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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   1943 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for August 30, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Finally YouTube did something useful. If you have an YouTube account and turn of your watch history, YouTube stops recommending you videos. The final piece of my day to day internet experience free of outrage bait that was making me depressed. If I want to be recommended videos I can always log out.

I consider video recommendations to be YouTube holding up an analytical mirror to my subscriptions and watch history. Opening it up now: movie critic, music composition analysis, writing advice, music+ambience for studying, mean tweets from Jimmy Kimmel Live, science history, pop science, movie history, math, science. Two of those were good recommendations from channels I've never seen before, and I'm not ashamed of 9 out of 10 of them; that's a solid A minus. Plus, I've also learned that I spend too much time watching dumb Jimmy Kimmel clips, so I should try to cut that out. After just one more. Probably.

Opening up YouTube in an incognito window, on the other hand, to force it to give me generic recommendations without history, is good for nothing but making me feel better about myself by comparison ... there's some Hurricane Idalia coverage, there's a Mexican guitarist duo that might be interesting, but before and between and after that is page after page of clickbait and wasted time. "SCREAMING at a SCARY Toy Factory [Poppy Playtime]". 36M views.

I used to have a good experience with subscriptions and recommendations it contributed, but somewhere along the line the algorithm decided to show me "outrage bait". Things that I deliberately avoid by not going on Twitter, Reddit(when it got worse there) and so on... for my own sanity. So it is something in my personal feed that triggered it but it became like everything else that I've identified dragging me down.

The thing is that it is personalized by the very definition not everyone is going to have the same poor experience I did. So if you are seeing things that enrich your life go for it. I'm just informing other people that might have identified something similar in their life and that it might be something worth a try.

Yeah I've done that too, but those extensions don't work on the TV. This applies to the TV and the YouTube app on your phone too.

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