This past year, I fell into the habit of watching a show on Netflix during dinner, then mindlessly scrolling through reddit and YouTube watching videos and clips. I tend to be a sucker for dog rescues, break dancing, swimming, drumming and any DIY project I’m currently doing.
Even though I would filter aggressively and downvote things I have no interest in seeing, my feeds still contain plenty of crap. I’d just mindlessly scroll past it and eventually become bored enough to fall asleep.
I know it’s not a productive use of time. But I kind of like to shut my mind down in the hours after dinner.
But lately, things have rapidly declined on both Reddit and YouTube. Ads have increased, of course. The content though has become abysmal. I suspect it is because clips are being auto-generated using AI.
This past week, I kept being fed videos with audio and captions in Russian and Mandarin! I’m also being fed really disturbing animal abuse/rescue videos from foreign countries. And some AI has figured out how to isolate audio from hit songs of the 90s and 2000s and sync it to what appears to be “studio” recordings from artists. These are then replicated and posted by hundreds of different accounts – even though they are nearly identical – and served up in my feed.
Apparently, the algorithms decide to send me something, then send me it again and again and again.
It’s maddening.
Or, I should say, it was maddening.
Today I deleted my YouTube history, turned on all privacy settings and cleared my cache. I will now only go to YouTube when I have specific content I want to see.
I did the same with Reddit. I unsubscribed from all subreddits and will only go there when I am looking for something specific.
I’m going to try reading a book tonight instead. I’ve been reading books more every day now instead of grabbing my phone to browse for something interesting on the Internet.
As much as I’m a fan of digital content and access to “all of the information in the world”, I’ve discovered that the AI, clickbait and attention-economy driven algorithms aren’t working for me.
Rather than continue to get frustrated with being served a plethora of shit with an occasional interesting video, I’m giving up. It has simply become too annoying.