They Need To Fix This.

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Hello and welcome to this is I have figured out why our views suck.

[00:00:05]>> Wait, they do?

[00:00:06]>> I think algorithms are ruining society.

[00:00:10]>> That's a big statement, but I don't immediately hate it.

[00:00:14]>> I'll start small. So, what's sparking that I want us to talk about this? Last week, Netflix very quietly got rid of a toz browsing on their platform. A big reason why I got rid of Netflix years ago is cuz I had gotten sick of here's the top ones we think you like. Here's the top ones that people show me one more Adam Sandler movie. I'm out.

[00:00:32]>> Like it was already very difficult to browse. It's these categories that mean nothing but then it also it's also all the same movies in every one of the categories.

[00:00:43]>> They really push like the top 10 like no chart and trend and you know >> and that's my problem with it because the way that algorithms were pitched originally was we're going to feed you the things that you're going to like.

[00:00:56]What it's evolved to is we're going to feed you the things that you like enough that you're going to watch and keep on our platform so we can monopolize all of your eye time.

[00:01:06]>> It's a weird name for it for sure.

[00:01:07]>> What else would you call it? Eyeball.

[00:01:10]>> Watch time. Give us your eyeball time.

[00:01:12]Subscribe to this channel. Give us your eyeball time. Every minute of eyeball time equals one like.

[00:01:18]>> I realize I'm going to come off as a crazy person in this. I'm okay with that.

[00:01:22]>> Okay, there's no tin foil this I just want to make sure there's no temp file this time.

[00:01:26]>> I'm willing to lose most of you to gain a few of you in this one.

[00:01:29]>> What the >> I think you're pulling on something here. I I want to learn more. So, you think >> the catalyst for this?

[00:01:35]>> I have issues with literally every platform.

[00:01:38]>> So, let's use YouTube as an example. I think it's a good one. I think back in the early days of YouTube, if you are old, there was not really a great browse feed like like you could search for videos, you would have a subscription feed, you would see like, you know, like whatever was on the homepage, but there wasn't like the algorithm that we think of today. And that was back in the time with us old heads, remember, where a subscriber actually meant a lot. It still means a lot, and we love each and every one of you, but back in the day, if you subscribe to a channel, odds were pretty good you're going to watch most, if not all the videos that came out. At this point, when you subscribe, what it really does is it teaches the YouTube algorithm that you want to probably see a few more of these videos. If you are watching some random creator, right? You see just some video, you click on it, there's a pretty good chance if you watched a good chunk of that video that at some point YouTube will serve you another one of their videos. And if you watch two, then they're going to keep giving you more cuz, oh, hey, you like this new creator. If, however, I see some new channel launch, I hit the subscribe button, and if I don't click on two or three of the videos that pop up after that, then they go, well, you actually don't care. and they will depp prioritize that. That's the way that these things work. It's trying to give you what you want, quote unquote, versus what you say you want. In some ways, you could say is maybe a good thing, right?

[00:02:46]Like like show me what I I think I want, not what I know I want. But I kind of get that.

[00:02:50]>> My problem with it is that there's clearly agendas in the way that these are pushing >> like Tik Tok heating certain types of content and whatnot.

[00:02:58]>> I'm not going to get political. I'm not going to get whatever. when I was on TikTok.

[00:03:01]>> Yep.

[00:03:02]>> It for whatever reason fed me van life stuff all the time and I hit I don't want to see this content every time. One out of every like five of my things would be here's van life content. Come get ready with me while I almost get murdered in a in a truck stop. Like >> you spent so long uh like looking for the button to make it go away. I was like oh you watch it for 10 seconds.

[00:03:26]We'll give you another one. It's like the close elevator button. Doesn't do anything. recently done Spotify. One of the things that like Spotify has tried to shove down my throat with a chimney sweep. It justopon, please don't make it cuz there's nothing wrong with Bad Bunny's music. I'm not a fan of it. Spotify is like Bad Bunny is the only artist that you will listen to and you will like it.

[00:03:51]I listen to 20 bands and I understand like okay we want to uh expand your horizon whatever. I don't like Mumford and Sons.

[00:03:59]>> What's wrong with Mumford and Son?

[00:04:00]>> I Nothing. I just don't like them.

[00:04:03]>> Okay. All right.

