this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Ok people, time to decide. Do you want targeted recommendations or do you want privacy?
Because the only way for YouTube to figure out what you may find interesting today is to go through your watch history, rummage through your engagement metrics, and suck up your profile details. Then collate and process a ton of data about you and your preferences, compare that knowledge against a vast library of channels & streams to try and figure out what would likely make you click on a given video. All while fighting spam, misinformation, and people trying to game the system with SEO and clickbait. All in real-time, as over 300,000 hours of content is being uploaded every minute.
To be clear, I'm not defending YouTube or Google. I'm just saying it's not all cut-and-dried as many people think.
While most of the rest is true, clickbait makes you click, so it isn't something YouTube necessarily wants to combat.
Same with "rage-bait", or content that you'll click on just because it's so preposterous that you'd want to criticize it in the comments.
Both are trash, yet not against YouTube's interests.
This is my view. I went the privacy route. The result is the addictiveness of the service went way down. For me, that's a win.
There are other ways to give us content we might like. For example, have a list of topics and categories we can select. This reduces invasiveness while providing some benefit.
The problem is that does not give Google what it wants out of the relationship.