Life without Algorithms
A perspective from a software developer.
So I started to get burnt out awhile back, not from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or some other typical social media platform, but by Youtube. I already checked out mostly from FB a long time ago, probably around 2016, but youtube I thought was a fairly safe place, besides the comments section. (although depending on the topic the comments section can be good too)
What I didn’t know or realize was how heavily the youtube would start to tweak their algorithm to tailor more and more news, politics and simply put push infotainment with a side of outrage into my face on a near daily basis for years. It really hindered my ability to think without a near constant feeling of dread somewhere in the back of my mind. Maybe one day I will be in a position to help with the many issues that impact society, but at the moment that is not my role, nor my talent, and so I will carry on with what I am good at and where I can impact change in people’s daily lives.
So how do you tame the algorithm? It is annoying to have to do — but you really do have to make use use of those 3 dots now in youtube to clean it up, tell it not to push certain things to you anymore, ignore certain channels, and subscribe to others — something I was horrible at doing. I felt it was more democratic of me to not subscribe to keep youtube a little more random that it would be otherwise — but the reality we live in now is that almost nothing is random or curated by individuals online anymore… practically everything & I mean everything is driven by algorithms and analytics. You are not a person to anyone, you are potential buyer in the eyes of corporate entities and a string of bytes to whatever AI based algorithm a company happens to be using.
While I was at it though I also got rid of trending on Twitter. I am sorry, but I really don’t care to know what Ashton Kutcher is up to or why Disney did X to Y or for Z. I just don’t care, all of it is a distraction and I do not need pointless topics or celeb gossip to be interesting. So I went through some settings in Twitter and tweaked it and installed Tweak New Twitter chrome extension. The topics I explicitly told Twitter I am not interested in are Celebrities, Entertainment news, Sports and US national news. I want a period in my life where those around me will be catching ME up on the news, not the other way around.
I also added BlockTube and Channel Blocker to help ensure certain things stay away even after I remove certain channels on Youtube, keywords and phrases. All sorts of things I want to ensure do not get thrown my way. The algorithm might learn this as well, but I will control what gets shown to me going forward and mostly because there is not true randomness or such thing as human curated content online anymore. That era of the internet is beyond dead, it’s 6ft under and has been worm food for awhile now.