Pete's Log: Reseeding YouTube
Entry #2645, (Random Crap)(posted when I was 46 years old.)
As much as I try to remove surveillance capitalism big tech from my life,
YouTube is one of those sites I can't keep away from. I try PeerTube every once in a while, but I never find the same level of content I enjoy on YouTube.
The YouTube algorithm is a finicky thing, though. Watch one wrong video and it'll suddenly forget you mostly want to see electronics videos and start filling your feed with videos all about how terrible an idea unschooling is. One video was enough, YouTube. One was enough.
So I use YouTube logged out, and I have it configured to live in its own Firefox container. And about once every two to three months, I clear all my YouTube cookies and reseed it. It doesn't take long for the algorithm to figure out what I like, and it's OK for a little while. But inevitably the vibe of the feed goes sour and I have to start over.
February 7 (I pre-wrote most of this) was a reseed day. Reseeding simply involves searching for a handful of channels I like and watching a video from each. Some of them don't have new content for me, in which case I can just put the tab in the background and let it run there at 2x speed. No idea if it matters to YouTube's algorithm if I watch the full thing.
I've been doing this for a few years now, and the channels I use to reseed do change over time. Here's the channels I used for my latest reseed:
And since YouTube does do a decent job of suggesting music to me, I usually include a few music videos in my reseed. This time I chose: