Algorithms and the attention economy

Last week FiveThirtyEight published Where The Algorithms Can't Find You, an article about how the modern internet's cookies and web analytics funnel everyone toward the same content with "algorithms that think you only want to watch beauty tutorials, Avengers outtakes or product unboxings."

Presumably in response to this state of affairs, a few people have started websites that specifically serve up videos that other people aren't watching. Here's one of the author's favorites from Default Filename TV, a website that finds and plays random YouTube videos with names like DSC 3307:

The algorithms will never recommend a video like this because it doesn't look like anything people in general or the current viewer in particular already watch, and I think that's a problem.