Look at the profile pictures.

Well, yeah. Isn’t the whole point of these foolish office mandates to get people to quit? That way they can reduce their workforce without the cost and negative press of another round of layoffs.

To be honest with you, the algorithm is pretty good. I’m a pretty active user of “not interested” and “don’t recommend this channel” so the algorithm generally shows me stuff I already like or things I may be interested in.

What I find frustrating is that there are so many extra UI blocks shoved in between regular videos. Featured current events, rentable movies, playable games, and the fucking shorts I don’t give a shit about. Since I mainly watch on mobile I also can’t just remove those sections and even when I dismiss them, YouTube decides to shove them in my face again and again.

I just want to be left alone to watch my nerdy stuff :(

Based on what the YouTube frontpage looks like when I’m not logged in I can guarantee that I will have zero interest in anything that gets hyped up on a leaderboard. But YouTube will of course malform its UI so it can constantly shove it into my face like it does with shorts.

I’ve been a macOS user for over a decade and I am never going back to Windows. That being said, Apple does have iCloud (their version of OneDrive) which is tightly integrated into the OS and they’re not shy about asking you to pay for more storage. They also want you to log in with an Apple ID when you first start your computer and I don’t know how easy it is to use a local account.

It’s not the same as Windows in terms of aggressive ads and upsells, but Apple aren’t innocent in wanting more of your money. If you want true freedom you have to pay with your time and energy and run Linux.

I use this rule: accounts.google.com/gsi/* Is yours similar?

I also pay for Kagi and I’m super happy with that decision. I do wish they’d stop putting so much AI cruft into their search engine, but at least I can disable it.