It's not strange. It's about power and control. Google and the other big names could care less about user satisfaction: their customers are the ad buyers.
It's too bad because even 10 years ago Google and the internet in general were magical. You could find information on any topic, make connections and change your life. Now it is mostly santized dumbed down crap and the discovery of anything special is hidden under mountains of SEO spam, now even AI generated SEO spam that is transparently crap for any moderately intelligent user.
For a specific example I like to watch wildlife videos and specifically ones that give insight to how animal think and process the world. This comparative psychology can help us better understand ourselves.
If you want to watch Macaque monkeys for example google/youtube feeds you almost exclusively SEO videos from a handful of locations in Cambodia. There are plenty of other videos out there but they are hidden by the mass produced videos out of Cambodia.
If I find an interesting video and my view history is off the same video is often undiscoverable again even with the exact same search terms.
Search terms are disregarded or substituted willy nilly by Google AI who thinks it knows better what I want than myself.
But the most egregious thing for me as a viewer of nature videos is the AI generated content. It is obviously CGI and often ridiculous or physically impossible. For example let's say I want to see how a monkey interacts with a predatory python, I am allowed to watch that right??? Or are all the Serengeti lion hunting gazel videos to be banned in 2025? Lol. So I search "python attacks monkey" hoping to see a video in the natural setting. Instead I am greeted with maybe a handful of badly shot videos probably staged by humans and hundreds of CGI cartoons that are obviously not real. In one the monkey had a snake mouth! Lol. Who goes searching for real nature videos to see badly faked stuff?
Because of how I can not find anything on google or Youtube anymore without picking through a mountain of crap I use them less now. This is for almost any kind of topic not just nature videos.
Is that a win for advertisers? Less use? I don't think so.
In about 20 years of using the product the number of times a google or Youtube search has led to me actually purchasing a product or service DUE to an ad I saw, is I believe precisely zero.
Recently I have been seeing Temu (zero interest), disability fraud (how is this allowed), senior, and facebook ads. I am a non disabled, 30 something man. I saw an ad for burial insurance today.
Why is facebook paying to advertise "facebook" on youtube in 2025? Is this some ritual sacrifice to the god Mammon or something? Surely in 2025 everyone who would be interested in Facebook has heard of it. I have the Facebook app installed. Why the hell do facebook investors stand facebook paying google to advertise facebook non-selectively on youtube. It's the stupidest thing I ever saw.
I have not watched any political content in years. And yet when I search for a wild life video I get mountains of videos about Trump and a handful of mass produced low quality wildlife content interspersed.
Today I was treated to an irrelevant ad about "jowl reduction."
I know many of you use ad blockers but this is how horrendous it is without them. You can't find what you want, even what you just saw, and you are treated to a deluge of irrelevant, obnoxious content and ads.
Clearly it is about social control, turning our minds to mush to better serve us even more terrible ad content.
Similar result, maybe not quite so illustrative, perhaps more colorful, just involving images not videos. Ended up at a similar conclusion.
Tried to search user interface design for an ongoing project, and found that Google now simply ignores filtering attempts... Try to find ideas about multi-color designs, and all there is are endless image spam sites and Letterman style Top 10 lists. Try to filter those out, and Google just ignores many attempts.
There's so many, that even those that actually do get successfully filtered out, only reveal the next layer of slime to dig through. Maybe the people that didn't pay enough for placement?
Huge majority, far and away, where the "Alamy", "Shutterstock", "_____Stock", ect... photos websites. There's so many it's not really practical to notch filter. Anything involving images. Spend all day just trying to notch filter through "_____Stock" results to get to something real.
The worst though, was that even among sites that wrote something, there was almost nothing that was actually "user interfaces" or anything related to design, other than simplistic sites like "top 10 colors for your next design" that are easy to churn out.
Try to search on a different subject and filter for only recent results from 2024, get results from 2015, 2016. Difficult to tell if the subject had simply collapsed in the intervening 10 years (seemed unlikely) or if Google was completely ignoring the filters applied. The results did not substantially change. It's like existing in an echo chamber where you're shown what you're supposed to view. It all feels very 1984 lately.
