One Man Against the Noise Farms

A while back I did a post on YouTube and the odd recommendations their algorithms were sending me.  Subsequently I did hear from people who had similar experiences but in a departure from my usual policy I decided to not post comments and make their discontents potentially visible to the Google Masters.  But my curiosity was stirred.  Could I actually make You Tube stop sending me nonsensical suggestions?

Now lets be honest.  You Tube is great.  If you want to learn about a specific subject or need to get the basics of an unfamiliar task in front of you it is the place to go.  I like it.  But there is the matter of all the useless dreck that goes along with it.  It's just getting in my way, in fact it is making it harder for YT to live up to its potential.  I also don't like to be told what sorts of things I should find important.  I'll make up my own mind, thanks.

After about three weeks of "interaction" with the algorithms I got to the point where YouTube surrendered and instead of suggesting specific videos they just sent me this:

Now that I consider fair.  It asks me what I wish to view instead of pushing various gaudy trinkets on me.   

After about two weeks it reverted to the status quo antebellum and began recommending things again.  So I started a second campaign.

To get rid of nonsense recommendations you of course must turn off History on your YT account and any linked accounts.   Don't make the bots non-life too easy.  You'll still get suggestions based on Channels you follow but that's fair game.  So I see and will occasionally watch videos relating to robotics and Roman archaeology.  But there are entire universes (and metaverses!) of other interests, and absent guidance from deplorable meat puppets the Silicon Overlords unleash a torrent of things they think you should be interested in. 

These include:  music compilations, 12 hour white noise and/or rain videos to help you sleep, endless "gamer" videos ranging from the infantile Minecraft up to abominable first person shoot fests, stupid people doing stupid things on TikTok, political screeds albeit only from one end of the ideological spectrum and a bunch of really odd stuff.  I got pretty grossed out by some veterinary surgery videos.  I had no idea there were so many bulldozers sitting in a shed for 30 years ready to be fixed up.  I am considerably better versed in the cuisine of Japan and local news reports from, I think, rural Pakistan.

So, how to reduce these?

When a video is suggested you can click on the little line in the right lower corner.  It gives you options:

Not Interested

Don't Recommend Channel

Report

Report further breaks down into categories.  Sexual Content, Violent or Repulsive Content, Hateful or Abusive Content, Harmful or Dangerous Acts, Spam or Misleading, Child Abuse.

These are the tools you have, and each deserves comment.

I read somewhere that Not Interested was the most feared feedback to YouTubers.  But it really does not serve my purposes.  Sometimes YT just sends the same video right back to you.  Sometimes sites have an entire array of similar nonsense and will just send you the next one in line (See Noise Farms below).  I still use it for things that are legitimately not of interest to me but otherwise inoffensive.

The Report function initially took a video off my feed with one click.  Now I have to double click the same report, or two different ones, before it goes away.  This is a new since my initial victory.  I try to be fair.  Making kids enter beauty pageants seems like Child Abuse to me.  And I'm repulsed by many things including execrable grammar.

It would seem that the ultimate weapon would be Don't Recommend Channel.  You click on that and YouTube promises: We won't recommend videos from this channel to you again.

Ah, but do they keep that promise?

For a while I was not sure.  So many Youtube sites just swipe the same music and video clips and if the name of the site is in Urdu I won't be able to read it.  But, alas, after many times hitting refresh and nuking a fresh batch of sites I saw old (non) friends reappear.  A gaudy young lady styling herself Lena Slime has a weird make over channel I've dispatched several times.

Because the YouTube algorithms appear to be cheating I don't think they can be defeated.  Oh you can drive them into a corner now and then, forcing them to send you peculiar videos.  I'm actually worried about a Muslim cleric from Indonesia who always appears with his hands held to his face in distress.

But mostly what you get as a last ditch from YouTube are things like this:

Compilations of hours long videos of harps, rain, white noise, Native American flute music,  bootleg soft rock classics, healing Tibetian gongs, etc.  And they just keep coming.  There are entire sites that crank this stuff out.  I call them Noise Farms.  

They never stop coming.  Their name is Legion.  Endless variations on genres, so many variations on phrases like lofi, Ambience, Chill.  Some variants are religious.  Some are Goth.  Some defy description.

Oh I suppose if I were willing to commit to a grinding Western Front war of attrition I might get them all perhaps at the cost of tendonitis in my mouse clicking finger.  But YouTube has a final card to play.  Intermittently they send me recommendations from YouTube Music.  Slightly less bizarre than Sufi Ambience Chill Vibes for Villains to Study By,  these recommendations only come with one available option:  Not Interested.

I'm pretty sure that whatever subroutine of the Youtube algorithm I've been shunted off into already knows that.  And does not give one digital damn.