Thread by @DanFriedman81

I would like to share my experience being radicalized by the YouTube algorithm which sends you down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme content.

At the start of the pandemic, I was cooking a lot at home, and I started watching YouTube food videos. I became a fan of a YouTuber whose channel is called “Binging With Babish.” Babish, whose real name is Andrew Rea is a personable video editor and amateur chef whose food channel in which he attempts to construct food items from movies and TV shows became very popular.

However, I ultimately was interested in more technical cooking, and I began watching a YouTube chef named Joshua Weissman, who was cooking in a fine dining restaurant pre pandemic and started a YouTube channel that has become extremely popular. Many of his recipes are technical and challenging, but I did make his famous birria tacos, and they were very, very good.

But after watching a lot of Babish and Weissman, YouTube began feeding me stranger videos. From there I started watching videos from GugaFoods, an ebullient Brazilian who performs meat-based “experiments” often involving $250 Japanese wagyu steaks.

This leads to a rabbit hole of strange content, like competitive eater Matt Stonie, who posts videos of himself wolfing 7000 calories at a time of strange things, like 10,000 Cheez-its, and Ordinary Sausage, an extremely Chicago man who makes sausage from things that should not be sausage.

But when the algorithm has taken you from normal to weird, it is not yet satisfied. It has to push you to the point of complete degeneracy. So that is when it starts offering you Masaru the Okinawan spearfisherman.

This dude goes into the ocean and comes out with things that man wasn’t meant to eat, and he eats it anyway. He makes sashimi out of fish that are crawling with parasites. He put a giant starfish in a pressure cooker and then cut it open with a huge knife and tried to eat the stuff inside it. He will disappear for a while and come back with a video about how he almost died.

So everything they say about YouTube is true. You start out watching a personable influencer who is making the sandwich from Scooby-Doo and you end up watching a subtitled video of a guy in a kitchen that looks like a medical examiner’s office cutting open a ten-foot shark.

In case you think I am making this up, please enjoy: “Eating a giant hermit crab causes an abnormality in my body.” It is spellbinding.