Like it’s always been shit, but at least it has some resemblance to the content I watch. But now I’m getting recommendations for videos with like 60-400 views from random channels of people who forget they opened up their cameras. Or sometimes it’s some old lady speaking a foreign language about who knows what. Or it’s some kid recording their friends during PE class. Or it’s some vlog from a guy in Idaho going camping.
Yeah, it’s pretty dogshit.
If I knew how to code or I could bankroll something for this, I would definitely create a platform-agnostic frontend for sites like YouTube to create a feed that blends different sources and which is customisable.
It probably sounds a bit daft or a bit unnecessary but I think that a large part of how sites like YouTube maintain their monopoly in a legitimate sense, as well as holding a monopoly on people’s attention, is that their feeds are soft-locked into their platform and people are passive consumers which are subject to the feed.
Imo part of why R*ddit was so successful was that it created a blended feed which was customisable - you can go to different subreddits based on a category or theme and you’d get recommendations from across a variety of platforms.
My idea would be similar to that - you would be able to create multiple categories for feeds (for example theory, entertainment, news) and within each category you’d be able to tell the feed to recommend content in a randomised way that you could peruse until you find something that takes your interest. Basically like an RSS feed but with a bit of window-dressing on top.
So say you work a manual labour job or you’re a trucker or something like that. Maybe you have an “audio” feed and you put in some podcasts, some audiobooks, and some lectures to listen to while you’re on shift.
Or maybe you’re just in the mood for watching a TV series or a movie because you’re relaxing at home and you want to switch off for a while, so you have an entertainment feed which you have added to over time with the things that you’ve been wanting to watch.
Or maybe you’re on public transport and you don’t have your headphones so you go into your short-form reading feed and it suggests any articles from sites that you are “subscribed” to as well as those articles which you added in manually because you wanted to read them but you didn’t have time when you came across them so you saved them for later in this program.
The idea is classic techbro-tier “I didn’t invent anything new, I just slapped two preexisting things together and now I’m on the cutting edge and I’m a disruptor” fodder but I do think that it would help make people into more active participants in the media they consume and if it’s easy to add subscriptions to different platforms then it would mean that YouTube or Netflix or whatever wouldn’t be a person’s immediate go-to.
Meanwhile there’s a genocide taking place in Gaza and flowers are blooming in the Antarctic.