May I share a "minor" point in this post today? Something that I had an "aha-moment" on recently and that I have been implementing in a sustained manner for the past couple of weeks, with good results.
You
know how when you open up YouTube, it is full of rather
incomprehensible junk? And we perhaps helplessly throw up our hands and blame
the "algorithm"?
I recently flipped that thought around and asked, how about if I "trained" the algorithm? Would that actually work?
For
example, given that I was watching Game of Thrones (GoT) intensely two years
ago, my feed was full of and cluttered with Game of Thrones content of
every possible kind! This was from before the pandemic, and yet the YouTube feed was just clogged with GoT content of every stripe.
If you notice, each
YouTube clip has three dots on the above right. If you click on it, you
can choose either "not interested" or "don't recommend this channel"
So for the past two weeks, whenever I pulled up my iPad, as a matter of "hygiene," I started selecting one of those two options - I literally made a 100 to 200 such negative selections over the past two weeks.
This morning, when I fired up my YouTube - - guess what? - -> it was clean - clean - clean!
And
the YouTube feed had just the kind of content that I want - some
science, some history, some economics, some sports, some music and some travel.
Literally no junk (at least for my preference). It does feel great to have a clean YouTube feed ...
Today, I only had to swat away one or two random posts - one of which was still a pesky Game of Thrones post!
I am sure there is room for "surprise me" content once in a while, but at least the clutter is gone.
This is my "minor" social media point: it does seem like the algorithm is real, and we can train it to our advantage!
Now, that YouTube has gotten a spring cleaning, it is time to turn to .... Twitter!
6 comments:
Please post the algorithm you recommend for cutting down social-media time to one hour daily!
Please post the algorithm you recommend for cutting down social-media time to one hour daily!
An exercise that should be done periodically.
Terrific! Now this is ‘news you can use’.
I was also frustrated with the amount of junk I got in my YouTube feed. I’ve now stared the ‘three dot’ training program and look forward to more useful engagements with it as a result. Which is great because I still very much like what I can find there. But it simply took too much work and too few good surprises to want to spend much time there.
Is it freedom given by an algorithm or the first step to serfdom and being enslaved by algorithm? You decide.
A cup half full is also half empty.
Good advice Surya! Thanks for sharing.
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