Q: What's in YOUR algorithim? A moveable index of Social Media & Streaming prompts

Here's where we share the stunning accuracy (or inaccuracy) of social media & streaming sites making helpful suggestions to us

Currently, YouTube seems to have me pegged.. yet another offering of a guy searching for an abandoned gold mine the Nevada desert, or a haunted bothy near a Scottish loch... old Decker episodes... live Deep Purple & Cat Power clips

How are they tracking you?

My ig feed is like Indian street food vendors + pictures of rich ppls music collection, where did the animals go

tiktok: various leftwing/lib political posts, hoops, music, teaching/education stuff, local shit, cooking/food, standup clips, futbol highlights

fb: have that blocked on my laptop browser, but when im on my phone and logged into fb via browser if its not hoops related or local, its largely irrelevant garbage that i scroll past with a quickness

ig: i dont have this app on my phone either, just logged into the browser. i think i get exclusively soccer content here

yt: almost exclusively music with some nba and occasional standup/comedy pods (getting a lot of gianmarco soresi stuff)

Had to reinstall FB on my phone because it’s the best way to get info from my union. The main page is a horror show of the world’s stupidest reels and links to pages I don’t follow.

Twitter is the same as it used to be when I look at it every few weeks in that all I see are people I follow, except it’s halfway to a ghost town.

Instagram - the first page of my suggested stuff consists of 9 rescue dog posts, 1 guitar, 1 keyboard and a wombat.

The ads are where Instagram is a horror show. Gambling, crypto, dick pills, scams when it realizes I’m a middle aged white guy.

Reddit.com is synthesizers/synth circlejerk, baseball, soccer, basketball, indieheads, hiphopheads and the Pat Finnerty subreddit.

I clicked on too many TR-1000 videos lately so YouTube is mostly new music gear demo videos.

Cats, clothes and stand up comedy … mixed with ads for things I have searched for work… which entails a really broad range of items and services because I am often trying to figure out what my clients spent money on.

After a few days the ads for searched things get replaced by more recent searched things

Haven't gone on FB for ages so I checked and it's pretty respectable: London concerts, plays, blu rays, leftie politics.

Youtube algorithm also fine: cooking, videos about obscure old shovelware games, old anime intros from the 70's. A smattering of music recs coming from my playing of videos from sundry rolling ILX threads.

Instagram is the wildest, and thus most fun. It has taken my cultural background (admitidely complex - portuguese/german/british, plus french/lebanese/moroccan/senegalese from my partner) and general interest in world cultures and is just wildly grasping at where I might be from, recent recs have included a Chinese woman teaching swear words in Arabic and a clip of Jean Luc Melénchon subtitled in spanish.

It has also decided I'm a lesbian, I guess because I folllow Jennifer English? So I get a lot of lesbian influencer couples (preferable to straight ones I suppose), and also a reel of "how to flirt like a lesbian" which turned out to be "never say anything or make any moves and just hope the other person telepathically realises". More fool her, that was already my flirting style!

IG: London art events, countless 'the is the best London market/restaurant/shopping area you've never heard of' (which I invariably already know of) parkour and red bull high diving, endless chess videos, 'can you guess what this song is from this drum pattern'?

FB: oriental and middle eastern carpets, endless 1970s UK punk band photos, cats and tiger cubs, 'you'll never believe what this celebrity looks like now'

I'm in the UK, so YouTube keeps recommending right wing ragebait / conspiracy videos, no matter how often I click 'don't recommend this channel'.

watching the cabaret voltaire videos on youtube and every 4th suggestion is about german pows in ww2

normally they are about being interviewers being pwned or large people getting beaten up by tiny mma fighters. i don't know what i've done to deserve this.

I keep getting suggested videos about which songs or bands that aging 60s era rock stars supposedly hated, because I once clicked on one. But more puzzling to me are the seemingly dozens of fanboy videos that tout Larry Bird as the bestest most wonderfullest NBA player in the history of the universe. I never liked him that much because he was too big of a prick. Admittedly, I don't give the YT algorithm much data to work with.

YouTube: cooking, science explainers, NBA, cats, and bluegrass / folk. But 1 click on a rock climbers vs marines and my feed will be flooded with similar noise. Have to stay disciplined…

watching the cabaret voltaire videos on youtube and every 4th suggestion is about german pows in ww2

I haven't watched any cabaret voltaire videos but I've had 3 or 4 german pows in ww2 suggestions in the last few weeks too

There's another one!

"German POWs Couldn’t Believe Their First Day In Britain."

59K views 6 days ago, from a channel with 136 subscribers

ha, I too got a few German POW suggestions on youtube... No idea why

It happened again!

"German POWs Expected Torture, but Britain Treated Them with Kindness !!"

137 views 2 weeks ago

The only algorithmic feed I see is Youtube, where I get clips from late-night talk shows, sewing videos ("I make and sell 20 of these a day!"), exercise videos for old people because I had a period of googling exercises for knee pain, tips from ADHD home organisers on organising my life, general interior design tips, and Shah Rukh Khan videos. So that's actually pretty good. The husband has a Youtube premium subscription through his work, though, and I wonder if that might be keeping some of the worst of it at bay.

I never follow any of the interior design tips or organising tips. I think I just like watching people organise things.

fb: fitness products, fitness clothes, workwear (i spend too much time adding things to carts i'll never check out), people's hiking photos, people's herping photos, weather stuff (facebook is so bad at this - week-old forecasts from the next state over, etc.) some music, buddhist memes, a bit of the gay. so many screenshots of jonathan edward durham tweets for some unfathomable reason? self-help and affirmation memes. occasionally get a toxic masc / right wing coded ad come through sadly. for several years fb has seemed really committed to both-sides-ing and fishing for the conservative/puritanical/mean part of people.

ig: a lot of cats, fitness, some music. less dj / rave stuff than there used to be. lotta really generic meme-y stuff.

youtube: almost all train videos, "peaceful walk around japanese city" videos, car ride videos, some history stuff.

grateful that's the extent of my social media imprint these days.

Youtube gives me rum reviews and cocktail videos, and Korean and Japanese diner/restaurant videos. It keeps trying to add movie trailers to the mix but I keep shooting them down.

Youtube gives me rum reviews and cocktail videos

a couple years ago I was getting a LOT of single malt scotch reviews shot in man caves, that seems to have abated somewhat thank god

A couple of years ago I went on an IG pogrom, hiding every ad because it was “inappropriate”, to see what I’d end up with cluttering the feed. Mostly very boring and esoteric ads, and then a few times it dumped ads for very illegal stuff like bricks of molly and charlie, peyote buttons pressed in tablets, weed buds, wads of cash and so on. Never had the courage to click through but I enjoyed screenshotting them for my (adult) daughters.

dang I’ve never gotten ads for illicit drugs, but I do get weekly circulars from random grocery stores on the other side of the country