Recommendations reflect what you want to watch, not what you want to want to watch. During pandemic at some point I started indiscriminately watching more YouT

Recommendations reflect what you want to watch, not what you want to want to watch. During pandemic at some point I started indiscriminately watching more YouTube while logged in, and do I regret it. It responded after my viewing habits changed. It seems possible to change it back gradually, but it takes some effort I wish I didn’t have to take. Second-order volition (“want to want to”) plays a big role in allowing yourself to evolve, i.e. you can force yourself to do something until you become interested in it. In this sense recommendations become a self-fulfilling prophecy, an automatic labeling system that makes you behave the way it thinks you should behave, which is approximately how you behaved before (ideally; we set aside the issue of algorithmic manipulation). This is true for any platform that has recommendations, and I am highly suspicious of the ones that don’t allow anonymous viewing.