giornata, 6/12/25

welcome to my twisted youtube

Giornata is my Thursday weekly media diary, covering whatever I read, watched, or listened to in the last week. This feature is for paid subscribers. This week, we’re reviewing my YouTube algorithm and The Phoenician Scheme.

YouTube is the most opaque source of content for me. Even as I developed my romance novel habit on BookTok, I couldn’t believe that these people were coming over from something called “BookTube” that had apparently been discoursing and fretting for a decade. YouTube, for me, from the moment that it expanded beyond meme videos that I watched in someone’s computer room at their house, existed for two purpose: to watch people do their makeup and to watch Madonna music videos. For the better part of two decades, I couldn’t imagine what people were doing with the medium beyond that.

Now I like watching YouTube content because I find it more scroll resistant than social media forward feeds. Since I live with my sister and we share a TV that has both of accounts linked, I occasionally get glimpses into what her algorithm pushes and I find it fascinating. She’s six years younger and has a taste for quotidian vlogs that I’ve never really understood. When I asked her about her taste she said she prefers vlogs of “people who have jobs” and she loses interest when these people parlay their success into being full-time influencers.

She said of my algorithm “the thing that is keeping you from getting pipelined is all the Bob Mortimer videos.”

Napoleonic War explainer videos