Ok what the actual fuck is happening here
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
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Instead YouTube gives me literally nothing but AI spam. :/
I scrolled down a bit more and got this: https://i.postimg.cc/fJcPhG45/Screenshot-20251118-150802.png
Scrolled down some more and this: https://i.postimg.cc/v1khnhRp/Screenshot-20251118-151325.png
I kept scrolling until I ran out of relevant results. Not a single video was legit. I don't think I've ever seen so much AI slop in one search term and by the gods there is a lot of crap on YouTube.
Anyone have a good comparison video? I'm just wanting a decent comparison of Actual, Firefly III and possibly HomeBank. Feel free to also give me your 2 cents on whatever you use :)
YouTube has integrated a boatload of AI "tools", including suggested video ideas/titles/thumbnails based on market and audience trends.
My guess as to what happened here is that multiple channels got and followed the same AI-generated suggestions. I'm not familiar with these names so I don't know whether they are legitimate creators or just content farms/AI imitators.
Oh my god seriously? That’s actually hilarious that it’s accidentally causing people to make the same video thumbnails.
Judging by the length of those videos I'd guess they're AI imitators/content farms
About what?
creepy AI voice: Hello. In this video we will. Examine the differences between two popular budget ing sofware.
SOI SOI SOISOISOISOISOI
I'm a lazy bastard and I don't self host for a lot of reasons. I use Actual because it's close to the old YNAB and has a desktop version (AppImage, I know it sucks, I don't care).
It has a list of transactions, and a budget with envelopes. That's all I need and it's fine.
As for the others:
- Firefly wants me to use Docker, I don't have time for that and I don't have a server
- Homebank has a weird dev process on launchpad, no releases, and wants me to disable uBlock Origin, fuck it
And the slop is the reason I don't use YouTube anymore. People seem to enjoy that dead internet because it looks like TV.
Appimage is perfectly fine for smaller projects that don't have the resources to support different packaging formats.
Holy hell, your recommendation algorithm is all sorts of fucked. I tried to replicate it but just searching for "FOSS budgeting software comparison" it looks like there's a few legit ones in the mix, but plenty of AI, too.
I'm not going to watch them to check though, since hitting one AI one will probably make them all AI, lol.
This is the first time I've had this much slop come up in one video. The search I used was "Actual budget vs Firefly III": https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=actual+budget+vs+firefly+iii. I mostly watch Linux tech related videos, some gaming stuff, DIY, bit of comedy here and there, philosophy and some socio-anarchist stuff (ya know, like protecting your privacy lol). No idea why I would get so much slop from one search other than the enshittification of YouTube is accelerating :/
I've tried it on PipePipe, and the results are the same. I don't think you'll find it, because there are no comparison videos without AI slop.
I don't think I will either. I gave up and did a general internet search to read people's opinions instead.
Posts like this make me glad that I have never liked watching videos to learn about different software, and that I have a tendency to just read up on the features/information the dev has made available and then just try whichever platforms look the most interesting.
This has caused me to immediately drop the shinier looking option because the set up was too much of a pain in the ass to do though.
AI has gotten so bad that I've resorted to reading the fucking manual. I can't even follow tutorials anymore.
Tried to follow a rust programming tutorial earlier. Couldn't for the life of me figure out why my code wasn't working. Noticed the AI generated avatar for the article and immediately understood. Got so pissed I started reading the docs. Programmed my first rust rest api in the following hour.
I really really want to get off YNAB and Actual is the closest but I just need almost the same features and an open source mobile app and we’re golden
I use Actual and it's very barebones, no BS, does one thing and does it well. Great if that's what you're looking for.
Oh crap, I have uploader-defined thumbnails turned off which would actually make me more susceptible to falling for this AI slop. A guy just can't enjoy quality videos anymore without putting in the effort to filter out the trash.
Gnucash
That's just a desktop app. Not really in the same category.
Firefly III has mobile apps