I spent some of my sabbatical watching YouTube. I know, this is not the best activity of all and I did other things that were more meaningful. I’ll post about it later.

So, here’s my problem with YouTube, after a few months of embarrassingly high usage. I don’t like their recommendations algorithm. I see what they do, I see why, it is very clever, it just feels like it turns the users into victims, and some of their users are my kids. Here’s what I think the algorithm does.

You are into science but I don’t really have much else to offer here. Maybe you’ll like an investment video by similarly looking creators? Oh great, you watched 30 minutes of that. Let me now fill your feed with similar videos, all full of reasons why we are all going to suffer imminent apocalypse from at least 10 different sources. AI is taking over. Data centers destroy communities and don’t pay taxes. We are running out of water. A tanker was hit in the Strait of Hormuz. The petrol will go up, prices will inflate, the electronic tickets spy on you, so do the Flock cameras. The Chinese cars are coming and that’s awful for the industry but the industry is also awful because modern cars are bad and expensive. Choose your own doom and I’ll show you 100 videos telling exactly the same but with more drama.

It’s the same story of productive emotions repeated over and over by an almighty ML algorithm, ordering videos, and clever influencers, saying whatever the target audience wants to hear. The bubbles of content naturally form because they’re ordered by the probability of what would keep me watching.

But why ban just YT shorts if it looks like a broader problem?

I think that long content is higher-effort to both create and watch. The learning loop is longer, the creator has to go deeper. It’s much easier to identify if they are reading an AI generated script and stop watching them before the message is transferred. It doesn’t mess up with your dopamine as much. So it’s a bit better and perhaps some of these videos can really be useful. I don’t need to buy a DGX Spark or Mac Studio to see them in use. I don’t need to tear down an engine to learn how bad oil looks like. There’s some value in that.

After spending several rounds in YouTube rabbit holes in the areas of mathematics, car repairs, local AI, and particle physics, I think reading is still the way to learn things for me. Videos look like a proof someone else did their homework and can do something, like fix a computer, or run a benchmark. But watching someone fix something doesn’t teach me how to fix it myself, something books and education can do, or at least can still do for me. Slop invades books as well.