2322 Farsight.

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It’s getting very difficult to find good content on Youtube. Over the last 5 years or so I have been using my account to experiment on how you can train the algorithm to act & I have essentially broken my account be being contradictory at every turn. The result has been youtube only recommending exactly what I have been looking at over the last few minutes, or things from the years before I started actively fucking with it. So now I can’t find things unless I already know they exist. On top of the already annoying shenanigins the service has been pulling on its own to stifle the types of creators I like it’s made my most common background noise much harder to discover. The other day, for the first time in a very long time, it suggested a video game review channel that was reviewing all the games people reviewed from a decade ago, but this time with a female host. It was like some kind of weird, gender swapped, deja vu. Youtube has been around long enough that apparently we can start retreading all the old subjects & he kids won’t know any better because nobody their age knows who the fuck Jontron is. The creators I used to enjoy have grown up & moved on, while I continue to do what I’ve always done. Making comics & offering bonus content on Patreon (other services are available).
Maybe it’s just me having a “things used to be better in the old days” moment. I know, objectively that things weren’t better in the strictest sense. It was just terrible in a way that I was more inclined to resonate with. Seeing a random conspiracy theory video wasn’t the worst thing in the world & led to a lot of interesting rabbit holes to explore. That doesn’t happen nearly as much now. I’m not sure how much of that is from youtube changing or my meddling. Either way I almost feel like I need to start a fresh account just to see what a fresh start on youtube is like now, compared to when I started watching it.

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You can clear your watch history on Youtube. Go to myactivity.google.com and click Youtube History, then Manage Activity. On the left you should see “Delete activity by” and you can use that to delete all Youtube activity within a certain time frame, or just clear it out completely. This is the list the algorithm uses (and you can also disable activity tracking from that page).

I’ve actually done that. It doesn’t exactly solve the problem, but I’m not sure why. It may be that youtube just is how it is now.

Maybe also clear out your likes list? Although I’m not sure if there’s a way to do that automatically.

Does Youtube act the same way if you don’t sign in?

You CAN do that, can’t you? Not sign-in, I mean

And constantly wipe your cookies.

And twiddle your router’s IP address, and possibly your mac, cached files, ISP, browser, and OS depending on how aggressively you’re being fingerprinted.

The only way to be sure is to use a different computer for each website and throw it away when you’re done!

If you like game reviews/game analysis perhaps you would like Noah Caldwell Gervais.

As to your problem with being stove-piped in your searches. I have the same issue. It’s why I made a second Netflix profile, just to browse an ‘untrained’ menu and see what I was missing. I then go back and watch on my main profile so that I keep one ‘clean’. If you really want a clean youtube, use TOR to do your searches, then view the video on your normal browser. So many rando searches come out of TOR gateways that it would amount to searching from a library computer, without the cultural bias of the library’s hometown. (Also: it’s not polite to stream video over TOR since it’s bandwidth restricted by definition, and some people depend on it)

I have two ideas to help you.

A) You could list the things you like, and maybe we fans can suggest something new but kind of the same.

B) Your fans could send you more money via Patreon or SubscribeStar or whatever. I’m not sure how that would help you find new content, but hey, more money is also good.

(I figured somebody ought to say it since you didn’t this week.)

Here are some channels I follow on YouTube.

Sarah-n-Tuned: Sarah works on cars and makes them better. She also reviews cars. She has a strange sense of humor and I usually like it. I like her work ethic: she gets a lot done for one person.

The Critical Drinker: He reviews movies and comments on modern entertainment, while doing this schtick that he is drunk. He’s Scottish and has a strong Scottish accent.

Timcast / Tim Pool: Tim Pool reads news items and comments on them. Most of the news is bad, so I’m not sure this would make you happier, but I like Tim Pool personally and I like his takes on the news. He has two channels, I’m not sure why.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams: the cartoonist who draws Dilbert turns out to be quite interesting to watch. He discusses current events, and I found his coverage of COVID-19 to be worth my time. Way back when we were told that masks don’t work, he told why he was pretty sure they do work. He is not even a little bit boring when he talks.

Screen Rant: all I care about on Screen Rant is the “Pitch Meeting” series, which skewer movies by making imaginary pitch meetings where someone is trying to sell the plot of the movie. Ryan George plays both the writer and the producer, using simple editing to make it like two people talking, and I find his jokes very funny indeed. There are some running gags which work for me… I laugh again every time he says “Super easy, barely an inconvenience.”

Rocketjump: Freddy Wong used to make lots of funny short videos for YouTube. He has stopped lately but there is a huge back catalog. One of the funniest things ever is the short movie “Jess’s Big Date”. If you are a Star Wars fan, you really ought to watch “How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit”, which is simply amazing.

This Old Tony: he’s a machinist and he makes videos where he makes stuff in his metal shop. He makes all kinds of jokes which I find funny. I know someone who I urged to watch him, and that person found that the jokes didn’t work for him in the first video he watched but started landing after he watched a few more… I think I was hooked just after one video. A good first video to watch would be “Alex’s Pasta Machine: The Rebuildening!” or perhaps “Operation: Tap Wrench”.

Techmoan: this guy gets examples of old technology and talks about how it worked. Also, at the end of some of his videos, he adds a short comedy sketch using muppets! (I always like those.) A good first video would be “The unique 1960s Hi-Fi systems that became time capsules” and one that ends with a muppet sketch is “HiFi Component TV – What? and Why?”

If you liked any of these suggestions and would like more, please let me know.

Ryan George’s personal channel is also good. He continues the tradition of playing all the characters in a sketch, but now uses various scenarios (not just a pitch meeting for a movie).

