It occurred to me a few days ago that my YouTube subscriptions are heavily weighted in favour of men. I follow a lot of video essayists and educational YouTubers, and when the algorithm surfaces new ones to check out, 99 times out of 100 it's a man talking. Same with musicians, gamers, and tech heads...
I feel like I'm missing out on some valuable perspectives, insights, and just all around good content. So please hit me up with some recommendations!

There was a brief (an oh-so-brief) period in youtube history where all types of non-corporate content thrived. I'm referring, if memory serves, to the timespan from around 2011 - late 2014.

This was after youtube initially got big, but before Google decided that it wanted to step in and maintain the cultural status quo rather than redefine it. Ad revenue paid creators fairly-ish in most cases, and the talk of the town was machinima assfucking it's segment of poor souls that signed into it, rather than youtube pulling the same moves universally as it did a few years later.

(Suffice to say I have no love for the platform).

It's important to note that at this time, Youtube was a bit like a small-scale television enterprise, before it dreamed of deliberately becoming one. Youtube had everything from animations to product reviews, news to reality programming to VFX extravaganzas.

One of the most incredibly important innovations of the time, and one that's been all-but-lost, was the birth (and subsequent heat-death) of youtube news channels.

These channels mirrored cable news, but without the influence of corporate sponsors getting in the way, and without the ravenous need to appease political parties and harebrained cable tv viewers. They were biased - good god were some of them biased - and they weren't perfect, but they were set up in such a way that, had youtube not fucked it up (sigh...) they might've someday dethroned CNN, MSNBC and Fox.

With the next election coming up and shaping up to be a small-scale repeat of 2018s (you're kidding yourself if we're every going to go any other direction than further down at this point - after all, it works!) it's important to remember that there was, for a beautiful gleaming moment, a chance for not a corporation, but a community, to rise up and redefine the way people received news in a way that hadn't been seen since the conception of the newspaper.

Instead, youtube squandered it. Real events and engaging content don't generate views. People can't sit and watch hours of current events like they do for whatever-the-hell youtube trends nowadays (list videos and toy openings, I guess?), and why would they? If you get on youtube to watch today's news, you're not going to stick around for yesterday's. So youtube's 'algorythm', a word I've come to absolutely detest, doesn't favor them just like it doesn't favor basically anything else that once made youtube great.

The icing on the cake: rather than embrace even a tertiary aspect of the community, they went for the safe option and the ad revenue. No Phillip Defranco for you, we'll show you Jimmy Kimmel. No TYT, we'll fill trending with clips of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The only real survivor of the era was infowars.

Here's to you, youtube news. Dead and gone, but not forgotten.

On Tildes I don't have any filtered tags yet but I did unsubscribe from ~anime, ~books, ~food, ~games, ~movies, ~sports, and ~tv. Wow I just made that list and realized I cut out most of the fun groups... I'm not sure what that says about me haha. I unsubscribed from all of those because I either don't enjoy those things or if I do, I know what I like and don't have any inclination to discuss them.

Reddit is where I have the most things filtered out. Mostly entire subs from r/all but I have some users blocked too. Like poem_for_your_sprog. Don't get me wrong I like poems in the right context but it throws me off too much when I'm reading an askreddit thread and suddenly find myself reading a poem. A dumb pet peeve.

Facebook it's just random people blocked from showing on the newsfeed.

I have said "not interested" to videos on youtube more times than I would ever care to count. I'm not sure why but they have a really hard time giving me content I want to see. There's usually like 3 videos in the feed I'm down with and the rest is just garbage. They're good about not showing me things I said I'm not interested in but they can't seem to pinpoint what I actually want.