She’s almost 70, spend all day watching q-anon style of videos (but in Spanish) and every day she’s anguished about something new, last week was asking us to start digging a nuclear shelter because Russia was dropped a nuclear bomb over Ukraine. Before that she was begging us to install reinforced doors because the indigenous population were about to invade the cities and kill everyone with poisonous arrows. I have access to her YouTube account and I’m trying to unsubscribe and report the videos, but the reccomended videos keep feeding her more crazy shit.
I think it’s sad how so many of the comments are sharing strategies about how to game the Youtube algorithm, instead of suggesting ways to avoid interacting with the algorithm at all, and learning to curate content on your own.
The algorithm doesn’t actually care that it’s promoting right-wing or crazy conspiracy content, it promotes whatever that keeps people’s eyeballs on Youtube. The fact is that this will always be the most enraging content. Using “not interested” and “block this channel” buttons doesn’t make the algorithm stop trying to advertise this content, you’re teaching it to improve its strategy to manipulate you!
The long-term strategy is to get people away from engagement algorithms. Introduce OP’s mother to a patched Youtube client that blocks ads and algorithmic feeds (Revanced has this). “Youtube with no ads!” is an easy way to convince non-technical people. Help her subscribe to safe channels and monitor what she watches.
Not everyone is willing to switch platforms that easily. You can’t always be idealistic.
That’s why I suggested Revanced with “disable recommendations” patches. It’s still Youtube and there is no new platform to learn.
Also consider - don’t sign in to YouTube. Set uBlock, and Sponsorblock, too - so when youtube does get watched, the ads and promotions get skipped.
Everyone here is missing the point - by signing in to YouTube, you give Google more power to dominate your life.
With a simple inoreader extension in Firefox, you can visit a youtube/youtuber/video page and subscribe the feed.
Search interesting channels and save them to Feedly, or Inoreader.
Pin those to Firefox, so that your feeds are always refreshed and visible.
How does revanced remove the algorithm stuff? I have been using it for a long time but never saw this feature
I don’t know for sure, because I actually like my algorithmic recommendations on YT (I’ve done a good job of carefully curating it to show me a good stuff). But if I had to guess, I’d say it removes “related videos” from its watch page, and removes the “home” tab. So it will show search results and subscriptions, but not the general algorithmic content.
There should be a patch for it that hides the “recommended” feed in the homepage. I’m not certain because I never use Youtube with an account or the official website/app, so I don’t get targeted recommendations.
Ooh, you can even set the app to open automatically to the subscription feed rather than the algo driven home. The app does probably need somebody knowledgable about using the app patcher every half-dozen months to update it though.
How do you disable algorithmic feeds in revanced? This sounds perfect…