I’m not exactly rejecting it, but I can’t afford to build a new computer that can run it till the AI bubble bursts.

That’s just because he looks like depression.

Sure, google knows I’m a 50+ year old man but YT isn’t pushing me a bunch of videos about retirement and how to keep the damn kids off my lawn. If I made a new account and it knew nothing about me, it might. But right now it knows I’m interested in obscure early 20th Century comic books and early 70s horror anthology shows.

Edit:

I misunderstood what you said. I use ad blocker so I don’t see ads. Sometimes they get through and it’s always Wix. That is kind of a mystery to me.

Algorithms aren’t that smart. Maybe there needs to be general education about how they work so people will understand that viewing a video is like searching for a topic in google so people will understand how much control over what they see and use the technology appropriately.

If you watch a video about anorexia that’s like typing “Anorexia” in Google or pressing 9 on a remote control, you’re getting channel 9. That’s why to me this sounds crazy. It’s like someone complaining their TV keeps pushing the cooking channel at them.

I get some manosphere stuff for the same reason, but mostly ignore it. At the risk of getting beat up here, I like Joe Rogan. His celebrity interviews are entertaining and I like wacky subjects like UFOs and such which he covers. Plus I’m a gamer so I watch videos about guns frequently because I find that fascinating though I don’t want to own one. So that’s why I’ll get recommended manisphere stuff. And I’ll get curious and take a look at those videos, and get more recommendations. But when I stop watching them, they go away. My recommendations are based on whatever I’m interested in at the time.

Everybody talks about Andrew Tate but I have never ever seen any of his videos. Him or Mr. Beast. They never get recommended. I only know about Tate because everybody everywhere else is complaining about him. So I don’t what that researcher did to get that.

That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological harm by designing features like infinite scroll and autoplay to push her down a path that she alleged triggered depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality.

What the hell is everyone watching? YT recommends me Red Letter Media, Veratasium, old movies, Blender tutorials and a bunch of other stuff that’s never going to drive me to self-harm. I don’t understand. May be this woman doesn’t have ad blocker installed and is forced to sit through a bunch of soul crushing PSAs? Why is my experience so drastically different from this?

A lot of sites had to block the UK like Imgur, or completely shut down like Urban Dead, because they aren’t the kajillion dollar companies the UK government thought the Internet was made of. I don’t know why the UK didn’t enforce parental control software instead. OSA is a solution for a problem solved 30 years ago and is just going to destroy the Internet since it’s not possible for the vast majority of it to adhere to its laws.

Why is European seen as a selling point?

“Thanks comrade. But are you sure we’re supposed to use our tongues?”

I use 1930 as the base year. So the $20 USD bill is actually the new $1 bill.

The algorithms aren’t that smart. They’re extraordinarily dumb.

For example, on YT recently I got recommended an ancient video from 2011 where an ex-con was giving advice about how to pick up hookers. I looked at the comments and tons of them were recent and also confused about why they were recommended this video. After sifting through my own watch history, I realized I had recently watched the Austrian version of Eyes Wide Shut where the main character meets a hooker. So the algorithm just looked and saw the synopsis had the word “hooker” and found another video where the word “hooker” is used, and then sent it my way.

The algorithm is not even as smart as any given free chess app that some college kid wrote over the weekend as an exercise. If the algorithm is manipulating people and hacking their brains, that’s a problem with the wetware not the software. The remote control isn’t hacking people’s brains when they press 5 and the TV displays channel 5.

You looked at one of those videos at some point. I get them too because I occasionally get curious. Some of it is tied to watch history. You might have one buried in the pile. If you clean it out, you might not see those anymore.

What would disprove it is if people would quit upvoting, reading, and watching things that make them more and more angry. Algorithms don’t steer anyone. People steer themselves with the algorithms. They’re essentially mirrors of one’s personality. Just be aware if you upvote a post that says “Tech billionaire kills baby seals with his bare hands, has sex with the corpses, and laughs about it on TikTok”, you’re going to get more stuff that has all those keywords in it. However, if you upvote “How do I subdivide a mesh in Blender?” you will get a bunch of stuff about Blender, subdividing 3D models, and other topics related to that.

Algorithms give you what you want. If you’re getting rage, you’re looking at and upvoting rage. On Reddit, 99% of what I get are posts about Hitman, Blender, Boomershooters and other things I’m interested in. The same with YT except I also get obscure movies from the 30s and 40s. The more of that I consume, the more the algorithms push it to me. The same with news. If there’s a big news event I might read and watch a bunch of news and then all the news stuff gets pushed to me.

Algorithms boil down to “Did user look at, upvote something with these keywords? If yes, then send more things with those keywords their way.” These magical mystery algorithms are probably 5 lines of code most.