YouTube Face is clickbait, attaining human form

I do the same, and it started accidentally. I followed someone on twitter who I thought was someone else, and they are hard alt right. After getting some updates from them in my email, I realized my mistake, and went on twitter to unfollow them, and got to reading their feed was was atrocious from my viewpoint, but I saw that it was good to know how the "enemy" was thinking, what their thought process and logic trains are. So I kept following them.

At first I stopped in from time to time to get my outrage on (I never interact with them, just read) and to feel smug that I am intellectually superior to them and their followers.

But then I realized that if way back, at the very beginning of your thought process you start from a false premise, everything else can follow reasonable and logical methods. It's almost like chaos theory, small differences in the starting position can have vastly outsized differences at the end.

I've used this experience to go back and look at my "starting" positions. And I've horrified myself too. So on the whole it's been an enlightening experience.

So now I can say that I am firmly on my way to understanding them now (and myself too) even though I diagram with them vehemently.

I don't use Facebook much, but if I did, I would want to be able to tell the algorithm "take 50% of what you want to show me based on my preferences and show me the exact opposite"

Right. It only "got worse" while people tried to figure out the new medium. Once we have a set of options that work well, I'd expect this to become a basic meta game. People will recognize the current pattern and begin to associate it with "old". Just like fashion. Probably a bit circular, aka old trends will at some point re-emerge. This assumes YT will be around for long enough, of cause.

>So if you just set out to make a Good Thing it gets lost, unless you also do other things that are seemingly unnecessary (like adding a silly face to your YouTube preview).

Right, so you can boost the signal (curators, youtube face, clickbait title) or reduce the noise (lesser crappy content). Reducing the noise seems to be harder when so many people have this false confidence that their half-baked ideas are worth sharing.

Andrew Huang immediately sprang to mind https://www.youtube.com/user/songstowearpantsto

He's a musician and synthesizer enthusiast, granted electronic music and synths have taken on a pretty youthful market in recent years (thanks to cheaper products and a larger acceptance of the genre) but Andrew becoming a YouTube personality in this space was definitely met with backlash from the community.

It wasn't for the content itself, I really respect the guy as both a musician and video editor, but it's the gimmicky persona, the little "signature" things he does in his videos, the all too-perfect sheen put on top of his content, the silly faces on the video thumbnails that draw people's attention, the inauthenticity of it all. It rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, at least in the electronic music/synthesizer communities I visit (full of people who have been working with synths and modular instruments since the 70s/80s).

Now I realize it's not just his gimmick, it's everyone who hopes to ranks' gimmick!

Since the hot mess that was 2016 on Facebook went down, I've been pondering this a lot.

Facebook was an effective rear view mirror, for a whole lot of us. The more savvy among us could see the storm clouds gathering on the horizon literally almost since the beginning , but certainly by late 2014/early 2015 it was plainly obvious that psyops were afoot, though even to a lot of plugged in hackernews type people the full-blown industrial scale of it all wasn't immediately obvious.

That's whats so insidious. It's the model. It's the first person perspective that facebook locks you into. It looks like reality, and it contains people you know, but it is not real.

You don't really know who wrote what, who liked what, etc. There's no global view of facebook for a user. I think that's the problem.

The first person view that you're locked into with facebook, makes it trivial to manufacture the appearance of group consensus when no such thing exists in the real world (if you have access to the backend).

The problem really is facebook, not the concept of social media all together. The problem is also that Facebook knew what it was doing. They were building a political doomsday machine from the get-go, they knew that's what they were doing, and they designed specifically to that goal for a decade with practically limitless funding.