cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28241019
working on peertube recommendation algorithm has made me realize that we should be collecting our own data.
my program that monitors peertube watching habit and stores it locally and should track YouTube watching habit just so that data can be used in a recommendation algorithm. it would be a good idea for fediverse if there were programs that monitors and stores the data locally for the fediverse and corporate counterpart.
the reason why I would track youtube data was to get the titles of the video
As long as I can disable it or opt out of it, I don’t mind. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t want videos recommended to me.
With Youtube, it’s not a big deal because I never log in there, I browse in private mode and set firefox to delete cookies. So when I go to Youtube, I just get a blank page with no recommendations.
But with Peertube, I need to login to get full functionality (federated search, etc). So I would need an option to turn off video recommendations or whatever.
As a computer guy, I can appreciate that working with data is cool - there’s a lot of neat stuff you can determine from it. As a user, it creeps me out. If I went my favorite restaurant, and the waitress recommended something based on the last 5 times I ate there, I would stop going to that restaurant.