[00:04:04]>> Every day that I have had Spotify, Little Lion Man comes up on my Spotify and I have never once listened to it and now here's 90 days of skipping it 100% of the time. Here's some songs you keep coming back to. Little Lion Man. I definitely have not come back to Little Lion Man ever. My issue with these are I love Tiny Moving Parts. I may have said that a couple times. I made it into their top.1%.

[00:04:32]On Spotify. They have six albums that I listen I listen to all of them. And it's like here's these three songs. Two of them are not even the ones I like the most. My issue is that they are tell like they are dictating >> Mhm.

[00:04:48]>> and narrowing down your choice. They make it very easy to be like, I like this song, but I feel like that doesn't do anything cuz my like songs rarely get played. I don't like that there's not a dislike uh easy function. They're pushing these agendas from the record companies. By the way, I'm not on a free plan. I am paying for this frustration.

[00:05:07]I do think the fact that you have a fairly new Spotify account is probably throwing things off. But it also, I think, is still trying to like understand what you really like. I feel like one out of every like every 20 polls I get like here's the top hits or something like that. I will say I do see that same kind of thing where it gets very insular where it's like here are 30 songs and these are the songs going to play over and over. But honestly most of the time that's kind listen to. So like that's okay.

[00:05:29]>> And again I'm ranting about Spotify specifically.

[00:05:31]>> Yeah cuz you did start off by saying that algorithms are ruining society. I don't know if the Spotify DJ is quite that. These ones are the annoying things. And now we get into like social media one just become an echo chamber.

[00:05:45]>> Yeah.

[00:05:46]>> Like everyone agrees with me.

[00:05:48]>> Yeah. That's because everyone who agrees with you is being fed >> your similar content. A great example of this is like someone's like will post like I like waffles. And then it's like oh so you must hate pancakes and yet you say nothing about French toast. It's not the things necessarily you like. It's the things we know you are gonna like to about online. I fully hear the irony of meing about this online. So >> the algorithm that served you this video of course, >> right? Whether it's Facebook, whether it's Twitter, whether it's YouTube, whatever. Who's to say what you are actually >> Yeah.

[00:06:23]>> being allowed essentially. My gut on this is that the vast majority of the content that's being served to you isn't necessarily like some nefarious agenda.

[00:06:32]It's like, hey, we're going to give you whatever is going to get the most engagement, which is going to keep you on the platform the longest, which is going to make us the most money. I believe that like algorithms will push you in direction. I just think it always pushes you almost entirely in the direction of whatever makes them the most money. Not necessarily like it's always pushing you in XYZ direction, which I'm not saying is a good thing. Oh my god, you did have it the whole time.

[00:06:52]Of course, I always had it the whole time. like you say, whatever makes the most money. If someone says, "Here's a big fat cash of money to push this in a direction >> or running ads about a certain topic or whatever the case is." Yeah.

[00:07:06]>> My dad 50 years ago was a radio DJ >> spinning them Beatles records.

[00:07:11]>> He got Poliola, which if for those of you who don't know, Piola was a a thing back in the day where record labels were literally like, "Hey, play this song more than any other song." What I've talked about is the the annoying side of it, which is very like, okay, that's fine, whatever.

[00:07:26]>> But is when people start to weaponize this. How many slop channels are there on on and I'm not talking about clip from your favorite podcast or something like that that like I think those have merit. How many times have you seen the same five clips from a movie that is just fed with like some weird uh uh sharpening on it? What someone is doing is taking that clip and posting it hundreds if not thousands of time across thousands of channels that are all bots just because of the sheer number and you can't escape it. So, it's going to keep feeding it to you. And if you say, "Oh, I don't want to I don't want to have uh content like this channel." Well, here's a million other channels that are all doing the same thing. This is a question I want to pose to the audience. How often have you said, "I don't want to click on something because I don't want the algorithm to >> think about this."

[00:08:18]>> Oh, absolutely.

[00:08:18]>> And you're training it and it's training you.

[00:08:20]>> The fact that that's a thing that needs to happen. If you create a Tik Tok account today, you need to very carefully prune and build it. Same thing on like shorts or anything like that.

[00:08:30]Every second you spend watching each one of those videos is more of a signal that that's something you want. Maybe because you spend so much time in private tabs, they have none of these companies have enough data on you where they have enough data on me because I like am not that anal about things. The only data they have on me is what I'm actively searching for. Yeah. Why am I not seeing that? And then I I searched for one very specific thing. I searched for the Harry Potter Balenciaga edit.

