Television and Radio are 75% advertisement.
Most of my favorite youtubers from 2010s are gone replaced with nonstop politics, drama, reaction, and streaming content farming.
I feel it in my heart that short form content is damaging everyones attention spans especially my tablet ridden younger family members.
Weekend trips to Blockbusters to rent out a game and movie is gone.
When I go into the search bar on YouTube I see stuff literally called “brain break” and “brain rot”.
I switch on the news and its 90% pure political propagandano matter the station.
Even the memes suck now, say what you want about caption memes and dancing babies and troll face, Pepe, me gusta but that shit was at least comprehensible in humor. go on 67 Wikipedia and it literally says “It has no fixed meaning.”
Even the steam store just feels different now. Its full of gooner porn bait visual novels and mundane activity sims and 1 season relevant fps shooters.
All the stuff I enjoyed is gone, and everything they make now seems so empty and pessimistic now. The last bastion of enjoyment zi have is older media and indie made stuff by a few select artist/small teams . Is this just me getting old yelling at clouds, or is something wrong?
I think on the YT part we can blame the extremely crazy recommendation engine for it, because I can find great content easily, but even just 1 genre alteration throws me into a whole different recommendations.
Ex: You watch 1 political vid, and suddenly half of your new vids are politically related
Carefully curating you watch history is key. I try to check mine once per week and pull out anything that causes me to get angry about something. Basically if it’s not a video that teaches me how to do something, I remove it.
Are recommendations based on the “watch history” list, or just your actual watch history? I doubt they are just disregrding data they have on you just because you remove it from the ui.
Nah it works.
Why would they keep forcing content on you when you explicitly go out of your way to remove it?
I know Google is fan of forcing things on their users, but they aren’t that stupid.
I imagine the fact you’ve watched and removed it from ypur history are both held as data points.
It wouldn’t work for everyone but my gut says that would help their algorithm fine tune etc.
Clear your history and check for yourself. It’s not hard to do.
On top of that, I personally set my default youtube app to be newpipe, so if I’m just casually browsing lemmy or elsewhere I can click a youtube link and figure out what it is, even watch it if I want, without it effecting my normal account and watch history.
If I like the video and want more like it, I’ll share to the Youtube (Revanced) app and finish it there.
My method of using YouTube is to look through recommendations on a video that I liked, and save any promising videos to ‘watch later’. Moreover, I have a dozen ‘watch later’ playlists by topic, each with several dozen videos in them. I can live off these playlists for at least a year.
I also open any links from social media in a private tab, lest my carefully cultivated taste profile gets bungled.