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It's a pity that they are missing a hugely troubled audience - elderly hooked on YouTube, specifically. It's an ugly addiction that mirrors what we've seen wit
by KernalSanders 11mo ago
It's a pity that they are missing a hugely troubled audience - elderly hooked on YouTube, specifically.
It's an ugly addiction that mirrors what we've seen with alcoholics and schizophrenics, whereby they point a finger at anything but the actual problem, and any remedy that the have, or are given, they adamantly avoid and refuse.
YouTube, like other social media, is driven by pushing and pulling on the right emotions in the right way to get you hooked. Sexy, funny, happy, cute, sensational, sad, scary, angry. Enough Sophia Vergara, cat videos, UFOs, doom and gloom, bias-confirming politics, etc, and you'll have someone watching all day long. It's not like what it was when an elderly person watched daytime soap operas and gameshows, this is a dopamine-fueled additive binge. We've seen several really bad cases where it's almost everything that the lonely elderly person does. There's no more "journey" or "investment" when you can simply flick to the next video that tickles your fancy in that moment.
These are the people I'm sincerely concerned about, and they have zero reason to go seek help. It's not an issue to them. In fact, they'll fight tooth and nail to claim anything else is their problem except this.
It's almost as though the first generations to enjoy television weren't ready for something this addictive.
Personally, I despise YouTube, despite growing up in the heart of the Silicon Valley. That platform serves a handful of purposes for me, such as helpful tutorials the rare time that I need them and epic Mongolian folk metal music videos.
- torben-friis 11mo agoWhy YouTube specifically? In my experience it is the tamest of all feeds. Not that they have any more morals or self control, they just seem to have a comparatively awful algorithm that brings up the same 14 videos over and over.
- atoav 11mo agoYoutube is one of those platforms I would probably never have used if my feed wouldn't be adjusted to me. There is real gold on youtube, like for example the math explainers by 3blue1brown. But if you ever tries opening a private browser window and opening and see the video recommendations it looks like a platform only containing mindless trash, with the mental nutritents contained in a piece of cardboard. And there are people who like precisely that: Mindnumbing somethings that just keep your brain from having a single thought.
- the_af 11mo agoAgreed. YouTube shines with personalized feed, and is unusable without it.
- floundy 11mo agoIf you’re using it as a tool it’s perfectly usable with just a search bar. I want to learn how to do something in a visual manner, I go to YouTube. Type in “how to replace [part] on [my car]”. All I have on the YouTube homepage is a search bar, because I used the Unhook extension to hide everything else.
- the_af 11mo agoOh, I use YouTube for my hobbies, which are very visual. Using YouTube (or any video thing) for programming topics drives me nuts, the presenter never goes at my pace.
- array_key_first 11mo agoYouTube recommendations don't work at all for me. YouTube will only recommend to me videos I've already seen. No matter what. Home page? All videos I've seen. Sidebar? All videos I've seen. The only way for me to find any new content is literally to search. It makes zero sense.
- FlameRobot 11mo agoYouTube recommendations are tailored to what you watch. I end up being recommended car repair videos, security/hacking/surveillance videos, repairing old vintage computers and some like comedy and music stuff I like. The stuff that you mention. You can literally say "Not Interested" on the video and it will show you less of content. I see none of it.
- Nextgrid 11mo agoRecommendations are mostly tailored to your history, except with a couple hardcoded slots populated with some general-purpose "engaging" trash from your locale/geographical location, pretty much always political content. And if you click on one, by mistake or curiosity, now you've sent a signal that you like it and will get much more of it in the next batch of recommendations.
- rkomorn 11mo agoNever fails to amaze me how shortsighted the algorithms can be. "Oh you didn't skip this video on a topic you usually don't watch? How about we make that topic 50% of your next however many videos?!"
- Nextgrid 11mo agoThey're not short-sighted; there's science behind it. The science of getting people to waste as much time as possible generating "engagement". All of this is A/B tested to hell and people's careers live and die by it.
- rkomorn 11mo agoYes, maybe shortsighted is not the right word, but regardless, they misunderstand signal constantly. I go out of my way to block accounts that post stuff I don't want in my feed and pretty much all of them see that as an invitation to give me more of the same content. Likely because I "interact" longer with the content since it takes clicks to block the account.