The vast majority of signal is from a plurality of opinions, and the outcome is an average of those inputs, usually tweaked a bit to make them more addictive.
Your thought that “the algorithm doesn’t serve me personally because I have exceptional taste” is not a unique observation. Everyone who consumes these systems has the same thoughts. Everyone is a rounding error, whether you’re in a knitting community, or you’re a worlds leading expert in deep learning.
Do they?
From what I can tell most people using these apps seem pretty fine with having their algorithm determine everything they consume. You must remember, a majority of US teenagers went out of their way to download TikTok, before short-form content was forced into the existing platforms.
I think we can boil this down to a single question: If tomorrow, YouTube offered a toggle to all users to completely remove shorts from every feed in the app, what would most people do?
I think many here on HN would immediately choose to disable shorts. But what about the majority? Would they disable?
I think the answer is so obviously no. Despite all the disdain and regard for short form content as slop by the mainstream themselves.
I think your viewpoint is the correct default opinion to have. It prevents belittling thy neighbor & delusions of grandeur. But at a certain point you have to drop the optimism. These platforms do work for the masses. Unfortunately.
They're betting that despite the masses not wanting it, they'll watch them anyway. And to a rounding error, they're right.
Youtube consumption doesn't represent the finest moments of humanity. For the most part, its the huddled, cowed moments of weakness. The hated but accepted necessary recovery after a hard day's work, working up the energy for facing the chores needed for continued survival. People would much rather be out and about, living life with exuberance, but one simply cannot do that all the time. Few look forward to watching youtube. Few see "youtube watcher" as part of their identity. It's just a thing they do. Of course, occasionally you do see something worthwhile, something that improves your life, something you spend more than a passing thought on after closing it. But that is the exception, not the rule.
For many, hacker news is also this thing.
Only, some people consume what is objectively trash, and others recognize what is objectively of value. The Paretian distribution is real and observable.
It’s not two distinct people - or at least, I’ve seen no evidence that it’s two sets. The venn diagram is a single big fat circle, and we’re all in it.
The first member, to the best of my understanding, lamented that in the "exploration vs exploitation" game the "exploitation" side fed to the algorithm returned "more of the same" which the member saw as "choking the exploration" side.
He got replied that the «patterns, desires and tastes ... of normies ... are different [hence] we see a massive deterioration of quality».
If some people want to consume trash as "more of the same" and other want to "navigate the diversity of more open seas" that makes two different sets in the Venn.