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Comment by gfxgirl | Hacker News Reader

I know I'm old but dang for some reason I really dislike recommendations from almost any company.

For media I grew up in the 70s and had the TV Guide. I'd look through to see what I wanted to watch, circle some things and then watch. No spying what-so-ever.

So, I like for example HN where AFAIK I'm not tracked so much and I choose what I want from the top of the list.

Conversely I mostly hate Amazon, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, and all the ad services and any other service that uses some algorithm to decide what to put in my face.

It's to the point that 3 out 4 time I'll open videos in private windows so they don't get added to my profile and used for recommendations.

I don't mind going to a tech sight and seeing ads for tech or a car site and seeing ads for cars. Do mind visiting an apartment listing site and then going around the net and having every other sight shove ads for apartments in my face.

View on HN

I've said it many times now: people should be avoiding "the algorithm" as much as they can on streaming and social media sites.

On Facebook "avoiding the algorithm" entails creating a friends list of all your friends, then using the link to that list as a portal into facebook. Posts and shares are listed in chronological order without anything missing (which is absolutely NOT true for the normal news feed, even when "chronological order" is selected). No "so-and-so commented on this" or "so-and-so liked that". Just posts and shares. Scroll through the feed until you recognize something, and you're done.

On youtube, you really should be going straight to subscriptions first. If you want to look for recommendations that's perfectly fine, you can go to the home page... but don't go there by default.

On reddit, I recommend using /r/all as a portal with some of the more obnoxious subreddits blocked.

I'm aware that what you see is still influenced by the algorithm in these examples, but the impact is reduced by a lot.

Browse with intention. Make deliberate choices. Don't just let the algorithm lead you around.

Remember, "the algorithm"s on these sites aren't designed for your benefit. They're designed to increase the site's metrics. More clicks. More time on that website.

I think client apps can help a lot in all of these cases. Like newpipe for YouTube or infinity for reddit. They clear out tracking as much as possible and let you browse without logging in.

But the website of all these site feels useless and slow to me. Recommendations were good on yt, but I think they stopped it during the election. So, I defaulted to newpipe and freetube.

In my experience, recommendations are still good. You just can't rely on them anymore because if you keep following them, you tend to go to whatever is popular rather than going deeper down the rabbit hole like you used to.

You have to mainly keep to your subscriptions, and use recommendations occasionally.

> So, I like for example HN where AFAIK I'm not tracked so much and I choose what I want from the top of the list.

The top of the list is the product of some recommendation algorithm. Clicking through https://news.ycombinator.com/newest, there were some 900 submissions in the past 24h; you probably chose from a small subset of that.

It's not personalized.

Adding on to this, the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) has information on how stories are ranked.

It amazes me that advertising companies have been able to brainwash companies into paying more for "targeted ads". Usually I spend a few days doing research into whatever big purchase I plan to make, then for the next 6-12 months I get spammed with ads for that product on every platform. It's such a waste of their money and my time.

Just use ublock origin(firefox). If on apple then safari should be good too.

"Engagement" is toxic full stop.

> "The road is most utilized when all traffic comes to a full stop"

-One of my managers

This is what I hear every time someone optimizes engagement.

I open private tabs as well for some videos that interest me, but that I wouldn't like to keep receiving recommendations on similar videos. I thought I was alone :)

You can look into invidious BTW

>Netflix

Back when Netflix was a DVD delivery service, its personal recommendation system was fantastic. Rate things by stars, it would estimate how you'd rank movies based on users with similar tastes to you, so rather than trying to give the same ratings to all movies and push the same things to everyone, it gave me a ton of very useful recommendations. I had a 500 movie long queue on it for awhile, so each movie I got was like a surprise from my past self.

Then one day they failed to deliver a DVD to my place because my mailbox was full or something, and they closed my account and my queue was gone. I never bothered trying to open another one after that.

I've never been into recommendations and I find most are awful. TikTok is addicting but it's all rubbish content.

I feel like I am in the minority in how I use YouTube. If someone shows me a video I'll watch it, but I don't browse YouTube.

Many people nowadays use client apps and invidious for YouTube.

I much prefer a really good and feature full browse and search functionality rather than recommendations. Youtube has really poor search and even worse browsing ability.

The browse would be good if it wasn't location based

It's like the media company is taking the driver seat of your mind and decides you need to watch these videos over and over. Where have individualism and creativity gone?.

The search function still exists, recommendations are really aimed at low effort engagement. YouTube recommendations are only aiming for the equivalent quality of channel surfing when most user generated content is really bad.

Sadly, it’s largely your own history that clogs the recommendations. The less you use a recommendation engine the more relevant it becomes.

How does one search for what one doesn't know exists?

> The search function still exists...

The search function recommends results that match your query. It's part of the same system!

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