Comment by II2II
7 months ago
On the extrapolation to zero videos by September 2026: it is already here.
Seriously. Clear your cookies or open a private window. All of the videos are replaced by the message "Try searching to get started". Granted, as someone who clears cookies regularly, I like the change.
Its oddly relaxing.
As an aside, this is something I've noticed recently switching to KDE from Windows/OSX No one is trying to get me to do anything with my computer to pump their metrics. You log in the first time, there's a little welcome popup, and that's it. You are now free to use your computer as you wish.
It's oddly stressful being a rat in a bunch of PM's maze.
This is exactly the best part about the Linux experience right now. There is nothing that's there because a PM is trying to get a promotion.
I had the same revelation when doing the opposite, using Windows for two days after using Linux for years. It's a constant stream of attention grabbing distractions, questions and notifications. I don't even know what they are all doing. Like why does the graphics driver has it's own update mechanism and its own tray icon, why am i being asked to put the application as a desktop shortcut, why is the start menu rotating ads and news next to my applications. Some of them are not even metric pumping, it's just bad design. And that's just the start, the things getting in the way of you actually doing your job just don't end.
Never again.
Except the results will be what the algorithm has determined that people accessing from your IP address at your location using your exact version of your browser on your exact version of your operating system on a screen with your exact width and height and pixel resolution are into lol
I like that too. It reminds me of the classic Google home page: just a search bar so you have to search to get started.
Yeah I find this so strange. Why not take the opportunity to throw a bunch of heavily cached shorts recommendations in our faces when signed out? I don't understand how the anon home page is not both a money maker and extremely cacheable and cheap to serve
The only explanation I can imagine is that the risk of turning someone off YouTube by showing them the "wrong" vidoes is worse than the views or attention capture lost this way.
I can imagine my mom opening YouTube (hypothetically) for the first time and seeing an anime video, or my younger cousin being shown a Top Gear video, and them deciding that YouTube is "that app with the weird videos" that's not for them. It's not a carefully thought out conclusion, but in the era of a hundred competitors, it's plausible that superficial decisions like that have a lot of impact on the app usage.
Or it could just be that someone with a forceful personality on the YouTube team decided this is how we're going to do it and nobody could oppose them, not every decision is scientifically planned and executed like it's often assumed from the outside!
Normies expect platforms to have a vibe that it's full of their kind of person, regardless of how many thousand/million/billion users it has.
It's a fundamentally broken understanding of internet communication, but catering to it is possible and profitable. (I've done it in moderating smaller communities. We've handed out undeserved and unjust bans because getting rid of a high profile nuisance is easy compared to convincing someone to stop getting one-guyed. We also kept the most toxic users around when they're crowd favorites.)
You're spot on. YouTube knows they're the boring old video platform, the bland safe-for-tv default homepage that would be shown to someone with no surveillance profile would only confirm it's not the platform for someone with their taste in TikTok slop.
does anyone know why when I do this all my recommended videos are always "10 hours star pattern" or the like? does youtube figure any cookie-less machine is usually just a stick pc in a restaurant serving screensavers?
"Feed Me Seymour"