Youtube recommendation engine is smart. It learns your interests very well to later recommend you the most suitable videos. The goal is to keep you watching.

However, your attention is a valuable commodity, and perhaps you'd rather spend your time in a more productive way.

That's one problem. But there's another (more important one, in my opinion)!

I've recently watched The Social Dilemma which I think is an excellent explanation of why social media/recommendation engines are toxic way beyond just stealing your time. Namely, they make you surround yourself only with your own point of view. You start living in the so-called filter bubble. There's a risk that you start thinking - "hey, everyone around must be thinking the exact same thing!" In reality, you're falling prey to confirmation bias, slowly giving rise to social polarization.

Anyway, it turns out I'm not the only one who thinks it's best to avoid social media/streaming platforms recommendations! I'd like to introduce you to an article written by Chris Lovejoy!

This guy wrote his own youtube algorithm to stop wasting time!

Instead of relying on Youtube's search engine and recommendations engine, he built his own search algorithm that returns him only "good" videos, based on his own search query.

Obviously, capturing the essence of a "good" video is a non-trivial task. The whole article outlining the process and assumptions that the author makes can be found here:

https://towardsdatascience.com/i-crea...

And yes, the algorithm did spit out one of my videos (which is the reason why I even found that article!). So... you're in good hands! ;))