The social media platforms benefit out of this situation. What surprises me is how similar the recommendations are when I borrow someone else's computer in a d

The social media platforms benefit out of this situation. What surprises me is how similar the recommendations are when I borrow someone else's computer in a different geographical location to do some testing or want to use YouTube to look up how to do something. In these scenarios I am on a different operating system, differently gendered to normal, possibly in a borrowed account or in incognito mode. Yet I get the same lowest common denominator stuff that I get at home, logged in and with a particular history. I come away wondering how tailored those recommendations actually are. Of course they are not that tailored at all. Unless I specifically look for something whatever get recommended is going to be from a quite narrow selection. If I start out looking for a particular topic then the recommended stuff will steer me back to the same froth that everyone else gets. If I was a paranoid person I would assume that the social media giants were especially good at tracking me. But no, I have been tricked into believing recommendations are more tailored than they actually are. So why does this suit the social media companies? Well Google/Youtube is probably the case in point. Shifting those videos around costs bandwidth. They have had boxes in the telcos before now, they might as well be a virtual update to Blockbusters and only have the general small selection and not every single option, that will do for most people most of the time. Or like libraries in the olden days where you could put in a special order for any book to borrow but the local library just had a few hundred kiddies books, a few hundred books in big print for the old folks and a few reference works. There was a story on here today about how Google search results are skimping on showing us everything. I actually had not been able to find a former co-worker recently, and, thanks to the article comments I went on DDG and was able to find him. So we have a subset of information going on, the same influencers, the same search results, the same videos, this also becomes a corpus of information we rely on and, the more we rely on it, anything outside of the expected becomes alien and rejected by us. It is like eating the same food every day, variety that was once the spice of life doesn't sit well. Special knowledge is always special knowledge though. The really good stuff has few if any likes/views/reads. It is there for people who take the path required to get there. It matters not what the medium is.