November of 2023 was NoTube November, a time to shed watching YouTube. I kept it up until the first of January of this year, beginning to dip back in for very short periods to watch little clips with subject matter that ranged widely, from politics to technology to cats (lots of cats), etc etc etc.
This past week I dove in even deeper and managed to trigger within myself the same level of disgust I’d experienced late last year. This time, however, I decided to find out exactly what was driving that emotion of disgust, and I think I found it, at least for me.
It is, for lack of a better term, the “oh-ain’t-it-awful” form of reporting.
It doesn’t matter if the talking heads making the report are liberal or conservative or whatever, the formula is basically the same; talk about a given subject/target, go into great detail how and why it’s awful, and finish up with an advertisement for something related to the channel. Lather, rinse, repeat.
And the YouTube algorithms know that’s what drives “engagement” and from there, advertising dollars.
As an experiment this last pass into YouTube, I started to mark what YouTube was trying to hand off to me with either a not interested or else don’t recommend this channel. I’m not sure what the not interested flag is supposed to do because I kept getting videos with the same subject matter, but on different channels. Even marking a channel not recommend still didn’t stop it completely, and I believe the answer to both questions of why is because there are a lot of people/bots out there grabbing other channel content and reposting it as their own. It becomes an exhausting whack-a-mole effort, which is what has driven me out of YouTube yet again.
Radarwitch
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