Tuesday, June 25, 2024

I'm Not a Monk, You Know, But Come On...

I sometimes wonder about the YouTube algorithm and what shows up on my YouTube front page.

For every video that appears that's from a channel I subscribed to --or one in which I've watched videos of without subscribing-- I get some suggestions that came from out of nowhere. 

Like this:

I don't play Final Fantasy VII, never have, and probably
never will. But I ain't blind, you know.

Or this:

As if you didn't know, the picture --and likely
the rain sounds-- are AI generated.


Or even this:

What I did not know was that tents that use inflatable
"tubes" as supports are apparently a thing. Not exactly
sure how that'd work, but it is a thing.

And that's not even counting the YouTube videos of women "trying on" see through clothing, which suddenly blew through my feed and then vanished after a couple of weeks. To which I had to ask just how those videos got past the YouTube "adult" filters.

I mean, I get where all of the screencaps of the videos above are similar --I am a guy, after all-- but why these videos suddenly made their appearance is beyond my understanding. But there they were, intermixed with videos about D&D, sports, woodworking, MMOs,  and other forms of gaming.

Oh well. If I don't respond to their pretty obvious clickbait, they'll go away after a few weeks. But even my oldest has been getting these sorts of videos in her feed, and she's been annoyed by them as well.

2 comments:

  1. I posted about the YouTube recommend algorithm once, a lon time ago, ithink. There was a time when it really annoyed me, although I have never had it push anything like the stuff you're getting in my direction.

    I did some research on it back then and made some changes to my settings and installed a couple of add-ons to Firefox and things got much, much better after that. I pretty much only get directly relevant
    suggestions on my PC now.

    On my laptop, though, where I haven't made the same adjustments, I get a large number of completely irrelevant recommendations but they are almost all political or socio-cultural. I find those a lot more annoying than the more obviously commercial ones. Imight have to sort out my filters on the Laptop soon, now I've started using it again.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think I ought to take a hard look at my Subscriptions just to see what I really would like to keep and what might be feeding these sort of results. I did just review my settings in Google and tightened things up a bit, but I'm not convinced that'll do that much good.

      Delete