Basically ended up at the same conclusion: their customers are the ad buyers. They don't get enough money from "normal" people to care.
One of the fun things about surveillance capitalism is that you can't correct errors in any of the millions of assumptions being made about you based on any number of tiny details collected about your life.
Sounds like somebody somewhere thinks that you're old, or that you know an old person. Maybe you live in an area with lots of old people. Maybe you've got aging parents. Maybe an old person had your IP before you did. Maybe just the fact that you're still using facebook is good enough to identify someone as being old the majority of the time.
That's every streaming service right now. Netflix hides all kinds of things they have on offer from you because they've already decided what they want you to watch and they'll push it at you over and over again while keeping other content hidden unless you explicitly search for it.
We have curated TV now, but just like before the people doing the curation aren't doing it based on what's good for you, the viewer. It's based on what will benefit their bottom line.
The things we try to resort to in order to figure out what to spend our time watching like review sites and social media are already gamed and astroturfed to death. Each new one that comes out gets less useful as time goes on because of it.
Good luck finding the real humans online among the countless AI generated curators PR firms churn out.
The joke used to be, "there's no girls on the internet."
Now its, "there's no humans on the internet."
I struggle to find a comparison that adequately describes the head snap at how fast some of these image / video generators were deployed.
The one that really got me was the immediate use of fake image gen by the British Royal Family. [1] (Check the kid's hand in the lower left they didn't even mark, broken fingers) Didn't even try to respond with anything real. Immediate response, photo image gen.
It's too bad because even 10 years ago Google and the internet in general were magical. You could find information on any topic, make connections and change your life. Now it is mostly santized dumbed down crap and the discovery of anything special is hidden under mountains of SEO spam, now even AI generated SEO spam that is transparently crap for any moderately intelligent user.
For a specific example I like to watch wildlife videos and specifically ones that give insight to how animal think and process the world. This comparative psychology can help us better understand ourselves.
If you want to watch Macaque monkeys for example google/youtube feeds you almost exclusively SEO videos from a handful of locations in Cambodia. There are plenty of other videos out there but they are hidden by the mass produced videos out of Cambodia.
If I find an interesting video and my view history is off the same video is often undiscoverable again even with the exact same search terms.
Search terms are disregarded or substituted willy nilly by Google AI who thinks it knows better what I want than myself.
But the most egregious thing for me as a viewer of nature videos is the AI generated content. It is obviously CGI and often ridiculous or physically impossible. For example let's say I want to see how a monkey interacts with a predatory python, I am allowed to watch that right??? Or are all the Serengeti lion hunting gazel videos to be banned in 2025? Lol. So I search "python attacks monkey" hoping to see a video in the natural setting. Instead I am greeted with maybe a handful of badly shot videos probably staged by humans and hundreds of CGI cartoons that are obviously not real. In one the monkey had a snake mouth! Lol. Who goes searching for real nature videos to see badly faked stuff?
Because of how I can not find anything on google or Youtube anymore without picking through a mountain of crap I use them less now. This is for almost any kind of topic not just nature videos.
Is that a win for advertisers? Less use? I don't think so.
In about 20 years of using the product the number of times a google or Youtube search has led to me actually purchasing a product or service DUE to an ad I saw, is I believe precisely zero.
Recently I have been seeing Temu (zero interest), disability fraud (how is this allowed), senior, and facebook ads. I am a non disabled, 30 something man. I saw an ad for burial insurance today.
Why is facebook paying to advertise "facebook" on youtube in 2025? Is this some ritual sacrifice to the god Mammon or something? Surely in 2025 everyone who would be interested in Facebook has heard of it. I have the Facebook app installed. Why the hell do facebook investors stand facebook paying google to advertise facebook non-selectively on youtube. It's the stupidest thing I ever saw.
I have not watched any political content in years. And yet when I search for a wild life video I get mountains of videos about Trump and a handful of mass produced low quality wildlife content interspersed.
Today I was treated to an irrelevant ad about "jowl reduction."
I know many of you use ad blockers but this is how horrendous it is without them. You can't find what you want, even what you just saw, and you are treated to a deluge of irrelevant, obnoxious content and ads.
Clearly it is about social control, turning our minds to mush to better serve us even more terrible ad content.