Where did it go so wrong for you guys??

"Clock App" = TikTok.

Took me a minute, not gonna lie.

Hahahaha I remember when TicTok was newish a friend of mine (who never once actually used TikTok) boomerly complained that it was "just underage girls twerking".

He then proceeded to get roasted to hell and back the rest of the night, because Tiktock was famous for its algorithm showing you what you want to see. One boomer lying whine, and then 4 hours of being on blast and forever's worth of random inside jokes on him.

To be fair, when you first install it/set up an account, it doesn't know what you like, so it shows you the most generally popular material. A lot of that popular material is pretty... uncomfortable.

If you think you’re not seeing propaganda, you are not seeing the propaganda.

Okay but YouTube suggested videos are genuinely way worse than they used to be. I can't even fall down rabbit holes anymore. Trying to "curate" the algorithm is like swimming against the current. I can try and try to get YouTube to recommend me live music, but even when I manage to find something, the next video is going to be either a video I already watched yesterday or Rick Beato's daily rant about the top 40. Every time.

I used to be able to spend hours just browsing, drifting from topic to topic. Now it's like they're trying to trap me in a loop of their most profitable videos

Lately, I go on a 30-minute "Not Interested" spree on the recommendations feed when I need to weed things out. I burn everything that I know I'm never going to watch. I have 500+ subscriptions and the ratio of those with new content to trash the algorithm hands me is too damn low. So I have to set it straight some times. After this correcting action, things are noticeably better for about a month.

Another move is to right-click and open unfamiliar stuff in an incognito/privacy window. This helps keep similar material out of your feed.
Been different for me, found a lot of good new channels through the side bar more recently, but sometimes it is just the same channels video in the whole bar.
Back when I was using YouTubes site, about once a month shorts would absolutely hit home and they would just be great for one day. I'd come back the next day and it would just be absolute trash.

But since then I've decided to try to stay the f*** away from the algorithms.
Youtube hooks me with really interesting shorts and within a couple shorts it always derails to the worst brain melting garbage. I really don't get it.

I loved that guy, politician I think, who said "This app is disgusting. It's just full of nearly naked young girls!" and everyone was like my dude, it's an algorithm, that's on you.

I do miss tiktok sometimes, but i had to delete it because I think i broke my algo somehow, it started showing me things i had absolutely no intrest in to the point of it being unusable... I'd love if i could get RSS feeds of tiktok pages so i could still follow my friends tho

i like platforms where i can curate what i see

I mean, you can do that with TT. Don't fight the algo, work with the algo
- What is TT.
- i mean, kind of.
  
  sometimes i engage on videos on purpose just so they show me more later, even if that specific one isnt good?
- What's TT?

Probably at the point they went to the app store, searched TikTok, and clicked "install".

Ah yea, that's why you gotta get island and install it only to the sandbox!

Is that an interrobang‽

holy shit that's ~~boomer~~ zoomer as fuck

YT basically just sends me comedy sketches and bad sci-fi shorts. Lemmy basically sends me memes about popular culture and science... And that's it, those are the feeds that exist, right?

Lemmy doesn't send you anything. It is just the most active posts.

YouTube is creepy
- It is just the most active posts.
  
  If there is a whoosh moment, it's this one. But technically, no, I browse by "new", and that's what I subscribe to.
  
  About You Tube, yep, it can change in a whim just by clicking on the wrong video and watching the few seconds it takes to discover it's some crazy piece of shit. Anyway, there's fun stuff there.

If you give Abbie Richards a watch/read, she'll educate you on how easy it is for TikTok to become a right-wing misinformation playground.

And YouTube. And Facebook. And Reels.

Did what go wrong?

Never used TikTok (which is what I assume "TT" means). Don't have a YouTube account, use it very little anyway.

So what's the question again?

Yea TikTok and where the algorithm went wrong for them to show em what it shows