Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

I had used ublock-origin on youtube to disable the right-hand sidebar of "recommended" videos so that I could just view the stuff in my subscriptions. A couple of years ago, they started detecting and blocking ublock-origin, so I stopped using it (ublock).

It's not really the ads that bother me. It's the "recommended videos". Is there a way to customize my view of youtube to avoid the shit I don't need to see?

The thing about youtube is that it's very easy for propaganda/click-bait to creep in during moments of weakness.

Maybe it's time to go cold-turkey? Failing that, maybe it's worth it to try and take some control over the experience?

Slide the right side of the window off the screen, maybe? Dirty tricks are allowed.

I'm very aggressive with the "not interested" and "don't recommend this channel" buttons, and over time it does mostly get rid of the most obnoxious recs. Right now it's also not recommending much good stuff, either, so YMMV.

For youtube, you can put the video in theater mode, which makes the video the full width of your window, and pushes recommendations down below it. With this I only ever see recommendations at the end of the video.

As a general solution for us techies, you can have user defined style sheets that selectively override the site's CSS, either using a plugin like Stylus, or Firefox's built-in userContent.css. Inspect the website, find the id name (or class if it is unique enough) for the content you want to go away and put the following in your user CSS.

   #<id> {
      display: hidden;
   }

I have so many of these. There is some upkeep with redesign, and for some sites with high churn I've given up, but in general it makes the web much more tolerable.

There's a browser addon, Enhancer for Youtube, that lets you hide recommended videos, among other things

I recommend: <https://lawrencehook.com/rys/>

there's actually a great "hidden" way to disable the youtube homepage and shorts across platforms - turn off youtube's watch history feature (myactivity.google.com > youtube history)

I've found that over time this chokes the recommendation system - makes it boring and it now finally refuses to show me any video recommendations on my youtube homepage - just a message asking me to turn history on. of course, you lose your watch history, but I just bookmark the videos I like anyway.

Videos related to the one you're watching may appear, but imo these tend to be based on your subscriptions / more focused / less rabbit-holey (and you can disable those with extensions and such as well).

It's so disappointing, because "recommended" used to be brilliant to find stuff similar-ish to what you're watching.

But these days half of it is outrage bait, ranging from "WOKE LIBTARD GETS DESTROYED" to "TRUMP LOSES HIS MIND", or malicious clickbait like "you won't believe what the cast if $tv_show looks like now" with some AI generated thing of one cast member being horribly maimed. Even on stuff that has nothing to do with any of that, like some music video.

And whether "Trump loses his mind" is something you agree or disagree with doesn't even matter – I'm just here to listen to some music, maybe watch a funny video or two. To take a break from all of that. It's become so pervasive that it's just exhausting.

So normal people like you or me just withdraw. And the only people who don't are the hyper-politicised who never grow tired of talking of $favourite_issue, which tend to be rather less reasonable or open to nuance. And this feedback loop just makes things worse and worse.

This, in a nutshell, is why you need moderation. People talk about "enshittification" of platforms, but IMO the bigger problem is more the "cuntification" of platforms, where a small number of extremely unpleasant and vitriolic people chase off many people who don't want to deal with that. X.com is a well-known example, but also online games where you're matched with random people (where you very quickly learn a great deal about your mother's sex life).

> But these days half of it is outrage bait, ranging from "WOKE LIBTARD GETS DESTROYED" to "TRUMP LOSES HIS MIND", or malicious clickbait like "you won't believe what the cast if $tv_show looks like now" with some AI generated thing of one cast member being horribly maimed. Even on stuff that has nothing to do with any of that, like some music video.

I don't know what I'm doing differently than you, but I don't see ANY of that. The worst, most clickbaity Youtube content I see is poorly done rip-offs of Primitive Technology.

Clear your history often. My youtube is actually incredible, massive variety and useful topics.

I clear it about once every 2 weeks or month depending on how many of the same topics I see.

It works really well in that if you ignore the content you saw before it forces the algorithm to find unique content because it thinks you don't like the stuff you've seen.

That and cleaning your subscription list. Easily the best platform I have as of now because of that.

First example I tried: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLF-f4kUtAw

7th recommended is " "YOU WILL BE INDICTED AND JAILED! " Jim Jordan SILENCE Overconfident Hillary Clinton" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbqHVba3Ohs)

I'm not logged in. I don't save cookies.

Unfortunately my regular internet has an outage and I need to rely on a mobile hotspot which YouTube seems to throttle with 20 second delays on everything, so looking for more examples is a bit painful at the moment. But having 1 to 3 of this kind of thing is common.

I go to extremes compared to most others, but I log into YT with a browser profile where history is not kept and don't log in. The front page is basically empty. I have a local web page with links to creators whose content I enjoy. I check out one of my favorite creators and see what new videos they have to offer. The benefit of this is that the first few rounds of recommendations are actually mildly useful since the algorithm knows nothing about you and you haven't showed it much for it to use since I'm usually logging in through a vpn.

It's crazy that the best experience (for me, anyway) is achieved by giving it the least amount of information possible.

There's a Firefox add-on called Distraction free YouTube I used in the past. Maybe try that one

FWIW I pretty much only see music videos in recommendations for the one you've linked to if I open it in a private Safari tab.

(If I use my normal session, it's still all music, but skewed more towards my personal tastes.)

Very much the same for myself as for you.

I suspect the GP comment is tainted by the video history by IP associations of

> I need to rely on a mobile hotspot