The siren song of recommendation engines

A couple of weeks ago I deleted my entire YouTube history - watched videos, subscriptions, likes, the lot. And I've opted out from further tracking of my YouTube activity. I'm sure Google still has that information stored away somewhere, but as far as I can tell it's all gone.

I did it because of my strong desire to turn off YouTube's recommendation engine. Now when I enter YouTube I'm faced with a blank screen, no more recommendations based on my history. Recommendations next to playing videos are generic and rarely ever interesting to me.

I've realized that YouTube's recommendation engine isn't my friend. It's actively working against me and luring me away form doing what I actually want to do. I don't want to endlessly engage with content on their site. What I want to do is to sometimes watch videos that interest me, when I feel like doing so. I want to nurture and direct my will towards finding content that is interesting to me and engaging with it. I don't want to concede my will and be pulled along endlessly by a lifeless algorithm whose interests are not aligned with mine.

Since I opted out of recommendations I still sometimes watch videos on YouTube, because I want to, but I never mindlessly open the site to let it pull me away from reality. It takes zero willpower. The desire to open YouTube to see what's up is gone. And I don't miss it at all.

The algorithm's ultimate purpose is not to make you watch the videos that you want to watch. It's purpose is to make you watch videos, period. And it's really good at that. The difference between the two may seem small but it's significant. Do you want to watch videos just for the sake of watching videos and increasing view counts? No. But like siren song the recommendation engine pulls you in and makes it hard to detach. You lose control and the algorithm takes over. Why would you want that? That sounds like slow death to me.

Like a boiling frog I haven't really understood how strong the lure of YouTube's front page is until I jumped out of the pot and opted out.

I've been an avid customer of YouTube's since probably 2008. Back in those days I primarily used it to find recordings of folk instruments and folk music that I liked. It was a niche community that was valuable to me and I had to look hard to find videos that I cared about, but I did it and uploaded my own in response. No algorithm fed them to me, I found them, not the other way around.

Nowadays however I can't find videos like that on YouTube. I've tried and given up. I'm instead fed with clickbait no matter how hard I try not to. And the YouTube click bait culture is absurd at this point. Maybe nobody uploads videos like that to YouTube anymore, but I don't think that's it. I think they're just never promoted by the algorithm because content like that doesn't suck people in and drive engagement.

YouTube is a company, companies need to make money and their monetization model is ads. The more I watch videos, the more ads I'm exposed to and the more money Google makes. It's their core incentive - I get that. My time is their profit. But my time on earth is not infinite.

Recommendation engines that both recommend content and also feed you with that content with no effort required should be avoided. It's toxic. They hijack your brain, detach from reality and take your will away. You become passive and time passes by. Why would you want that? The only reason I can think of is that you truly want to escape reality - a totally reasonable thing to want - but unless the passage of time is the solution to your problems, that isn't in your interest.

There's more to be said about the toxicity of the very distinct combination of recommendation algorithms that directly feed you with content - leading to passive consumption.

Avoid the siren song.