Purposeful scrolling on YouTube shorts

Doomscrolling became a popular phrase during the covid pandemic and the George Floyd riots. We are all guilty of partaking in it—myself included. Time is wasted going down the rabbit hole of mindless partisan banter, emotion-stoking videos, and people filming themselves having mental breakdowns in the front seat of their cars. It adds up to hours upon hours of wasted mental focus that has absolutely no value; it is a tax on your psyche that yields no dividends and leaves you numb.

Is this all by design? To some degree, yes, but overall it’s become a byproduct of the endless stream of content from social media platforms. Enter the phrase “purpose scrolling.” If you’re going to take a journey down the scroll, why not have it bring you some kind of value or meaning?

In creating the IchingPortal, this has always been one of my intentions: to create a platform that engages, educates, and inspires while employing the same type of device that doomscrolling uses. Instead of creepy algos serving up content to stoke your emotions, why not base that scroll on an archetypal construct tied to a 3,000-year-old system based on 64 hexagrams? It’s a symbolic binary system where you set the algo and interpret the data on your terms.

This aligns well with a recent integration to the IchingPortal: YouTube Shorts. This was my first foray into the Google Development Platform and the YouTube API; it can be overwhelming to know where to start. There is a lot to work with, and figuring out which endpoints to use can be a bit daunting. One of my goals with this platform is to make data entertaining and have it sync with keywords. I toyed around with several endpoints showing data from various channels for news and entertainment, but what worked best was YouTube Shorts.

The thing I like about Shorts is the way it can return content for both individual keywords and phrases. Oftentimes, the best way to describe the meaning of a hexagram or a specific line is through a phrase or idiom. On other integrations, it’s hard to get any data out of phrases; they tend to retrieve more data from keyword queries. YouTube Shorts have an uncanny ability to hit the mark and bring back relevant content that matches the hexagram's meaning.

So, give it a spin yourself and see what it brings your way. I plan to replicate this type of integration with other APIs. Unfortunately, the bigger socials like Meta and X have major restrictions on data, so it won’t be on those platforms. I am looking into integrating Bluesky in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that. I’d like to do the same with any conservative leaning social to  keep things balanced but I can’t find a public api. If you know of any other interesting APIs or feeds that you think would work well on this site, let me know!