[00:08:53]>> Oh, one of those AI things. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:08:54]>> To to show a friend. My feed has been nothing but Balenciaga since then. I know that it sounds like I'm being dramatic, >> but I I genuinely believe that this is kind of ruining the way that people think and discover. You could talk about the the dead internet theory all all day long cuz that's affecting things as well. How do you discover >> genuinely good things the way you used to? You it feels like you can't you can't because they're only going to show you what they want you to show you this week. As always, I mean, we've been on the internet for a minute. the internet of of 2000 is different than the internet of 2010 versus 2020 versus 2026. Obviously, we all have to adapt and adjust like that. That part I get. I do think that there is merit to algorithms in a sort of a a global sense. There's a lot of channels I never would have seen if it hadn't realized that oh yes, I do want to watch this and now I've watched hundreds of videos from this particular crew.

[00:09:48]>> My counterargument on that is what I hear from a lot of people. I didn't even know you posted a video. I'm subbed to you. Again, I want to ask the audience, when's the last time you've used your actual sub feed? Cuz it seems like it's just kind of been phased out. It used to be, oh, my sub feed is my for you, >> of course, but like things change.

[00:10:02]Things change, >> right? Is it changing for the better for you or is it changing for the better for YouTube? One of my challenges again is, is Mr. Beast as popular as it seems? Obviously, he's massively popular. Half a percentage of the world population watches every one of those videos.

[00:10:20]>> But are they watching it because it's as popular as it is. If you go to like a fresh for you page, half of them are Mr. Beast videos.

[00:10:29]>> Are they watching it because it's actually what they want to watch or because it's what's available, they can't really search for something and like, you know what, I've heard of this.

[00:10:36]I'm not saying he like if the algorithm went away, Mr. Beast is going to drop in views to nothing. When it comes to algorithms, I actually really do agree with you at a base level, but I also feel like it's half of my job to learn how to work with algorithms and to train algorithms and to make content for them.

[00:10:50]So, like I understand, fully biased.

[00:10:52]Like, I get it.

[00:10:52]>> Can I be real with the audience? Like, yeah, that is our job. And sometimes that feels gross to me. I want you to hang out and watch our videos cuz you like our stuff, not because we figured out how to trick you.

[00:11:02]>> Videos live and die by the titles and the thumbnails. It's true, >> right? Like that. That that is% thumbnail faces are real.

[00:11:07]>> We can put that aside for a second, right? obviously content creator hats and crazy thumbnail faces off. I have a theory on what is one of the more important things for just life skills for us all going forward. Taste. No amount of algorithms, no amount of AI, whatever can, in my opinion, replace your human taste. What do you engage with? What do you sort of have as your own opinions? The problem is you don't have control over that. If you're fed just white plain white bread every day all day, but then you don't know about a nice arteasonal like sourdough loaf. You can make your choices all you want, but what happens when that menu of 10 items becomes three items? You do not have a phone surgically attached to your hand.

[00:11:52]You do not have a vision pro permanently affixed to your skull. You have the ability to engage with the platforms that you choose to engage with. Try to avoid the doom scrolling when you don't want to. We're all adults or adult-like people. We all can make the decisions on what we think, not only what platforms we want to engage with. All of these platforms, while they can provide value to you, also are going to provide what's most valuable to them, which is rage bait, engagement bait, sort of, you know, contrary opinions. A lot of these things, especially on social media, are designed to upset you. My solution which I I have actually put some thought into this. Yeah, social media companies are required to give you the data that they have collected on you. I do think that it should be required to manually that you can manually go into that data and say this is what I want to remove like I want to remove some of this. So you have agency over your algorithm. That's why when I'm when you say like it's comes down to taste that doesn't matter if all that's in front of you is this. The reason I say this, I don't think this is a good idea is because I do think that this has every potential to make it even more of an echo chamber.

[00:12:57]>> I think a lot of social media has become less about social and more about media.

[00:13:01]When you talk about taste, that's something that like a person has. And so, if you take an active role in your social media, I'm going to put my friends on something that I think is cool and that they like actually listening to people when they're talking to me because that's another person.

[00:13:15]following feeds instead of going on algorithms. Maybe your friend is not always posting exactly what you want to see, but that's your friend.

[00:13:21]>> I think Google had it a like I actually think they had it right with uh Google+ circles.

