YouTube has become such a garbage fire it is time to dump it for good

This changes everything | To make the internet a better place we could start by switching off the world’s biggest video sharing site amid claims its algorithms magnify fringe views, says Annalee Newitz

By Annalee Newitz

A FEW years ago, the biggest complaint about YouTube was that if you left it running, you would eventually find yourself watching Psy’s Gangnam Style music video for the 40,000th time. How I long for the days when all we had to worry about was too much bouncy K-pop. Now, YouTube’s algorithm leads us in the opposite direction, autoplaying ever more marginal videos rather than more popular ones. As a result, according to a two-year investigation by the New York Times YouTube has been one of the major forces pulling fringe politics and conspiracy theories into …