what's wild is how this distorts the creation process itself. you end up optimizing for the algorithm instead of for quality. every creative decision becomes "will this get recommended" instead of "is this good." i've found that the best content comes from having strong human creative oversight and not just chasing whatever the algo rewards this week.

the no-code tools that promise to automate content creation for these platforms are even worse -- they just produce generic slop that feeds the attention machine. you need to actually care about what you're making, and that means stitching together your own pipeline where you control the decisions.

Looking back I am realizing that the techno elite did not coopt something that used to be nice. This whole narrative control and private information funnel was designed from the beginning with what it became today already on their crosshairs. We just went through the phases and ate all of it up.

The content makes sense, though. It’s nice to just follow people you actually know and see nothing else.

I think this is what keeps YouTube usable for me: the subscriptions tab stays in its lane. I only use the home (algorithm) tab when I want to.