Self Help scams, YouTuber drama, Reddit-reading YouTube, Culture ‘critics’, Gender/Sexuality/Mens/Neurodivergence/Race/Faith/Politico identity chambers – these are some of the holes that YouTube aggressively will funnel you into on their road to human ubiquity, and it is purely up to the individual to curate that hole with very few tools to help them understand the black box they are working with. Why do I have to know how an algorithm perceives me? Because if you let your algorithm drive you in 2023, you’re going to innocently watch the lockpicking lawyer, move on to lawyers talking about scam artists, which leads to Scam Awareness YouTube, and now you’re suddenly watching a stoner in a gaming chair nitpick Logan Paul scams on a livestream repost; which is the bottom circle of hell.
There’s always going to be this time– this moment, where you have to watch The YouTube Video, you know, the one everyone is going to talk about? Maybe your friends just ascended some tower of babel without you and now they only speak in tongues? You don’t want to stay out of the loop right? You can’t even afford to! Well, after spending 4+ hours on The Video, you’re going to have to cleanse your soul as well as your algorithm. This is good, and normal for a healthy social life to be a ‘part of the conversation’, of course Youtube knows that and would LOVE to plunder your watch retention for it.
So here’s what I did across 2023: since you gotta have safe pockets of YouTube just for you, I curated a list of my favorite videos from this year that will make you vaguely untrackable to YouTube’s suggestions while still letting you keep your dignity and learn some new stuff along the way!
I NEED MY CURRENT ALGORITHM DESTROYED RIGHT NOW AND I DON’T CARE THE PERSONAL COST
Are you absolutely sure? I understand. Very well. This will take 20 minutes in total, and you may find it unpleasant or even grotesque. It may alter reality around you for a short period of time.
You can even Like these videos and it’ll distract your algo for a short time. Between these four videos you can start to have a full palate cleanse as long as you don’t follow them deeper down the rabbit holes they occupy…
Wait, I kinda want to fall down that last video’s hole, that was nice…
So now that YouTube thinks you are some kind of starving Etsy shitposter, you can start molding your new personality for YouTube. Since we are force-choking YouTube’s algo for the time being, the deeper we go down any of our manually chosen holes, the more breathing-room we have when we want to return to idle browsing later. So let’s go down the deepest side of the crafting hole in a way that distracts and excites. I don’t necessarily know why these got big during 2023, but here we are flirting with DIY YouTube and Adam Savage’s side of the algo! Let’s pretend like we are bettering ourselves for a few hours.
The algorithm currently thinks I’m a girl and I need it to think I’m a guy; for reasons.
You want to be careful here because YouTube’s (and any media platform’s) algorithm is deeply engendered along the binary. However, the lack-of-binary can push you into other holes that you may not have intended; which it’s fine if you want to end up on queer, trans, enby or robot YouTube, but there are much more direct ways to flag your YouTube as queer, trans, NB or bot than this – you gotta pretend that YouTube is a cis dude who read Judith Butler and is now kinda being a know-it-all prick about gender essentialism. Here’s some videos that will allow us to take a subtle approach at ‘masculinity’ and go to interesting places while we do.
Your algo will think you are a 40-50yo straight dude and on top of that you’ll have a working historical knowledge of James Earl Jones and the Atlanta Falcons for your next dinner table conversation. You’re welcome.
Please, I beg you, the opposite of that! Make my (YouTube algorithm) ass into a girl!
Okay now YouTube thinks I’m the ultimate supergender of all femme-masc-ness with a penchant for woodworking and I need chaos to wash it all away again!
I don’t have time to WATCH something because I’m at work. What can I play in the background if I just want noise or new music?
So when I’m at work, I need long videos because for some reason YouTube when in the background starts skipping and refreshing 3 seconds into any new video that is loaded, so playlists are right out for me. Here’s some strange funky playlist videos from 2023 that will put you in charge of YouTube.
Note: Watching videos titled in language different from your primary language helps strip certain country identifiers from your algo. Which can be difficult since I can’t just type in “Vietnamese music playlist” in English to get there, but I can use the YT Recs to access those with enough massaging. It’s a delicate dance.
Mood playlists getting popular weirds me out because of how YT tries to use that to track someone’s mood, but we can easily play into that too.
Well that all sure seemed like way too much work for just watching a fun hbomberguy video, but thanks I guess?
Again, if you don’t, you’ll end up with a twee dude’s livestream showing you his cringiest influencer TikToks while selling his cheap print-on-demand shirt brand; the lowest circle, as I recall Dante wrote.
Solon is the ex-video boy of Gamesline, and one half of the Grindr Bois. He’s escaped containment and fled to become a games infomaniac and is now getting a Master’s in Library Science. You can always find him on Twitch at twitch.tv/chorbySP. The Gamesline-to-Postgrad Pipeline Grows.
