I don't know about tik-tok, but Instagram is totally unhinged. Boobs, butts, gambling, brain rot, watchbait/ragebait, all that stuff.
YouTube shorts gets all the hate, but I find the content to consistently be the most sophisticated? PG rated? educational?
> Boobs, butts, gambling, brain rot, watchbait/ragebait, all that stuf
I don't understand how other people have this experience and I don't. I see targeted ads of course. And every once in a while it starts showing me content for things I don't follow, at which point I start mashing the button they provide to make it go away, and after a handful it pops up something asking if I want to remove all suggested content for a while. I always select yes.
Do other people actually *want* suggested comment? that's bizarre.
Most people aren't actively curating their feed like this. They see an attractive person, eyes wander for a few seconds longer than the usual post before scrolling away, and that is enough.
But I'd at least think that anyone who is complaining about what content they're seeing, the algorithm, etc knows enough to do this too. Especially on a site like ths.
Instead online discourse often revolves around this being an impossible task. Meanwhile on all the social media sites I use I have managed to keep algorithmic content to a minimum.
What social media sites do you use where you've been successful at avoiding the algorithm? I don't see how it can be avoided. It is always trained in some way based on your estimated demography and what content you engage with slightly more than others.
Facebook, IG, Twitter, Bsky.
To be clear, I'm talking purely about being forced to see content from accounts you don't follow and not things like them choosing to show you content from one account more than another. Not all of them support my preference of pure chronological, so they will monkey with what I see amongst the things I follow. But all of them make it easy to quickly filter out and/or avoid any unwanted activity outside of sponsored ads.
It really wants to show you certain things. You can tell it no, but you have to do it a lot.
YouTube shorts was like this day 1. I didn't even use it, but it saw that my normal recs were music and started showing me music... performed by girls wearing skirts with the camera on the ground. Then I adblocked it.
I agree, YouTube shorts tends to be noticeably better.