My latest favorite channel on YouTube is called Internet Comment Etiquette. The guy who runs it is frankly a professional troll, but he uses his powers for good (mostly leaving hilarious comments under other videos and sending the most outrageous tweets to dickheads like Martin Shkreli and Ted Cruz).

I’ll check out your recommendations!

You might like Blondihacks – she’s a machinist with a nice sense of humor. From your descriptions, maybe like a cross between Sarah-n-tuned and This Old Tony.

I’m also really impressed by Primitive Skills – one person who starts with stone age tech and does bloomery refining and forging, water power, cement, fired wheel-thrown pottery, and several kinds of building.

I wouldn’t be recommending Scott Adams if I were you. It’s been well-documented that he’s both a misogynist and a Holocaust denier.

funny thing as he has said multiple times that no “no reasonable person doubts that the holocaust happened” The reason people claim this is because he has questioned how exactly the number 6 million jews was calculated. That’s it. All he wants to know is how we got to that number. So far no one has been able to give him a solid answer. And before you start calling me one too, my great grandfather died in a concentration camp. Asking how we did our math is not the same as saying ” it didn’t happen”

1. Questioning the number 6 million is a dogwhistle that’s been used since at least the 1970s. 2. The methodology to get to that number is well documented, seeing as the Nazis themselves kept decent track of how many people went through the camps. The information is publicly available, it’s the fact that he doesn’t believe the answers are “solid” that makes him a denier.

Not going to check this page again, btw. I know better than to argue about this sort of thing.

@Castriff, you said that it has “been well-documented” that Scott Adams is “both a misogynist and a Holocaust denier”. Then you said “Not going to check this page again, btw.” So I can’t ask you for evidence supporting what you said.

I will simply say that I have listened to literally dozens of hours of “Real Coffee with Scott Adams” and I did not hear anything that sounded even remotely like misogyny or Holocaust denial.

I did not recommend a YouTube channel full of misogyny or Holocaust denial, and I don’t really appreciate your suggestion that I did.

This whole argument is extremely funny now that he’s been canceled for completely different racist reasons. Couldn’t even find anything about the holocost or misogyny, but I don’t want to anymore lol

My top youtube recommendation: Wintergatan. Incredible creativity, interesting music, ridiculous dream inching closer to realisation.

I love watching Martin engineer the Marble Machine X, and he’s how I found both This Old Tony and Rainfall Projects, two other channels I love.

I do recommend Rainfall Projects. As a first video, please try: “Fabricating Parts for Wintergatan and the Marble Machine X” Then: “55 Gallon Drum Meat Smoker Build” I also like “Ring Roller” (which is how he built the machine he used to roll the X-brace in the first video). And, while it’s nothing like his other videos, “Farming Abroad – Coffee Harvest in El Salvador” is great.

Ever since YouTube pretty much destroyed the “gifs with sound” concept, most of my viewing these days is creepypastas, ghost footage and Vtubers. Oh, and “funny VRChat”.

Eventually, I will have a dream where I’m in a haunted house and Nyanners has the knife she’s been meant to have since the beginning.

As for Reggie, I’m going to guess “superiority complex”. He just shows up and helps because he believes everybody NEEDS his help, but he’s going to be an asshole about it because it’s obvious that no one would get anywhere without him but refuses to acknowledge something so obvious, and that gets annoying.

Youtube it pretty much my entertainment source. I watch mostly clever people creating things. I watch builders, makers, musicians, farmers, mechanics, repair people, but the common denominator is that all the people I watch seem to be real decent people whom I would enjoy meeting in real life. Regardless of content if the youtuber seems like the sort of person who would be challenging to be around I am not a viewer. Cheers Ulrich

Try Kyle Kalgren and “Brows Held High?” If you’re a Shakespeare nerd you’ll love his reviews of Shakespeare films. If you’re not, don’t worry about it.

I enjoy Bernadette Banner. She does a classic clothing blog and talks about responsible clothing choices. Her voice and music are extremely soothing, and there are lots of pretty pictures if you’re in to classic clothing or cosplay.

I kinda lost interest in JonTron when Jafari defended racist politician Steve King (who is no longer elected, btw) and said white people can’t be racist just for wanting to remain the majority in power in the US.

As for things we watch on YouTube, we watch Mr. Fruit, Puffin Forest, JoCat and Dingo Doodles. And I watch BlurryGil on Nintendo news on Twitch, since he does a lot of game playing and works for Nintendo (and he’s a personal friend).

I think Reggie should work at the Library instead. It’s not that he doesn’t have a place in society. It’s that he’s a square peg in a round hole working in Retail.

That’s the social disconnect here, I think.

I think I’ve been in this situation. I find a place where I’m loved, and then someone arrives from a place where I was hated and tries to convince my new peers how awful I am.

“If I was choosy about picking my friends, I’d have no friends at all.”

– said Ed Wood, in the Johnny Depp film, named: Ed Wood.

I wouldn’t follow creed coming from a director who wanted to make a Hollywood film using nothing but stock footage!

Huh… that’s the first time I’ve seen it as “frienemy” instead of “frenemy”… I like it! I shall spell it that way from now on!

I feel like a lot of gaming has gone towards streaming as opposed the recorded commentary route. Gotta get that live reaction.

AVGN is going strong, and I’ll still catch up on some others (Somecallmejohnny, Maximilian, etc) as well. I don’t keep up on gaming as much as I used to. So my other channels are geared towards my other interests.

And Homestar still lives, which is good for the soul.

Jackie, if I could make a suggestion, I would recommend starting up a Twitch art channel focused on you doing your art. You could set up extra donations while conversing with other Twitch account users. Twitch isn’t just mutually exclusive to gaming and sports anymore. :)

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