Comment by openplatypus

From my experience, YouTube recommendations on Apple TV suck compared to the home feed you get when you open YT on iOS. I was pleasantly surprised when I opened YouTube on mobile after a long time, it actually felt like what YouTube used to be with a wide variety of new and interesting videos (plus added shorts and posts).

I think Google needs to look into optimizing it better for those of us who prefer watching YouTube on TV.

What’s funny and sad is that the evolution of YouTube toward a chum feed that pulls people toward rubbish may have broken some peoples addiction but overall it has probably increased it.

One of the things that flabbergasts me about YouTube and TikTok is the utter bilge that people will watch. TV had some of this: trash daytime TV, late night infomercials, soaps to some extent. But the stuff social media runs on today is a whole other level.

If you went back in time and told me that millions would spend endless hours watching other people play video games while monologuing about nothing and randomly doing the same juvenile reactions over and over, I would not have believed you. Same goes for obvious zero effort AI slop, machine voices reading Reddit posts to a slide show background, incoherent rambling, or for kids videos of people unboxing toys for eight hours… it’s just astounding.

There seem to be these “hooks” that if mastered can take the place of plot, aesthetics, information, and everything else, and mesmerize people.

Sometimes it seems like the banality and bizarre nonsensical nature of it is the hook, like people just want to stare at nothing.

+1 from me too