So it’s around 9pm, I decided to hit youtube.com on my browser’s address bar, voila! my feed is full of just-what-I-wanted right now - a random dude sharing his opinion about another youtuber who taught herself to speak in several languages, and she is now just 18 years old. What can be better discovery for person like me who struggles to learn german for years? That’s fantastic! “Thank you Youtube algorithm” I say to myself and go ahead to visit some more videos with the hope to get some “snakeoil” solution to my german problem. Now, this is great, what a great time to be alive, you can get some invaluable tips from people around the world. Especially from those, who are really knowledgable in what they are talking about.

This are all good sides of the algorithm, enter the dark side of the algorithm. Now, let’s say now you search youtube for some physical or mental diseases. And next day youtube will bombard you with all so called “experts” who has opinion about everything, and very proficient at selling their “snakeoil” even to those who doesn’t seem to have serious problems. There are this kind of people everywhere and unfortunately Youtube is no exception here. In the beginning all those videos seem just naive educational videos, the more you advance in watching their videos, the more you tend to wear rose-colored glasses until you realize that this person is not a charity, they have to make money, no one just create video to help other people. There are some people who love to help, I don’t exclude them. I am talking about the videos with clickbait titles. What’s bizarre about these videos is that, they all seem to help you until you realize that you just waster your hours to just listen to random people’s opinion about things, which they acquired through their experience in life. This is the evil side of the algorithm, it doesn’t care about the quality, all it cares is to keep your attention in the platform. Because this is who Youtube makes money. The more you watch, the more they show your ads and potentially one day make you buy premium subscription.

No commercial tool is entirely evil, but greed makes corporations to include evil elements in their products. Youtube is great place to learn new things, moderation is the key.