Category: Editorial

youtube is still shoveling shit

whbeebe

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.

Links

notube november

grist for the blog writing mill

whbeebe

I have, since very late December and into all of January so far, been writing like a madman. Not because I’m mad in any sense of the word, but because there’s something inside driving my creativity with regards to the written word. Not software development, but the literal written word that flows through my mind and out of my fingertips and into every post on this blog. I can’t give you a definitive answer to why this is happening. I can say it doesn’t appear to be letting up and for me that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

Part of this flood of writing is traceable to a personal decision I made around Christmas that I would write about anything that crossed my consciousness horizon. Anything, especially if I experienced it. In the past I’ve been far too selective about subject matter, but not anymore. I think it’s finally sunk in that anything can be the subject of a post or story if you let it. By stopping myself from being so “picky” the floodgates have opened for me.

I’m sure a lot of this will read like crap. So be it. I’d rather it be human-generated crap than AI generated crap. I guess in a way this burst of writing creativity is my response to the AI LLM’s ability to create seemingly human-written content. I suppose if you read enough original written content and then have your machines mine steal that content from the entire internet for “training content,” that the AI software will regurgitate writing that seems plausible at first glance.

That’s not for me. If there are mistakes in my writing, they’re mine and mine alone. Bad prose, misspellings, grammar errors, syntax errors, too many commas, whatever. It’s all me and all mine. And that’s the way it should be.

More to come…