Recommendations algorithms are definitely out of control, and need regulation urgently. I don't use TikTok, so my personal anecdote will concern Youtube, which

Recommendations algorithms are definitely out of control, and need regulation urgently. I don't use TikTok, so my personal anecdote will concern Youtube, which with its shorts definitely try to become TikTok. I don't use it logged-in, but I had kept the same cookie for a few years, and I was getting great recommendations, mostly science and youtubers that I watch regularly would be suggested. It was working too well to the point I was sinking at least two hours a day and becoming problematic. The content was interesting and relevant, but not very in depth. About three months ago, everything took a dive for the worst. YT kept pushing shorts, although I never clicked them, one line out of 4 was shorts. So I added a filter in my ublock origin list so they don't appear anymore. It kept working great, until one day for unrelated reasons my Firefox crashed and needed to be factory reset, and my beloved cookie was lost. The YT experience instantly changed and hasn't recovered after three months. It is total garbage now. I am located in France but used to watch almost exclusively English content. The content now look like a generic mix-up of popular french youtuber, news, and religious content (for some reason YT has decided to show me Surat in Arab everyday even though I don't speak Arab and I am not Muslim). I am quite privacy conscious so I only accept necessary cookies anywhere I browse. But YT is still trying to learn as some of the content it recommends stuff related to some things I watched, or browsed about. I tried to explicitly search for the previous english speaking youtuber I used to watch, and watch their content. Like for example every night I watch Anton Petrov before going to sleep. It used to recommend it automatically, but now I have to search for it every night, and it still hasn't learn after 3 months. My YT consumption was drastically reduced to one or two video a day as a consequence of this. Even though I work in machine learning, I don't understand what sources it is using to update its recommendations, I don't understand how YT can provide such different experiences to different people. Or maybe I'm just in some bad beta test bucket like a lab rat. No way to know from my side. In the best case, it feels like being under the whim of an algorithm no one has control over, and in the worst case feels like being the subject in some sort of sick psychological experiment. And it's not even TikTok.