My wife and I have been saying "I'd really like to try parasailing" or "I wonder what parasailing is like?" or variations on parasailing, to see if it eventually pops up in our youtube feed. Two weeks so far and nothing yet. Said it about twenty times so far.
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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I checked my phone’s location settings, and sure enough, Instagram had recently accessed this information.
The average tech-illiterate journo is always going to be dogshit at these "experiments" because they don't understand how most of the underlying tech works.
Other additions to my feed were harder to explain. ... One video featured a woman in a sari frying up South Indian dumplings called kuzhi paniyaram — an obscure dish my mum would make when I was growing up.
Yes, numbnuts. Your precise location, plus a hundred other data points you're ignorant of, associated the account with your mum. This journo probably doesn't even know that location access likely means visibility of all the wifi and bluetooth devices in your radius.
If this is late stage cap journalism, in the age of omnipresent surveillance capitalism, it's time to pack it in. We're well and truly cooked. Welcome to costco, I love you!
Journalism is dead. Capitalism killed it, because they did not want any reliable witnesses to or records of what they are going to do to humanity and the planet. History is written by the victors, and they have already crafted their own narrative of technological enlightenment. And we're not in that story. At least not in any way we'll recognize ourselves.
Journalism’s not dead. The fact of the matter is that people don’t want to read journalism, they want propaganda and tabloid; if this wasn’t true ProPublica would have the readership that the Sun does.
Maybe it’s time for the return of curated lists. Back in the day (even before the web) there used to be people who organized lists of videos to rent, books to read, etc. why not bring it back in a lemmy channel or some other trusted service. Just curated lists of specific videos.
You can subscribe to YT channels on NewPipe, not to mention you have bookmarks and RSS feeds.
You can have those in the fediverse on Pixelfed and Mastodon. The problem is that then the people you can follow are only middle-aged Linux/Star Trek nerds and the occasional organic farmer.
I’m only hearing upsides here.
Aren’t communities/sub-reddits just another version of curated lists organized by topic?
good example I guess: https://fmhy.net/
Ah, so a meta list with locations of communities/subreddits/forums/etc that is platform agnostic. I see.
Yes, I was thinking something YouTube (or long-form media) specific with the purpose of replacing the YouTube algorithm. So for example maybe someone who loves astronomy puts together a playlist about supernovas that include a video from pbs spacetime, Sabine Hossenfelder and kursgesagt. Then he puts together other playlists. Over time you’d recognize this curator’s name and trust them not to point you to garbage.
If she accessed Instagram from the same home network (and IP address) as her main phone, the zuckerbots inferred that the two users were probably in the same household and knew each other/had similar interests.
Regarding how quickly Instagram started sending them personal stuff... Letting an app access your location, especially if it's not a one-time authorisation, is basically telling it who you are.
There was a newspaper investigation recently on data brokers, they approached one to get a sample of their data. It was "anonymous" data, only in the sense it didn't contain names. Using Apple's advertiser ID, they had no problem building profiles from specific devices and could easily identify a lot of their own employees, simply because their routine around a location made it clear it was their workplace. And from there, it was not hard to find out on the data what their home address was.
It probably took only location for the burner phone Instagram to know that this is either the same person, or someone closely related to them.
I like NewPipe for this reason.
My feed is what I've subscribed to and only what I subscribed to.
I've been having issues with NewPipe. After the second or third video YouTube stopped allowing my device from accessing YouTube through NewPipe. No RSS, no videos.
Sometimes Youtube pushes changes that break NewPipe. Usually the NewPipe devs take 1-2 days to sort these changes out
I switched to PipePipe. Works well
I did that too after having to reset my phone with newpipe crashing over and over..got no choice..now I only use pipe and I'm Happy with it
Pipepipe lets you block channels too which is so useful for results that tend to over represent larger youtubers you may have no interest in on the initial results.
Will do. Thanks for the suggestion.
Try grayjay
(not the play store version)
I'll try this too. Thank you.
Turning off your history on YouTube prevents them from sending recs to the home screen. I only use the subscriptions tab
My YouTube feed seems okay, recently they started promoting new crap but pressing "don't recommend channel" and "not interested" silenced it.
If I watch something from a channel I don't want to get recommended I remove it from my watch history and I never press "like" on videos.
It's good to see all the comments with ways to manage your YouTube feed, good to know if I end up in the same situation with a poisoned algorithm.
I like pipepipe and freetube since there isn't really an opportunity for either to offer a curated algorithm of content it thinks I would be interested in. And I can block channels which had been a game changer. Especially on the tech and game side, since search results tend to be dominated by a few big youtubers on the first pages.
I don’t have an account but my partner does. We normally get videos on the main page from people they’re subscribed to, or videos we already have watched (which is annoying.)
One day, one of the top videos on the main page reccos was what I can only describe as a terminally-autistic person (like we’re both autistic too but) hand-holding a camera to video capture Tamodachi Life on the DS and narrating the experience. It had like 37 views when we clicked on it. We looked at their channel and it was like their 1300th post playing the same game. It was amazing.
Its been two or three years now since i dipped out, the way you describe using the 'don't recommend' and 'not interested' options seems to have a clearer result than when i last used them. If they've changed that functionality in the meantime i'm glad.
Yeah, some of peoples suggestions here are good. I liked that user who only looks at their subscribed channels tab, if i ever go back maybe i'd try that. Though the only youtuber i miss is adamsomething, one day i might jump onto his patreon.
Yeah I feel like they changed how the algorithm reacts to getting those requests. It used to be constant skirmishes with the suggested videos where I have to say "don't recommend" until they stick.
The best way to use YT, is to have a bookmark folder linking to the recent video list (Descending by release date) of the channels you enjoy.
YT/Google by definition (large American technology company) cannot be trusted.
Word of caution because you may be under the impression that youtube isn’t suppressing videos that are supposed to show up there:
Youtube is known to skip certain videos and never surface them in the chronological view of subscribed videos. They explain it by “technical issues” every time, but intentional or not, the experience is the same, Youtube does not want you using it
Yeah, I noticed this, so I started using RSS feeds of my subscribed channels. I honestly think RSS (and other web 2.0 tech) is when the internet peaked from a user experience perspective.
RSS only faded away because it’s so convenient that it’s hard to monetize. When the goal became keeping people on your platform as long as possible, RSS was antithetical to that goal. So platforms either abandoned support for it or (like YouTube) stopped advertising its existence.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case, but since we are using YT to start with (I do use Peertube, but it's a lot smaller), this is a good baseline approach IMO.
Use YT as hosting/player service, not as a discovery/library management service.
I already quit youtube for odysee, reddit for lemmy, insta for pixelfed, tiktok for loops, x for mastodon, etc...
Nowadays those social medias are just trash. I can't fight against those companies and if i can delete them today without any consequences then why wait for tomorrow ?
I share your hate of YouTube.
But FYI Odysee is run by a hyperneoliberal Trump-adjacent CEO who jokes with his friends about selling user data for top price. I've been in the room with them. Disgusting people
thats true, but while everything have a downside what option left to choose?
atleast i know what am watching and odysee don't have an ecosystem and addictive design + shorts, i prefer odysee for now.
If peertube gets much content and users able to watch every instance content from a single instance then i switch to it.