I know the prevailing sentiment for a long time in the privacy community has been "DAE Youtube bad?" though I have always thought that it is kinda overblown. Besides, I am using Firefox which is supposed to isolate tabs so they can't speak to each other, so I felt a small amount safer using Youtube.

You can take my post with a grain of salt since all I have are anecdotes, but can anyone else confirm encountering creepiness similar to my experiences:

-Typing anything in another window that is not my browser, sometimes these words seem like they get picked up by the Youtube suggestion algo and then boom, I get suggested videos based off of those keywords. Recent example, I was copypasting the words "trans" and "talking" over and over for some nerd spreadsheet I am making (read: not transgender purposes) and what do you know, transgender videos about "How to change your voice" start popping up in my feed. Please know I have zero interest in transgender politics/culture/anything, it is not something I have ever searched for or engaged in online. Possible that Youtube is reading my clipboard? Reading my keystrokes?

-Listening to an album via VLC, while Youtube is open in my browser. Suddenly, more tracks from that album start showing up in my suggested feed. Possible Youtube is reading the titles of other apps current open on my machine? (VLC changes its active title to the name of whatever file is currently open)

-Have a Discord channel open in another tab, people there start posting things I am uninterested in and don't click on, but lo and behold, videos related to those things start appearing my feed. Tbh, I am the most jaded about Discord's privacy security because there is probably a direct communications pipeline between the Discord and Youtube where they link accounts to each other, even creating shadow accounts similar to how Facebook does. So while not surprising... still at least a little bit creepy, yes?

edit: let me add a small bit of context. I use Youtube all the time as my personal version of Spotify. Adblock+Youtube still works for me and is very nice. So all of my Youtube video suggestions are always music related. If anything weird shows up in that feed (you know, not music-related stuff) it sticks out to me immediately.

edit2: thanks for the replies, even if you are disagreeing with me. I promise you I am not the person downvoting everyone lol.

Second Haruhi novel release in the last 13 years. We truly are spoiled.

Also, there is a concert event that will reunite the original voice cast, which is cool if you live in Japan, I guess.

Contains spoilers for the full Haruhi series, season, season 2 and the movie. Though I guess if you are browsing a Haruhi community in the year 2023, you have seen it all already.

Spoilers begin below:

Haruhi has godlike powers and manifests her wishes into reality

Or does she?

I forget which LN it was in. Tanigawa briefly teased the concept that Haruhi wasn't the one with godlike powers, but it was actually Kyon. It wasn't a big tease. It was mentioned in an offhanded way in part of a paragraph and then never brought up again. However, it was a thought I had had before reading that, and seeing that Tanigawa even thought of it too (although maybe he only considered it as a throwaway line) sort of makes me feel like there is some substance there.

My understanding of this theory is that Kyon's desires manifest everything in the world, though because he is in such heavy denial that aliens, espers and time travelers exist, he can only envisage this sort of thing happening if someone else is manifesting it, that someone else of course being Ms Suzumiya.

As a semi-related side note: have any of you read the Michael Crichton novel The Sphere? Or seen the late 90s movie based on it? The idea of people wielding Haruhi-esque godlike powers and manifesting subconscious desires into reality is a major part of the plot in that story. Crichton (at least in the book version) also does a good job of writing about the psychology of how and why such a thing could happen. Actually, the first time I watched Haruhi and Koizumi explained her godlike powers, my thoughts immediately went to this book first.