Algorithm’s Laughter Day

YouTube algorithm really got me, no this isn’t about the microphone driven suggestion thing, will talk about it sometime later. 

So here is what happened: I was surfing through the home page and found the title "curb your feminism" a one-minute video. I enjoyed watching it, thrashing people with intellectuality has always been my cup of tea or at least I enjoyed that weird feeling. 

Once, I am done watching it, my suggestion list followed by tens of videos captioned with “curb your attitude,” “curb your belief.” Typical machine learning thing, I’m totally fine with it.

I went through each one of them till my screen time ended for the day, I am a person who sets a screen time for a day, so yeah, another weird thing to do in the age of screens. I laughed a lot and switched to twitter and found #worldlaughterday in the trending tab.

Wait what? So, I laughed today because I was supposed to laugh on a laughter day. Now this is really a serious business, eliciting a feeling by experience or by a person is considerable but by algorithm, is unsettling though.

Man, you were laughing you should be thankful for that, why are you even complaining about it, yes fine, I get it, the whole gratitude thing but imagine

if a machine could make you laugh, what else it could be capable of!

What if? It continuously pushed me through those sad love songs and made me feeble and think of my unrequited love, the last thing I wanted to talk about. 

Of course, the algorithm is very good at, it wants a user to spend more time on the platform, thus it keeps on pushing the same engaging content, better off it could predict too, but all of a sudden I feel like my privacy wall has been blurred out.

Am I just extrapolating a dystopian scenario, or this is the real shit that we will never be able to figure out about this black box of algorithms? Or do they even program a parameter like for a given user you have to push a content in the best interests of productivity and empathy. Ps: 

Drafting this little article, I took help of an online tool, which makes it more readable, no shit, another algorithm here.


image credit: <a href='https://pngtree.com/so/spy-clipart'>spy clipart png from pngtree.com</a>

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