For a less serious take, I've been playing a game with Youtube's recommendation system that I want to share. It works like the Wikipedia link game[1][2] but mor

For a less serious take, I've been playing a game with Youtube's recommendation system that I want to share. It works like the Wikipedia link game[1][2] but more stochastic, I'd like to think. To play the game: 1. Have a specific video in mind. It mostly comes to me from memory of recommendations past. For example, "Hey I remember Crash Course Film History had an episode on 2001: A Space Odyssey." 2. Now the fun part: NEVER use search to find the video (external search engines too!) directly or indirectly. Rather try to bias the recommendation algorithm until it recommends that video to you again. You can only try to influence the algorithm by watching other recommended videos, liking, or disliking. Recommendations come from the homepage or from the sidebar when you watch other videos; this means you can't start your search by visiting their channel In this example, maybe I'll try watching more content from Crash Course. I've been watching STEM Crash Course lately so maybe I'll click on the first Crash Course Humanities content that gets recommended. To bias towards movies maybe I'll watch myself some Nerdwriter. Again, note that searching for Crash Course Humanities content is considered cheating. It has to be recommended to you. It's a race against yourself to get to the video you want. Obviously, I don't have anything better to do with my time ;). Once I was looking for a video I was extremely sure Tom Scott made. After what's basically a nonsequential brute force search through his channel (again, only through recommendations!), I still couldn't find it. I gave up but I still didn't search, rather I emailed Tom. He replied only to say he's never made such video. This is when I used search; it turned out to be from Vox. I just wanted to "stick it to Google": if they are going to profile me and my interests, I won't make it too easy. With this game, I'm hoping my interests appear broader than they are to Google. Have fun. [1] https://www.thewikigame.com/ https://www.thewikigame.com/ [2] https://degreesofwikipedia.com/ https://degreesofwikipedia.com/