I was an early user of YouTube, mostly as a place to put home and work videos and make them available for family, friends and colleagues. After a few years, however, I began to really dislike YouTube, and started using Vimeo for my videos. My biggest issue with YouTube was the "you might like" recommendations and the immediate starting of another video as soon as the one being watched ended. This just felt very intrusive and very annoying. As I listened to Rabbit Hole, the light bulb went off and I remembered my dislike of YouTube, and it now made sense to me.
I was an early adopter of Facebook, and then joined Twitter when it became popular. Last year I left both of those, and because I never joined Instagram or any of the other "social media" I am now a non-entity on the internet (except for my blog, which you are reading for some strange reason). I am very disappointed with the direction the internet has taken, which is all about profit. And I do not like being surveilled by these giant, obscenely profitable tech companies. I use Signal for texting, and Protonmail for email, and DuckDuckGo for web browsing. This makes me feel like a resister, even though I still have a gmail account, use Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and others that harvest my data and push it back at me as ads. But I look for the rabbit holes, and try to avoid the ones I can.
As detailed in Rabbit Hole, the early and main goal of YouTube was to constantly increase and maximize retention time of users. In other words, capture eyeballs and try not to let them leave the site. It didn't matter what the users were watching, YouTube didn't care about the content, only the retention time. The algorithms build by YouTube pushed content at users based on the prior viewing of each user. It turns out that very large numbers of people are ensnared by this mesmerizing barrage of suggested content and, like Caleb, become addicted. In his case, Caleb at one time spent 12 to 15 hours per day on YouTube. And the algorithm, over time, dragged him to and into a rabbit hole that, in his case, turned him into a far-right extremist white supremacist. Caleb managed to climb back out after a long time down the rabbit hole, but many are not so fortunate.
One of the interesting segments of Rabbit Hole is the interviews with Susan Wojcicki, the YouTube CEO. Ms. Wojcicki talked about the early days of YouTube when it's purpose was entertainment, mostly home videos people made of themselves, their pets, and other mostly inane subjects. But YouTube now considers itself to be a media platform that hosts music, gaming, DIY and educational videos in the form of podcasts, informational videos and a variety of other formats. She talked about recent efforts of YouTube to find and expel the most extreme providers on the platform after YouTube realized that a lot of the platform content was being used for nefarious purposes. I am happy to learn that YouTube is finally trying to clean up the platform, a very daunting task when you consider the millions of users.
I still have a problem with YouTube, and I take issue with Ms. Wojcicki about the core of her business; it is still harvesting user data and pushing recommendations made by an algorithm. In my internet searches, I am very often led to YouTube and go there with great trepidation. My basic response is: I do not want your recommendations; I do not want another video to start as the one I'm watching ends; I do not want you to know what I am watching and also harvesting every bit of data from my computer and internet habits that you can glean from my visit. I just want to see the information or entertainment I was looking for.
The internet is a fabulous technological development, with many positive attributes and uses. That being said, the internet has also become a dangerous place and a technology that giant corporations use to commodify users in order to reap obscene profits. Privacy and security seem not to matter much, only profit. In that regard, we are all down a rabbit hole.
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