear from your feed
Is that conceptually asinine? Absolutely... But it's your best bet
I'd love a youtube replacement with decent recommendations based on viewer satisfaction, not "is this making money"
Buuuuut here we are, having to try to ignore the shittiness hoping boomer-bully-logic will work and it'll just go away...
We'll see how well ignoring it works. At least most of my subscriptions have playlist I can tap through
The not interested doesn't work, the don't recommend me videos from this channel works perfectly, and if the first video I get recommended of a channel is so repulsive to me I actually care to do something about it, the entire channel is probably bad anyways.