how to find interesting stuff on the internet.

Published: tech

Lately, I've fallen into some bad habits. "Lately" here being "in the past long while". The modern internet has trained me to wait for things to come to me rather than seek them out. It feels a bit of a lost art of mine. It used to be that you had to take some action on your own to find the next thing that would interest you. Now, the almighly and all-knowing algorithm does it for you. It serves up barely-interesting content on an endless feed for you to consume, forever. Never anything too much, or too out there, but just enough to keep you around, clicking, and distracted. This is the meaning and purpose of "algorithm" as we use it within this content-churn context.

My brother helped me jump out of this rut some. I've tried to pick up a habit I'm calling "webdigging", which is basically, going beneath the surface algo-presented level of the web to find the weird mass squirming just beneath. For this guide, I'm going to mostly focus on my experiences with youtube, but I feel like this is probably generally applicable. A lot of it is probably obvious to someone who knows how to seek out interesting things on their own, but this is mostly for myself and for anyone out there that might need a push into the deep end of things, it's a lot easier than you might think.

If you happen to give this a shot and find something tremendously interesting or just have a good time I'd love to hear about it. email

methodology of search

Here are a few of my tools and a simple explaination of how and why to use them. I won't go into too much detail as to what you'll find with a given tool, cause half the fun is doing it yourself, but I recommend just being ready and willing to go whereever your whims take you. There are methods of doing this for the general internet as well. Some of which I've mentioned at least offhandedly here.

<term> before:<year>

An extremely powerful suffix/tag that works on more search engines than you may expect. Youtube honors it about two thirds of the time, though it will sometimes intersperse random new videos in your search. I generally find that "2010" represents a decent cutoff, but you can always nudge it around. An example search would like like "cool 3d before:2010".

Every single comment on a video links to a users channel, as users on youtube are never simply accounts, anyone may upload any video they wish and then go around doing things just like any other user. You will find a suprising number of commentors (maybe around 1 in 8 or so) will have uploaded videos. I reccomend going to popular videos with many comments and just clicking on people. There are many methods to choosing who.

This sounds extremely obvious (perhaps most of this list does, but then again that is the point), but many channels upload hundreds of videos that do not strike the algorithm, even in a post-watch way. There are many channels that simply archive old footage, and randomly one old commercial will fit the "house style" of content, and hit the algo. I've found that its worth going through many channels manually and seeing whats going on, many will have something more going on than what their viral hit might suggest.

To pair with the above, many many channels, especially old ones or archival channels, will have thousands of videos and it will be nearly impossible to get through them in a reasonable fashion. To that end, I reccomend using a "shuffle" or randomizer extension or of some sort to dig deeper into them and grab a few random videos from the archives to look at. It feels a lot more manageable. Use at your own discretion, but this is the extension I use.

petittube and astronaut are both wonderful. You can use them to just zone out a little and let the world pass you by on their own, or you can dig deeper. I have found some interesting things by simple following up on a video that seemed like it might have something more going on. You can click on them just like any other and check out the channel they came from. Even as is, these both feel like a little window into someone's life out there in this big old world.

what even is "interesting"? is it something a machine can calculate?

This question has bothered me for a while whilst doing this. I think you can point to it as the core of what is so lacking about these homepage algorith-servers. I'd like to dedicate more time to this in another article. My general impression is that it is very difficult to understand what makes something interesting to yourself, and even more to figure out how to quantify that interest beyond a very minimal level.

eliminate focus nibblers

The forms and mediums of hthete modern internet condition us to be on guard and expect less from whatever it is we are experiencing. When we are in a movie theater instead of watching our monitor, or reading a book instead of a blog post, we let our guard down and take the work seriously. We give it our attention. When on youtube, we treat the work at arms length, the UI itself negates its content. If we watched the same video in fullscreen, borderless, in another application, it might feel more like TV. Or, if we had to treat it without kid gloves, we might sense the gap in execution even more sharply. We sense that we have to lower the bar for just about everything we experience today, and that lowering of expectations is painful when we know firsthand how much better things could be.

In a more general sense, the current standards of UI/UX design are not built to allow you to focus on anything anymore. They are built such that, no matter what it is you are doing, part of you is meant to be thinking about the thing you are doing NEXT. Why focus on your current video when you could be chatting with friends at the same time? Or better yet, looking for the next five videos to "watch" while you do the same thing in an endless loop. Why give you a split-second to collect your thoughts at the end of the video? No! You are immeadiately served up with an array of enticing NEW and SHINY videos to watch next. Everything is about keeping you in the frayed, frazzled state so you keep going and going. All in the name of watching ads (though all this design is still there even if you have an adblocker). Of course, this concept leaks even into the videos (content) itself, with everyone imploring you to watch other videos, and to go other places and interact in other ways, and generally allowing what can only be seen as the desperation to ride the algorithm to seep into their videos. They are generally making earnest content (with a few notable exceptions), but this drive for success lingers around them like a miasma.

