YouTube Addiction

Why is that?

This is probably enough. I've never subscribed to anything except for a friend who doesn't post anything, some random dude who hacked an old LG TV (he doesn't post anything either) and a couple of channels. I've just checked and all the recommendations I see are completely useless; I'm indifferent at best or sometimes even repulsed. Even though I can see how they were picked (Google search history).

> It's interesting to note that YouTube is still surprisingly good at suggesting relevant content to me

This is what really baffles me. I don't know what is wrong with me, but I don't remember ever seeing a relevant and useful recommendation from a machine (except when the search domain was already constrained to something very niche).

Here's what I see if I open YouTube's home page:

- "Razer Blade 16 and Razer Blade 18 - they finally did it". Yes, I bought a Razer laptop. Of course I've searched for a bunch of things related to their hardware, so Google must've caught it. I don't intend to buy a new one anytime soon. It's a prime example of a "meatbag bought a sofa, must love sofas, show them all the sofas"-style recommendation.

- "The most mysterious band in the world. Enigma." (title translated into English by me). So, long story short, based on my wife's recommendation I watched a channel with two radio DJs telling some interesting trivia about music. Like about how some popular songs are actually a covers of some obscure ones, or how The Prodigy songs were made (where are all the samples are from), etc. Fun stuff, but I don't watch every single video from them. Enigma is a miss for me, sorry. Good try, recommender system - given that this channel is one of a few I've actually cared to subscribe to, hah.

- Some podcast with a name and face that doesn't ring any bells to me.

- "Things I Wish I Knew Earlier In Horizon Forbidden West". Played, finished and uninstalled long time ago, doubt the replay value. And I've already checked the wikis when I was done playing. So, nope, not watching this.

- "Unusual Feature in UltraLoq Smart Lock" by LockPickingLawyer. I think I've watched a couple of LPL's videos when I was randomly wondering about some lock mechanism - so I wanted some quick visual explanation how it works. I sure don't need to see any videos to learn how some IoT is a mess.

- "1 Min Synth Review // TB-303 #shorts". Must be because I've watched that channel about music I've mentioned, since they sometime invite various music experts. I can't carry a tune in a bucket, so this is meaningless for me.

- "Lord of the Rings from Sauron's perspective". So, some time ago me and my wife decided to re-watch Peter Jackson's trilogy. And I've searched for The Battle of Helm's Deep because it felt weird and I wanted some expert opinion from Reddit's renown medievalists (lol). I don't think I'd care to watch a fanfic.

- "UE5 - How to create a Radial Weapon Menu - Tutorial Part 6". Never in my life I've ever coded for Unreal Engine. And last time I've did something with 3D game engines was two decades ago, when I was a school kid and played with a DIY Quake 1 map renderer, learning BSP (as well as other space partitioning algorithms) and some OpenGL.

- "10X Your Excel Skills with ChatGPT". So 3 months ago this meatbag needed to figure out how to make a certain one-off chart to visualize some data (and Excel is as good as anything). And this meatbag was not impervious to recent ChatGPT hype. Automated recommendation engines work in a mysterious ways! Obviously, I'd pass.

And so on and so on. I know I'm sometimes a pretty grumpy person, I've had some assholes for role models during my student years, and while I'm not that angsty kid anymore, sometimes something still gets through. And I went to YouTube with an expectation that I won't likely see anything interesting, so there's a bias. But then I've also honestly tried to find something worth watching. It's a good afternoon, I'm done with my dose of HN and I was certainly open to watching something entertaining.

It's not just YouTube for me. Spotify, Kindle, various streaming platforms, Amazon product recommendations and so on - all bad, to the extend I really believe that either I'm a weird outlier or all this "big data" that's supposed to predict my every sneeze is just one big lie from the naked kings of the industry. The thing that prevents me from thinking I'm just a negative person is that I've got a plenty of human-curated recommendations (even non-personal, but just some online posts) that I've genuinely enjoyed.

And I think I know how to waste my time responsibly (aka not screwing up other obligations too much), so I'd even pay for a good recommendation system that'd bring me something I'd be always interested in, on demand, to fill an hour or two when I want it.

So I wonder - how YouTube looks to someone who says the recommendations are good?

The first thing I did to try to curb my...addiction to YouTube was to consume the videos instead through RSS feeds. I wrote a script omnavi (https://sr.ht/~smlavine/omnavi) to help out with that. I would never watch videos on YouTube itself; I would click links that I got through RSS to channels I was subscribed to, and view the videos locally with mpv + youtube-dl.

Honestly it's sad to look back at how many hours of my day I wasted watching YouTube videos. They're the sort of sort-of educational videos that make me feel like I'm spending my time valuably, but at the end of an all-night session, I really wouldn't have been able to tell you any of what I had watched for the past six hours.

Disclosure - I'm full time working on software that arms people with better tools for fighting compulsive digital habits (https://getclearspace.com/) We have a chrome extension and an iPhone app and they're powerful for retraining compulsive habits - but can't honestly recommend them for full blow addiction (yet).

Interestingly, in watching my own behavior, the most effective force for keeping me from wasting my life is knowing that people can see my screen (at the office for example). I'm starting to think that replicating this remotely might be a way to keep my phone usage in check. If I could opt-in to sharing my phone screentime with a pre-set list of friends that might change how I behave - particularly if they were notified if I ever deleted the app that was doing that sharing. I'll be all-in building some version of that for the next few months if you want to be on the beta list for some accountability experiments. https://screentimeaccountability.com/