You didn't really ask for this, but here are some suggestions for YouTube content that is worthwhile:

• Fall of Civilizations - originally a podcast, these are long-format episodes that each focus on the history of a collapsed civilization. On YouTube they have added video of the ruins and the locations described in the podcast which really adds a lot to it.
• Folding Ideas - all of Dan Olson's content is worth watching, but I particularly recommend "Line Goes Up" which digs into the culture around NFTs and cryptocurrency, "The Future is a Dead Mall" which looks at the metaverse/VR and the people who bought into it as the next big thing, and "In Search of a Flat Earth" which tries to understand the cultlike behavior of flat earthers. Dan basically does well-researched sociocultural analysis and the things he finds are fascinating.
• Technology Connections - Alec Watson gives in-depth descriptions on how various pieces of technology do (or don't) work. I think the videos on pinball machines are particularly fun.
• Moon Channel - somewhat similar to Folding Ideas, Moony does sociocultural analysis, though in different topical areas. I highly recommend "Kawaii: Anime, Propaganda and Soft Power Politics".
• Cody's Lab - Cody does various scientific experiments, mostly focused on chemistry. He still tops my list of craziest things I've seen anyone do on YouTube - refining uranium from ore in his garage.

Revanced on android and Youtube Enhancer on Firefox.

Massive bookshelf here. Can't enshittify watch we already own! Fuck corps

I've been watching Biz Barclay lately. She does media analysis with some interesting perspectives

I subscribe to Technology Connections and his Patreon. Highly recommend his videos.

I also follow a few van lifers and a friends channel. I also have own channel on YouTube. I also read a ton of books. Wish we bad tons more options but watching YouTube is not a bad thing. Also follow a YouTuber who keeps me updated on politics and such.

I am convinced Youtube and many other platforms are dying right now because instead of protecting their assets, they double down on AI slop that nobody cares about. Of course traffic will keep increasing first but that's mostly from bot accounts spamming garbage and not actual users consuming content and ads. Server cost will explode while ad revenue will shrink. The corporations behind it have vast resources and will take down the Internet with them but their end is slowly approaching.

You might be ahead of the curve. I still consume Youtube a lot but my experience is getting worse each and every month. It's a consistent downward spiral. It's just a matter of time until I realize "Oh, I haven't watched Youtube in weeks!" That's when I know. The people who make decisions at Youtube clearly do not even use their own website or app and there is no way to give feedback either. When they realize how bad it's gotten it will be too late to course correct. You can't win users back after they sobered up from your addictive dopamine machine because they stopped coming and the only traffic on your servers are bots.

In my experience, you have to be incredibly selective with what you watch. The entirety of what I watch on there is makerspace type crafts, misc educational content, and the occasional video game, with ideally the least emotional commentary possible.

They started to auto translate comments based on your one(!) language setting, completely destroying nuance in the process. Oh, you're multilingual? TOO BAD! A lot of the translations don't even make sense. It's just word salad a lot of the time and they don't even give you an option to see the original comment, title or video description! And of course there is no way to give Youtube feedback about it. They're cooked. Their service is shit and the platform is suffocating from slop in more ways than I ever imagined. Like, I knew it would be bad but you even get bombarded with it when users aren't even involved.

I removed shorts by using ubo -> select eye dropper -> move eye dropper over the shorts section til it is all highlighted, then click "create" on the popup.

waiting for the AI blocking extension to come out one can wish

The people who make decisions at Youtube clearly do not even use their own website or app and there is no way to give feedback either.

Ed Zitron, famously verbose web blog guy, wrote a post about how he thinks most of these big businesses are run by idiots that are out of touch with both the product and the users.

The Era Of The Business Idiot

Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At (www.wheresyoured.at)

It's simple: they neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate.