I'm going to go against the grain here and say my YouTube algorithm is great. Signing out of YouTube and viewing the default home page is a reminder of the horrors that lie beyond, but my little corner of it is a bit too good.
There was a period of time semi-recently when the algorithm was better than my heuristics, too. I had associated too-good thumbnails with overproduced shallow clickbait videos churned out by content mills and "grindset" individuals. But at some point basically everybody started optimizing their titles and thumbnails and some of the stuff the algorithm was suggesting was actually good even though it looked "too flashy."
Yup, I'm the same. I've totally given up on navigating anything except my home page, I'm actually astonished at how good it is.
The newest videos from my favorite channels are always listed first, and then it's a smattering of older popular ones from the topics and channels I watch the most, and a handful of things "adjacent" to those that are sometimes not for me but sometimes become my new favorite rabbit hole, so I'm very thankful they're there. (For me it's a lot of educational content like architecture tours and urban engineering and how-it's-made, plus content from certain comedians and sketch comedy groups.)
I know there's supposed to be a bunch of clickbait garbage on YouTube but I just wouldn't know, because I literally never see it.
(Plus there are new tabs at the top that actually list the topics it's learned I like, so if I want to see 20 architecture videos instead of just 2, it's a single tap to filter. It's remarkably clever.)
I have had the YT algorithm "hunt me" for a weeks, keep recommending some what looks like a dumb-ass video, only when I finally cave in and watch it, I get it, I needed to see it. The thumbnail and the title didn't did it the opposite of justice. I even tried using the yt api to see if I could scrape the recommendations but they aren't in there. You would have to scrape the browser while logged in.
Russ Roberts (host of Econtalk podcast) says: take the teacher, not the class, meaning (at least in economics) you'll get more value from a great teacher of a boring topic than from a poor teacher of an exciting topic.
I feel that describes my YouTube preferences: I'd prefer to see amazingly intelligent/engaging content on any topic than just average content on topics I'm ostensibly very interested in.
My take away is that everyone is probably interested in everything, only we let the messenger kill the message. By let, we seem to have a messed up pathology where we think they are the same, so much so that it is a huge cognitive flaw, easily used for sabotage.
Ah, that explains why teachers dislike students who are disinterested. Its not merely a disregard for the subject at hand, it tells them they're not the great teacher they'd like to believe they are. The best teachers I had, also had great humor. Great humor helps a lot.
I can vouch for that idea. I dreaded taking statistics in college, because I'm just not a mathy person. But the teacher was fantastic. I actually enjoyed the class - which was 100% due to his passion for the subject, and deep interest in teaching it to the next generation.
I still remember, all these years later, how my CC statistics teacher “taught” us that airplanes don’t indeed fly by the Bernoulli principle producing lift but because the wind hits the underside of the wings and pushes it up into the air.
"So both “Bernoulli” and “Newton” are correct. Integrating the effects of either the pressure or the velocity determines the aerodynamic force on an object."
I'd like this, but it doesn't work when using uBlock Origin. It does change case of video titles, though, so it's working: just not able to alter the thumbnails anymore. Would be great but I'm not disabling uBlock Origin for it…
Thank you for your recommendation. I'm tired in the world of marketing when everyone is trying to invest in click bait instead of making good contents.
If you use uBlock Origin, you can hide any element on any site. If not you could also write an extension. I remember someone saying they wrote one and called it "Eat My Shorts" (lol). Perhaps you could search for that.
I don't exactly know where this Shorts trend came from (I guess Tiktok?) but it really destroys the generation / has bad impact. My attention span is encouraged to shrink to only 15 seconds.
It comes from YouTube wanting to compete with TikTok, yes. And it's become so ridiculously common on YouTube because the platform pushes the hell out of shorts compared to normal videos; as a creator, I can get 10/100/1000 times more views from a short than a normal video covering the same topic. So a lot of creators ended up jumping on the shorts train as a gold rush.
Of course, it's probably not great in the long term since shorts viewers and longform content viewers are not the same and your CTR can be destroyed thanks to shorts subs not watching your longer videos, but the easy views and subs are still enticing nonetheless.
And "our" generation has already had its attention span reduced, not even on purpose but from e.g. having access to fast internet & multiple tabs. I can't read a book on programming back to back (I don't think I ever could btw), it's good enough for me to google it to find a solution for the one problem I'm trying to solve at this time.
But I do miss out on in-depth knowledge of a library or language that way. But there is no value in gaining said in-depth knowledge when the stack & libraries I work with changes every couple of months or years.
In the 8 bit days there were programming books meant to be read back to back. I loved them as a kid - though I'm not sure that I learned much from that exercse. Even K&R "the C programming language" (first edition, the second edition wasn't as readable from what I remember, though that might be just because it was too repetitive for someone who had read the first edition) could be read that way.
These days that isn't a good use of paper books. There is rarely any reason to start with any one construct, and if you are not a novice programmer you know there must be something that does what you need and don't want the book to assume you understand the syntax of the while loop when you look up the do-while loop.
You can use ReVanced and choose every "patch". For example only remove shorts and keep ads etc. That way the creator still get your premium compensation
Agreed, pretty annoying when I’m trying to upload a unlisted screen cast or something under one minute to send to a specific person, and then, when I send it to him, they don’t have the ability to seek or easily restart the video.
I know it’s possible to change the URL manually, but I’ve seen it not work, depending on the type of client that views the video - YouTube should allow the viewer to switch off shorts even for a specific video
Not only on desktop. I was entirely addicted to shorts and hated that and my little monkey brain would at some point just click on them despite knowing it was entirely stupid. So I did not only block shorts on chrome but also on safari and safari iOS. You can do this by installing AdGuard and setting custom blocking filters so on the youtube website the shorts navigation button disappears and for subscriptions and suggestions I just set it up so it will show a black page. I couldn't get it stop playing audio but at least I am not seeing anything so I became unhooked. This only works in the browser of course so I uninstalled the YouTube app and I can only open YouTube in safari. I _really_ wish YouTube would just natively allow disabling shorts alltogether in their app and on their website.
> I know there's supposed to be a bunch of clickbait garbage on YouTube but I just wouldn't know, because I literally never see it.
Just sort by view count for any common english word and filter out the music videos.
Well, even including music videos there appear to be several dozen or hundred accounts dedicated to reposting the exact same Indian music videos, film trailers, clips, etc...
Not even small variations of the same content, the exact same video.
Some of the accounts look like plausible media distributors/producers in India but quite a large fraction seem to be bots or individuals spamming.
Why is anything with India content so... spammy? Endless cheap reposts with low res text and memes (or the India flag) pasted on top. Page after page of what I can only call video garbage. I have the feeling it is a cultural difference I am ignorant of.
Perhaps there is a way to game the youtube algorithm such that they still pay out on what seems like obvious spam.
But considering there are literally thousands of such videos with millions of views each, this could not possibly have escaped the attention of youtube engineers.
How are you coming across this content? I'm in India and when I see Indian content recommended it's generally one of:
a. Movie clips and songs
b. Religious stuff like prayer songs
c. Local channels that mostly do comedy (kinda like CollegeHumor used to)
d. Nerdy channels like solving math puzzles or doing Geoguessr
I can't really visualize what you're describing, though a sibling reply says there's "literally thousands of such videos with millions of views each" so there must be a lot of these out there. Do you get these recommended to you, or how are you searching them up?
I always laugh when I see a chess tournament recap video with the most clickbait title and thumbnail ever. Like, did they add explosions? And then it’s just a normal video, and very enjoyable. So, no harm, no foul.
Also a gothamchess viewer I see :)
Levy's indeed always making a sport of it to have the most clickbaity titles and thumbnails, but the chess content is really really top notch. (especially for low ELO players like myself)
I assume there has to be some degree of survivor bias here. You get good content, which is good, but there might be great content that is never shown. But I do agree that “the algorithm” often finds content that, at least, I’m interested in seeing which I would probably not have found otherwise.
Is this because we have a tech background and some understanding of how the algorithm works? I like to think I have curated my results to a degree by exercising this knowledge. ie: I noticed all of my news results were leaning starboard and things started to sound like an echo chamber. So I started seeking news content from the port side as well. Now I receive a mixture of both. I know my grandfather is not able to grasp this concept and I have seen his landing page.. I still have nightmares about what he is being fed in his echo chamber.
I do have some admiration for the algorithm - but I also wish that refreshing the home page would show me some more of the many thousands of videos that I'd likely find interesting, rather than the same 20 just in a different order.
