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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24829 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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My general recommendation for YouTube recommendations is use your adblocker to hide the recommendations entirely. If you want to watch something on YouTube you can search for it. If YouTube wants you to watch something, why should you care?

The idea of deciding what content to view based on what an advertising company recommends to me instead of because an actual human recommended it strikes me as completely unhinged. It also seems to be how the vast majority of users interact with the internet for the most part.

People being too lazy to use RSS and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

RSS doesn’t solve the right problem. The problem with the internet is with recommendations, not subscriptions.

It’s finding the stuff that I would like to know about but haven’t heard of yet.

Finding the latest episode/post of Thing I Already Like by Person I Already Like is easy.

Naming it Really Simple Syndication was a disaster by emphasising publishing instead of consuming. Meanwhile semi-nonsense names like Digg, Tumblr and D.e.Lic....iO.u..s ate its lunch.

If they'd just named it Really Simple Subscription instead...

YouTube used to be very good at recommending interesting, relevant content. It still occasionally recommends a gem that I would never have known to search for otherwise.

I've found my recommendations to be often reasonably decent as long as I keep engaging in that heavy curation.

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