[00:13:27]>> I like the idea of segregating my friends out.

[00:13:30]>> Don't segregate your friends. Uh, you know, I think that Kenzie has an excellent point here. Having a following feed versus a for you feed. When I am on any kind of algorithm based feed, I think about that as I am eating junk food for my brain right now. It's not really healthy, but I try to do it in moderation. And I know that if I actually spend an hour doom scrolling, I will feel bad. But the same way that if I sit there and eat an entire sleeve of Oreos, which I will do if you don't stop me, then I will feel bad after.

[00:13:57]>> There's companies spending billions of dollars on how to combat that thinking.

[00:14:01]>> And there's also companies who spend millions of dollars to make Oreos taste so damn good. I don't know how they do it, but you have to be a sophisticated consumer. I think that that's like like that's non-negotiable. Like >> I'm not going to blame fast food for making me fat. I ate all the fast food.

[00:14:14]But I will say that no salad can be smelled from three miles away with like if I drive by an In-N-Out. All right.

[00:14:24]There's no healthy eating for that. All right. Guess what? This stuff's addicting, man.

[00:14:29]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm with you. I'm with you. No. Again, I think if you treat it as something that's almost a little bit adversarial, right? We used to all live in a world in which we were forced to interact with people who had very different beliefs, views, and sort of worldshaping events than we did.

[00:14:45]>> And you wouldn't say any of the things you say online because you'd get your rocked.

[00:14:50]>> The idea that you can so easily just block anyone who says something that even is like vaguely disagreeable to you. While again there I don't want to say block buttons are bad, there's certainly some times where you just need to block people, but also think it's a little too easy to just block out other viewpoints, other people, other concepts. And I think it kind of e it sort of feeds into the sort of like living in your own bubble kind of thing.

[00:15:09]I'm not probably describing this quite the right way. People are narcissistical by nature. People in their minds says I'm I'm right.

[00:15:16]>> I'm the main character. You're all NPCs.

[00:15:17]Yeah.

[00:15:18]>> So like then it's like okay well I think they're wrong block. I think they're wrong block. It's okay to change your mind.

[00:15:23]>> Yes. Yes it is. That is the best point in this whole video. If you don't accept the fact that you say something wrong that is one of the most valuable human experiences is learning from past mistakes. algorithms kind of like they they sort of keep you from that sort of personal growth. It's all stuff that us as humans are not necessarily natively wired to understand and handle correctly. I just think that like certain traits that we as humans have built up over the years are becoming much less important. Understanding when you find yourself slipping into an echo chamber or just having the idea that you can narrowly focus on I want to hang out with this kind of, you know, type of person in this kind of environment. I just like that's just the healthy human way of doing things and I think that algorithms have kind of pushed us away from that.

[00:16:07]>> It's eroded that algorithms haven't been around that long >> and it's not just algorithms but I think that that feels like that's one of the big like levers that have been >> pulled even even if it's not like a literal computer algorithm. It's the social engineering behind them.

[00:16:20]>> Friction is good in life. Like you need some friction. If you just have everything sort of smooth and simple and it's just what you want and everything's being catered to you, it doesn't help you grow as a person. everything that sort of the the tech industry has been building especially when it comes to like social media and alos have just designed like the friction out of the system.

[00:16:38]>> Yeah. So instead of going on Spotify every day and just going, "Oh, what is it going to tell me to listen to?" If your friend has been listening to some album and they like it a lot, then just like try listening to that.

[00:16:47]>> Yes. I agree with Kinsey completely. Be active. Go find something new to try. My issue is that they're like making it harder and harder and harder to try new things.

[00:16:55]>> This is a good conversation. I feel like I wasn't sure where we were going to go with this. I was like, "Oh, we're just going to be like complaining about stuff." Legitimately, hopefully, like, if you've watched this video, if any of this resonates with you, I think it's something that every person has to grapple with in some way and make some decisions about. There's no silver bullets. There's no easy like just delete Facebook. I can tell you that deleting social media, it was was helpful, but like it's you can't escape it. If this resonated with you, please let us know in the comments cuz I I want to know I'm not alone. I I'm sure someone else does, too. Like, follow, subscribe. We'll catch you in the next one. And uh hopefully the algorithm shove this down your throat.

[00:17:29]>> No. No. Maybe.

[00:17:31]>> Open up.