Holy shit folks, use a bit of your innate agency, and let others do likewise. Yes, Google, sorry, "Alphabet", is a dirt shitty company that engages in all kinds

Holy shit folks, use a bit of your innate agency, and let others do likewise. Yes, Google, sorry, "Alphabet", is a dirt shitty company that engages in all kinds of ugly corporate and legal practices, but no, the YT algorithm isn't destroying democracy or ruining human thinking. The vast majority of us are cognitive beings with the ability to choose what kind of content we consume, or not. In most cases, people who watch a whole pile of garbage on YT are people who would find some other source of it anyhow and always would have throughout history. Those who can separate wheat from chaff will do so regardless of what the algorithm pushes at them. In fact, they'll generally find their own algo-generated suggestions to be in line with the higher quality they steadily pursue. And quite frankly, there is a great deal of excellent content on YouTube to be found. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Many of the comments here exaggerating the evil of the algo and claiming that it ruins people's minds unless they're "shown better" reek of elitism and an implicit desire to control other's belief/feedback choices for their own good. Aside from this being a morally weak viewpoint, it's also bullshit in a practical sense. The majority of such people with an intellectual superiority complex are little better at avoiding intellectual bias than the average person, they just sometimes learn to disguise it with more sophisticated looking justifications.