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I was a bit surprised to find that YouTube has the top spot. Probably preferable from American point of view than TikTok.
I find YouTube unfortunately to be the best at grabbing my attention
They’ve cracked the code with their UX to make it as addictive as humanly possible
Open YouTube to watch a long form video, get shown about 5 shorts per one video and inevitably end up seeing something interesting in a short, then end up scrolling for way too long on your very own skinner box
Yeah, it’s happened to me a couple times and I hate it so much when I finally wrest myself out, on top of the anti-adblock shit, that I’ve basically stopped browsing YT altogether. If I get a link I’ll watch a video but the quality of the experience has dropped so drastically since the early days. I actually lament the fact that because of how the algorithms are tuned, it is impossible to get to the weird part of YouTube organically - You have to already know about the weird shit in order to see it.
Not 100% related, but Chrome is crashing my computer. Started happening like a month ago, I would be dinking around on the net and everything would suddenly become unresponsive, can’t even open task manager, have to power cycle. This would happen anywhere between three days or thirty minutes apart. Nothing shows up in the event viewer before any of the crashes, all the hardware I can test comes back clean. I have a friend who said he was having the same issue, he switched to Firefox, hasn’t had it since. I’ve had a week of uptime now since I did the same. I’m beginning to think Alphabet just makes bad products now.
I mean, TikTok is comparable to YouTube Shorts rather than regular YouTube. I think that YouTube is useful, but don’t like TikTok or YouTube Shorts, the model where the service has a recommendation engine and just chooses a collection of short clips of videos to constantly feed you, one after the other. Apparently there are people who do like it, but…
I personally find them both useful. Well, Tiktok specifically not youtube shorts.
My thing with tiktok is that their content recommendation algorithm is best-in-class at knowing what sort of content I want, and it starts edging away from what I want, just marking stuff as “not interested” a few times will bring it back in line. By modulating my behaviours on certain types of content (i.e. making choices over whether to watch or skip, mark as “not interested”, view comments, comment myself), I can customize an algorithmic feed that delivers what I want.
Granted this is quite an amount of work to use a “social media app”, unlike the other platforms, it’s possible and it’s good.
Youtube (long-form) I think is extremely useful when I’m looking for something in-particular, especially if it’s something that doesn’t age very much. Guides and tutorials, let’s plays, retrospectives, etc. They both fit better with the long-form content, and are much easier to find on Youtube than Tiktok.
The content recommendation algorithm of Tiktok is what makes me use it, while the discovery of specific content and access to longer form content is what makes me use Youtube.