What's new and disturbing is 1) the degree of algorithmic personalization, and 2) that personalization goes to the highest bidder. Put together, we've built a marketplace for population-scale behavioral nudges, and the people who play that game have war-chests, not human-sized wallets.
The Facebook/Myanmar genocide is the Godwin's Law reference of the social media debate, but you don't need to look any further than the politicization of what should be neutral medical facts being fueled by recommendation-hole conspiracy theories to see the danger of all this.
I don't believe people are mindless spiritless bots, but I do believe our industry thrives on engineering ways to hack people's attention circuits. And what's terrifying is we've put a paperclip maximizing machine at the helm of all this.
In which case (if you truly believe that), we are all fucked anyway. Then who cares? Is youtube really your biggest problem?
> is maximizing for your mind's engagement.
So has media been doing for a long time, also all writers and poets, etc. Mind's engagement is not the only meaning of life, and most people act out this deep knowledge. I don't see a problem.