YouTube and the Algorithmic Unconsciouis

 

    When I started paying for a new YouTube Premium channel 6 months ago it was for the express purpose of having a commercial-free source for recent developments in the UX/UI field, Figma & web development tutorials and eventually hosting my own videos. My personal Google/YouTube account carried with it a long search history of Chicago Bears condensed games, highlights, podcasts, Good Morning Football mentions and scenes from Paul Thomas Anderson movies. Too many, I'll say.

    Oh, I used it for the occasional handy dandy “how to change the battery in your Honda key-fob” tutorial. But I would always have to mentally hack through the morass of Breaking Bad clips and Bears trade/draft rumors first. A six-minute tutorial took an hour to find and then execute because there was always a ten-minute clip of Justin Fields’ development as a pocket passer to check out. These algorithmically dispatched distractions had become too blatant of a time drain to ignore.

    So, I halted my Premium subscription and began anew with my new professional endeavor. For a time, it was good. Subscribing to the Webflow's Tutorial Channel, Flux Academy, Kevin Powell and Gemma Helyer ramped my design game up and helped me get through UX/UI Bootcamp. But once I graduated, there was a direct correlation between the increase in my free time, and the descent back into the swamp of sports and pop-culture.

    My playlists on my old personal YouTube channel were now full of ad breaks. When I wanted to unwind by watching the 2018 Bears trounce Aaron Rodgers at Soldier Field, I was constantly skipping ads for testosterone enhancement and Athletic Greens. Surely, there must be a way to import these playlists to my paid account without contaminating my search history and condemning myself to the same fate.

    Surely not. Within a month, the two accounts were nearly indistinguishable from an interest standpoint. My channel subscriptions all said “UX/UI learner,” but my recommended videos all screamed “Mock Draft!” When I had a WebFlow conundrum, I searched “How do I ____ in Webflow?” checked my channels, and maybe watched and rewound the same video a couple times once I was onto the answer.

    When Mel Kiper or Colin Cowherd went off the map with some hot take on the Bears’ off-season strategy, I searched for counterarguments and let the “Play-Now” daisy chain of related videos run amock. When it came to watch time, I would roughly estimate that non-leisure content took up about 60% of my attention as compared to 40% of the time spent goofing off. But the metrics of engagement told a completely different story.

    The thing of it is, it is difficult to disentangle the profile YouTube guides you toward. One’s choice of rabbit holes it seems, is sometimes much more potent of a determining factor in recommendations than the things I dedicated raw time to. Even when I actively sought out neutral, informative content, my more “engaged” base instincts rose to the top.

    Netflix’s “The Social Dilemma” highlights this phenomenon very aptly by portraying two different political viewpoints with two somewhat polarized search histories. One profile regularly peruses articles from left-leaning think tanks and news outlets, the other profile right-leaning ones. Then both begin typing “Is climate change…” into a Google search bar to see what the predictive text thinks of them. Surely enough, the former autocompletes with “…an existential crisis?” and the latter “…a hoax?”

    When the internet was much younger, I had this blind spot in my imagination concerning just how accessible the world could be once it became immeasurably larger by way of open floodgates of information. How would I find answers to my questions about feudal Japan for a history project without having to sift through myriad unrelated search results?

    The answer seems to be by leveraging algorithms to keep the world smaller for users. A mentor once told me “Brian, if everything’s important, then nothing’s important. You’ve got to settle down and prioritize.” And I can see the invisible hand of internet-capitalism guiding me in this.

    But, now I have translated that worry into fear of not knowing what I don’t know. What am I being distracted from? What skill could I be developing that cannot find purchase in a mind muddied with stats and movie dialogue? My world feels not just smaller, but narrower. Like peering down a hallway to an exit that only gets smaller and more distant. Which would be fine were it easy to choose the direction.

    My plan for now? Scrubbing my History and Privacy settings in YouTube and staying on the metaphorical high road of curiosity. Delete my non-professional development related playlists and keep my content diet clean. I would like to think I’m a person with diverse and robust interests. The state of my YouTube landing page come June may tell a different story. Only time and attention will tell.