The sick world you live in is online. It’s not real. The world you see through your black mirror isn’t the same as the one you see outside the window. News has always been a litany of human misery. Online news is pure and condensed human suffering.

One of the authors, Prof Ashley Gearhardt of the University of Michigan, a clinical psychologist specialising in addiction, said her patients made the same links: “They would say, ‘I feel addicted to this stuff, I crave it – I used to smoke cigarettes [and] now I have the same habit but it’s with soda and doughnuts. I know it’s killing me; I want to quit, but I can’t.’”

Sometimes I wish there was a devastating famine, and 100 of millions of us would starve to death so we’d have to start using the old definition of “kill” again, and appreciate the futuristic utopian we once had. We need to stop scrutinizing the actuary tables for hidden horrors, look up, look around, eat a cheeseburger, have an after meal cigarette and relish the wonderous paradise in which we all live.

I’m not exactly rejecting it, but I can’t afford to build a new computer that can run it till the AI bubble bursts.

That’s just because he looks like depression.

Sure, google knows I’m a 50+ year old man but YT isn’t pushing me a bunch of videos about retirement and how to keep the damn kids off my lawn. If I made a new account and it knew nothing about me, it might. But right now it knows I’m interested in obscure early 20th Century comic books and early 70s horror anthology shows.

Edit:

I misunderstood what you said. I use ad blocker so I don’t see ads. Sometimes they get through and it’s always Wix. That is kind of a mystery to me.

Algorithms aren’t that smart. Maybe there needs to be general education about how they work so people will understand that viewing a video is like searching for a topic in google so people will understand how much control over what they see and use the technology appropriately.

If you watch a video about anorexia that’s like typing “Anorexia” in Google or pressing 9 on a remote control, you’re getting channel 9. That’s why to me this sounds crazy. It’s like someone complaining their TV keeps pushing the cooking channel at them.

I get some manosphere stuff for the same reason, but mostly ignore it. At the risk of getting beat up here, I like Joe Rogan. His celebrity interviews are entertaining and I like wacky subjects like UFOs and such which he covers. Plus I’m a gamer so I watch videos about guns frequently because I find that fascinating though I don’t want to own one. So that’s why I’ll get recommended manisphere stuff. And I’ll get curious and take a look at those videos, and get more recommendations. But when I stop watching them, they go away. My recommendations are based on whatever I’m interested in at the time.

Everybody talks about Andrew Tate but I have never ever seen any of his videos. Him or Mr. Beast. They never get recommended. I only know about Tate because everybody everywhere else is complaining about him. So I don’t what that researcher did to get that.

That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological harm by designing features like infinite scroll and autoplay to push her down a path that she alleged triggered depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality.

What the hell is everyone watching? YT recommends me Red Letter Media, Veratasium, old movies, Blender tutorials and a bunch of other stuff that’s never going to drive me to self-harm. I don’t understand. May be this woman doesn’t have ad blocker installed and is forced to sit through a bunch of soul crushing PSAs? Why is my experience so drastically different from this?

A lot of sites had to block the UK like Imgur, or completely shut down like Urban Dead, because they aren’t the kajillion dollar companies the UK government thought the Internet was made of. I don’t know why the UK didn’t enforce parental control software instead. OSA is a solution for a problem solved 30 years ago and is just going to destroy the Internet since it’s not possible for the vast majority of it to adhere to its laws.