this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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Unfortunately, I can’t escape YouTube/it's recommendations. But! I watch content about privacy through LibreTube, which proxies everything through Piped, which means that Google doesn’t know what I’m watching. So it's not a big problem.
Doesn't the recommendations require some history?
Though I feel that has peaked too, I think the recommendation engine was best around 2011 to 2015. It's kinda gone downhill since.
Of course they do. There are no videos about privacy in my recommendations. I look at privacy through LibreTube purely based on the list of subscriptions.
You can request a csv file of your subscriptioms from Google which you can import into Libretube and then cut ties with Youtube entirely, at least on mobile. There are other methods on desktop.
Subscriptions are good, but YouTube recommendations introduce new channels that you didn’t know about before, so recommendations are still needed for me.
I feel the same way. I switched to NewPipe recently, while degoogling my phone for privacy reasons, but I'm still using YouTube when I'm at my desktop. The recommendations are just better at finding new content for me.
I can respect that. I'll admit my finding new creators has slowed considerably since I stopped using Youtube directly. Now I just use word of mouth from podcasts and YT creators I already follow. For me, as of right now, that's fine.
But if I had just joined the platform, I'll admit there's just no way I'd discover as much, and would probably just use the platform directly.