It seems I have fallen into YouTube's filter bubble trap. Like I used to do on Facebook, where it would be news stories, I go to YouTube every day to see what outrageous videos are at the top of my feed. The algorithm is enhanced to increase watch time, which effectively increasing ad revenue*, though I never click them.
It's a shame because I knew they were filtering content to increase watch time a long time ago. The way it started, I would go to find the next unintentional AMSR video I hadn't seen, which I recognized as random by the algorithm. These videos had a way of relaxing me before bed, even helping me drowse off. Ironically, I started seeing other videos related to things I'd searched and watched, only these were more extreme and kept me up longer. Intense police encounters, shouting matches in a court of law, the devastation of extreme weather. Instead of relaxing me, these would make me every bit as distracted as a Facebook user who can't put their phone down after posting before bed.
The idea now is to log out of YouTube the way I started logging out of Facebook, which lowered my usage time substantially. I won't outright boycott these platforms, but I will make a more conscious effort not to go. There are too many useful videos on YouTube to abandon it entirely. I just don't want the algorithm filtering suggested videos based on my data anymore, because they have a tendency to radicalize people** and I don't want my worldview to shrink. All searches will be off the record now.
*Fisher, Max. 2022. The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. Little, Brown and Company: New York.
**ibid
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