It is all part of the game, and I cannot blame anyone for playing it, but its not in service of anything but the cancerous growth of itself. It's all for the algo, the art is in service of the algorithm. There is no message other than "algorithm". Mr. Beast is the apex of this, and on some level I think he's the creature that the algorithm was always meant to create, and in that sense he is the only true artist sitting atop the algo-heap of youtube, as he has seen to the core of the whole thing and exposed it. This is not to say that there are not real artists on youtube, but anyone who has been tempted to curate themselves into "growing their channel" via this sort of trimming and catering and self-search-engine-optimization has numbed themselves in service of the giant machine heart at the center of it all, and no one has done that better than Mr Beast, since he has never had any vision or impulse towards anything but growth. His content is perfectly pure algorithm in that sense.

So all that aside, how do you begin to focus? How is it that you can regain the ability to enjoy something in the same way as you would have been able to in even the comfort of your own home on your physical media format of choice? Well, it is pretty simple all in all. You just need to take initiative and start

I set up my youtube to be a lot more minimalist, I did it all the easy way, right click > block element. A feature readily available within ublock origin and one I highly reccomend taking full advantage of. Many sites are only a simple blocklist away from becoming minimalist enough for you to focus on what you actually care about within them. Advertising is bad in itself, but the shadowy patterns it bred websites into are far more nefarious, and require a keen eye to yank out.

This is what is probably an incomplete, un-up-to-date list of things that I find gnaw at my focus when trying to watch something, but it at least serves as a good starting point and good example. To use it, simply go to your blocklist in ublock origin (or other adblocker) and paste it in.

www.youtube.com###sections > .ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##ytd-item-section-renderer.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-entry-renderer.ytd-mini-guide-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2)
www.youtube.com###content > .yt-related-chip-cloud-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##:matches-path(/^\/$/)#chip-container
www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope > .ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##:matches-path(/^\/$/)#primary > .ytd-two-column-browse-results-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com##:matches-path(/^\/$/)#content > .ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com###clarify-box > .ytd-watch-flexy.style-scope
www.youtube.com##.ytp-videowall-still-info-content
www.youtube.com##.ytp-videowall-still-image
www.youtube.com##.ytd-download-button-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com###top-level-buttons-computed > yt-button-view-model.ytd-menu-renderer > .ytd-menu-renderer.style-scope.yt-spec-button-view-model
www.youtube.com##.ytp-endscreen-content
www.youtube.com###flexible-item-buttons > yt-button-view-model.ytd-menu-renderer > .ytd-menu-renderer.style-scope.yt-spec-button-view-model > .yt-spec-button-shape-next--enable-backdrop-filter-experiment.yt-spec-button-shape-next--icon-leading.yt-spec-button-shape-next--size-m.yt-spec-button-shape-next--mono.yt-spec-button-shape-next--tonal.yt-spec-button-shape-next > yt-touch-feedback-shape > .yt-spec-touch-feedback-shape--touch-response.yt-spec-touch-feedback-shape > .yt-spec-touch-feedback-shape__fill
www.youtube.com##.iv-click-target.branding-img
www.youtube.com###flexible-item-buttons > yt-button-view-model.ytd-menu-renderer:nth-of-type(1) > .ytd-menu-renderer.style-scope.yt-spec-button-view-model > .yt-spec-button-shape-next--enable-backdrop-filter-experiment.yt-spec-button-shape-next--icon-leading.yt-spec-button-shape-next--size-m.yt-spec-button-shape-next--mono.yt-spec-button-shape-next--tonal.yt-spec-button-shape-next > yt-touch-feedback-shape > .yt-spec-touch-feedback-shape--touch-response.yt-spec-touch-feedback-shape > .yt-spec-touch-feedback-shape__stroke
www.youtube.com###flexible-item-buttons > yt-button-view-model.ytd-menu-renderer:nth-of-type(1) > .ytd-menu-renderer.style-scope.yt-spec-button-view-model > .yt-spec-button-shape-next--enable-backdrop-filter-experiment.yt-spec-button-shape-next--icon-leading.yt-spec-button-shape-next--size-m.yt-spec-button-shape-next--mono.yt-spec-button-shape-next--tonal.yt-spec-button-shape-next

Have fun out there.