I don't use YouTube, but my preschooler does. And YouTube does take any video you watch and immediately start recommending stuff really similar to it, but it ge

I don't use YouTube, but my preschooler does. And YouTube does take any video you watch and immediately start recommending stuff really similar to it, but it gets extremely repetitive. In particular, it keeps recommending literally the same videos. That's actually not a bad approach for young kids, but even they get bored with the same videos eventually. Also just letting YouTube keep automatically moving on to another video, it pretty quickly gets off into weird territory. It's like YouTube thinks that for any video you watch, you want to hyperfixate on that particular topic and are perfectly happy to end up in some weird video with hand-drawn badly-voiced Sonic and Mario characters having a tea party. Or perhaps my favorite genre of "where did this come from?" is a series of stop-motion videos with figurines of Ash, Misty, Brock, and for some reason Link (from Zelda), sitting in a classroom, with Nurse Joy as the teacher, who puts up a silhouette of a pokémon on the blackboard and asks what it is, and the characters try to guess. It always ends up with something weird like a silhouette that looks exactly like Voltorb, and once everyone gives up, Nurse Joy reveals it as a top-down view of Jigglypuff. This one is weirdly entertaining. But also just plain weird. Not quite as good but even weirder is the 3D animated but badly-rendered and badly-animated scenes of lego pokémon with wizard hats and wands that conjure up lego buildings and collaboratively build a farm. --- I suspect the real difference here is TikTok wants to drive user engagement. It wants me to actively enjoy the videos I'm watching, put likes on them, maybe comment on them, share them with people, make my own videos inspired by them, etc. It wants me to be an active participant in consuming and creating content, and it wants me to always be confident of finding new content I enjoy by going through the feed. And me swiping past a video that I don't care for is perfectly fine as long as I don't have to do that very often. YouTube on the other hand wants a passive viewer. It wants me to just sit there on the couch slowly going numb as I let it show me videos. If I never touch the remote control, that's a win for YouTube. Every time I hit the menu button to go back to the content list, that means YouTube failed. Picking new unique content is therefore a big risk for YouTube, its best bet is to just stay closely related to whatever it is I just watched, and to slowly migrate towards anything that keeps me fascinated. This means it tends to get weird.