I am one of those people that listen to music via Youtube. Some people get it, some don’t, there’s nothing I can do about it.
Anyways, Youtube has an ever-evolving algorithm to recommend stuff it thinks you might be interested in. It’s used to push new content on users so they increase their watch time. The more they watch, more ads are shown, more money is made by Youtube,
The Music algorythms are a little different. In my experience they are much more conservative and tend to show stuff you already like, in other words, videos you’ve seen before. Also, if you watch anything with your account logged in the algorithms will consider it important, specially if it is something new. This creates a curious dynamic: algorithm tweaking.
Algorithm Tweaking
Algorithm tweaking is the process of intentionally influencing your algorithmic recommendations by strategically selecting the content you interact with.
Sounds fancy but in this particular case, Youtube’s “My Mix” recommendations, it is something we all do. We avoid clicking on songs we don’t want to hear again either because it was from a cringier moment in our lives, or some other unpleasant motives. Somehow we feel the need to listen to that song, that shameful song. By some strange reason we crave for some bad tunes. So we listen on a private window so to not taint our pristine song recommendations.
So… about this blog
We have a wide range of interests and our tastes change overtime. Sometimes my “My Mix” playlist has cute songs on ukulele next in queue with Heavy metal songs about death and war next to some cover of a videogame theme next to an acoustic rendition of a popular song. I find these juxtapositions quite funny without context, but they make total sense to me.
This blog is a record of this ever-changing playlist and should reflect, at some degree, changes in my personal life.
I hope you enjoy it.
Caio Amaral
Creative Programmer
P.S.: This blog used to be published on tumblr until February 20th, 2026. The old blog is still up for archival reasons.
