Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

Those of us in the west tend to forget that much of what we see is a form of propaganda, whether by governments or businesses, or even a large number of people. When you keep this in mind, everything you see becomes an opinion and your mind can comfortably (or at least not emotionally/hurriedly) form your own opinion over time.

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?

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.

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.