DarkThoughts

You think your personalized feed is not manipulated like this either? Or imagine someone new to the platform, he’s gonna immediately get bombarded by propaganda and disinformation, clicks on the videos, and then the personalized feed will feed them more of the same, radicalizing them even further.

And no, I’m not and I don’t. You’re clearly not getting the topic and why it is a problem.

By bad actors. Do you not remember The_Donald being practically at the top of everything on Reddit? Do you not understand why far right videos on YT & TicTok have so much traction? Everyone gets fed their own reality that completely contradicts with what is happening in the world, which is causing massive divisions among our societies.

If it suggest me things based on various factors that can be manipulated, then it is inherently bad.

And user control would be to give me filter options. Videos are already categorized & tagged, so why not let users specify which categories & tags they want to see - and which one they do not? Much better than some obtuse and brain dead algorithm flip flopping while trying to figure out what I want to watch.

I’m asking myself this question for many years. Especially since YT videos are categorized to a degree. Give users control over keywords, both to like more of them, and to filter certain ones out. Obviously not perfect either because not everything is going to be properly categorized & tagged, but it would be so much better than the current mess where some brain dead algorithm tries to figure out what I like.

That’s just your history of what you watched, liked, disliked, etc. The problem is that the system behind it is inherently stupid. You liked Vintage Story? Here’s some Minecraft! And since they’re games, you likely also like OTHER GAMES! Right? So here’s some Roblox and Fortnite! Our trends say those are super popular with the cool guys and you surely are a cool guy too, right?! And with that comes all the clickbait bullshit too, so I say I’m not interested in those channels and block them, so YT now thinks I dislike gaming and scrubs everything again, until I manually search & watch another video of a game because obviously it also scrubbed the ones I’m interested in. Or you watched some music videos, REPEATEDLY? Here’s all the videos you previous have watched! Now you have to click, not interested, click for why, click you have watched it already, click okay. Repeat for every video you ever watched until YT gets the hint, for at least a day or two until it repeats the stupidity again.

You literally have to fight the system constantly. It’s why I don’t watch YT much anymore, or use private tabs now, which bring their own issue now that they also frequently block VPN IPs and ask you to log in, but that would then again muddle my watch history and consequently spam my feed with all sorts of irrelevant shit that I don’t want.

The only thing that got better over the years is the video quality, like from an encoding standpoint, the content quality went way down.

Yes, Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and all its other niche platforms are very much person based. They can still be topical, based on who that person is and what they post, but they have this self-centered drive that never made me click with any of them. Hashtags help with discovery since you can search and even subscribe / follow certain hashtags, or use them to block / filter certain topics. But there’s also often people who abuse that and just spam hashtags, or people who don’t tag their posts properly, which makes it a very flawed system imo.

Forums, Reddit, Lemmy, mbin (excluding the microblogging section), etc. are all topic based, and users are just contributing to those topics but ultimately not important as the person. That being said, some also allow you to follow the people directly as well, but at least for me that’s never been much of a thing.

Which service specifically are you referring to? YT’s search function has been constantly degrading over the years and spews out more unrelated bullshit than ever. And their algorithms are the worst and most moronic thing ever, and also somehow got worse over the years.

I’m completely fine with “no algorithms”, I even want that. But you have to give the user control over what they want to watch instead of just throwing random videos at them.

5000 videos and it only shows you the same ones, in the same order, with 0 media controls, or search & filter functions. I just don’t get this format.

I think I just did automatons back then because that’s where the rewards were but it was a completely overwhelming number of enemies spawning in non-stop. Combined with the sort of time limit I just did not enjoy that experience at all. Maybe you can kinda get better and grind through it I feel I’d rather waste my time and money on something that’s balanced around singleplayer, even if just optionally.

Yes, but the gameplay is absolutely not tailored towards solo players. I tried and it was a mess.

Stupid, but at least better than for example Helldivers 2.

Yeah but my bank card is still unique and tied to me as a person and my address. I can’t really get something anonymous for free like some temporary email provider throwing me a new inbox. We can’t even get anonymous prepaid phone SIMs anymore. It’s all a contract.

We don’t really use credit cards where I live.

Because stores typically want your payment methods first, before they let you subscribe or purchase anything, even for “free trials”.

Once. We’ve had this conversation already. Please stop spreading disinformation.

I don’t pay for Prime.

Clarifying a simple fact isn’t harassment.

It’s not a free game if I have to pay for it.

That makes it not a free game. It’s like saying games on Gamepass are free.