Pay no attention.

Just got on Youtube now* and it gave me one of those quick quizzes asking me why I don't like Youtube comments.  I can't decide whether or not that was creepy.  Did they know I have a plugin installed to block all Youtube comments and target me on that basis, or do they just assume everybody hates Youtube comments?  It's the lack of transparency that increasingly bothers me.  It makes it hard to assume these companies are acting in good faith.

This is compounded by the surveys themselves, which all tend to seem like a setup for a particularly nightmarish episode of the Twilight Zone (I'm old and have yet to watch Black Mirror).  At some point the data hungry companies realized that they couldn't get people to answer "ten minute surveys" and just started asking us random questions.  Which I do answer, most of the time, because we are all of us driven by the demon convenience.

And what demons drive them, these companies?  I'm not a well-placed data analyst, but I'll tell you what I do see, across the board - a hunger for data.  More and more data, quantity without regard for quality.  Our machines have started to pick up our disorders - first venereal disease, now insatiable hunger.

Google asked me why I hate Youtube comments, and there was a list of answers, and I could pick one.  Maybe it was better-designed than the Facebook survey which gave its viewers one choice as to what to do about child pornography and didn't give "report to appropriate law enforcement authorities" as an option, but I wouldn't know, would I?  No transparency.  I give an answer not knowing what it means, what it implies, what will come out of it.  Does my choosing the problem as being "hate speech" over "ignorance" mean that the Youtube comments section will instead become a wasteland of polite lies?

I guess it doesn't matter that much.  I can't imagine anything Youtube could do at this point to induce me to unblock the comments.  It's this overall sense I get - a sense of fumbling incompetents trying to lead, trying above all to convince us they know what they're doing.  Tech's great Emerald curtain.

* I do still use Youtube for now - I'm trying to mediate my online presence, not go full-bore luddite.  In this case the "mediation" includes running Tampermonkey scripts to block Youtube comments and to, additionally, block Youtube's recommendation engine.  This last step might seem draconian but before I turned off my Facebook yesterday I was browing through my old photos, and ran across one where I was watching a classical music video, and the sidebar had recommendations for other music videos but at the top - and this was not sponsored, this was ranked - was a recommendation for a video by "ResistNWOrder" with 3,599 views.  Again, the lack of transparency here becomes problematic - I don't know how their recommendation engine works, but it's clear that somebody did, and they were using that knowledge to feed hate speech to random Youtube viewers.