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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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It does seem to create weird trends. I like to watch videos of people building things. One day, I watched a video of somebody building a bizarre contraption termed a turbo burn barrel, which involves connecting a automotive turbocharger to a sealed metal barrel full of burning wood and starting the turbo going with a leaf blower. Pretty amusing, I thought. Well it seems either this was a Youtube creator trend or the algorithm decided I loved it (or both), since I kept seeing a constant stream of turbo burn barrel videos for the next few weeks, which I mostly did watch. Then all of the sudden it just stopped and I hardly ever saw them anymore. I saw a few hints suggesting videos in that genre were still getting made, but it seemed more like the algorithm just decided to stop showing them to me for some reason.

I saw that one in action! Thing was terrifying. I have no idea how much thrust a regular turbo is supposed to produce, but it certainly looked like a lot.

However, it didn’t mess with my recommendations. No idea why.

Depends which one - at least 5 or so channels that I saw built them, probably more.

Those automotive turbos aren't supposed to produce thrust at all, the exhaust is supposed to be run through the usual mufflers. With bare exposed turbine exits, it'd be just a little. You'd probably need to build a proper nozzle to generate much thrust.

I got the turbo barrels too! Does youtube push them to people in a broad demographic or do they have an implicit characterization of people wherein we both fall into the same narrow bucket of turbo-woodstove-video susceptibility? I honestly find this question rather disturbing, in that unless I choose to buy print media it's getting harder and harder to tell what's going on in the general populace. As in, how am I to tell whether something gets to me because it's in general circulation, as opposed to having been precisely targeted?

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