I'm glad that the home page is semi-stable because I'll often click on a video and then go back and want to queue up another that looked interesting but if it were gone it might be hard to find again. (Yes there are strategies to work around this but I don't always use them).
They do have the "New to You" category on the home page now which you might find useful.
also being new to TikTok, I didn't realize scrolling up at first would refresh the queue of videos. And I would lose the vid being watched which was a bit terrifying to lose an interesting video.
It's discoverable at least and I can look past it given tiktok does a bunch of other stuff so much better than it's competitors.
What's a lot less forgivable is how undiscoverable your actual watch history is in case you do want to go back to that one vid.
Litterally have to search for * or the like.
I keep getting recommended the same damn set to videos which I've passed over a hundred times. Not sure why the "algorithm" is getting so much love, it's got some attributes that are pretty clearly crap.
I use watch later for completing videos, but these are just I think may be interesting from the homepage, like seeing the title and background pic. I sometimes open multiple tabs for them.
One of things I found the coolest, was when I am watching a video, and if the video mentions for example some event that happened a while ago or a person being referenced, I would immediately search for that, and I would see it already recommended on the search bar.
Maybe lots of others have also done the same, and it recorded that as a meaningful suggestion. Or maybe it's standard ML techniques, or the new Transformer models diffused across Googles products I'm not sure but was noticing this even around 3 years ago.
Mine does? I often see videos from my watch later on the homepage. If you hover on them they say, "from your watch later list". It does only seem to be recently added ones though.
It's very well hidden, but if you scroll to the end of the filter tags there's a button to show "New For You", which shows a screen full of new recommendations each time you refresh. Sometimes I'll roll the dice a few times with that page and find really interesting stuff.
That is not what I want. There should be an explicit button to refresh the recommendations. What I hate is a recommendation page that displayed what I liked but made them disappear just because I temporarily navigated away.
I think I'd be anxious then that if I saw two videos that I really wanted to watch I'd have to one in a background tabs, rather than just trust that the other one will almost certainly be recommended again.
how the algo can be so good, and so bad, at the same time boggles my mind
the repetition just feels so unnecessary in many cases -- I know there's so much more content out there that is not a huge leap from what I watch regularly but the recommendation engine makes it broadly inaccessible
one related symptom of this - i think - is when you watch one or two videos on one new thing and then get drowned in videos about that thing at the expense of everything else
If you get swamped like this it's a good idea to switch to your Subscriptions list instead and watch some of the things you want to remind it you like.
I am... OK with the Youtube algorithm. I find that it is pretty good at this point at not giving me stuff I find awful. However, I think it has lost a lot of ground in helping me find newer, more obscure topics that I'd also find interesting, compared to where it was 5-6 years ago.
Overall I think Youtube IS a jewel of the Internet. The amount of astoundingly interesting, informative, entertaining, educational, insightful, important or just plain COOL content that has appeared over the time it has been up is phenomenal, and it is like a Library of Alexandria of our time.
My big fear is that someday, Youtube will no longer be profitable. And then, like so many other beloved services, it will send out an e-mail saying it's been a great X years, blah blah blah, we'll be shutting down in a few months, bye.
> My big fear is that someday, Youtube will no longer be profitable
Why do you think it's profitable? It makes for a decent chunk of Alphabet's income, but they don't break down costs so we have no way of knowing exactly how much it costs to store and seemlessly deliver zettabytes of video.
YouTube is like 10% of Alphabets profits and there are thousands of creators relying on it for a living. Anecdotal but the creators I follow all talk about YouTube giving them a much better monetization strategy than any other platform. So I don't think this will be any time soon
Twitter's recently rolled out their ad revenue sharing arrangement and it's a 20% margin (under $50k is 3%) vs YouTube's 45%. Maybe low balling the early days to build traction? Also people probably aren't consuming 1 person's Twitter the way they consume Youtube channels.
Is that really about Twitter sharing ad revenue? The page is just talking about paid "subscriptions" to Twitter creators. That seems like a business model where the revenue cut is irrelevant. Nobody will pay $5/month to subscribe to one person's tweets.
Why would they be unprofitable? They have a range of steps before that. Heck there are github repos that let you use youtube as free(terabytes) storage, by encoding data as noisy video. I think first step before "bankrupcy" would be to remove all videos that have 0 views in 24 months (which is most of their library).
The only complaint I have is that the recommendations are too biased towards what I liked or watched very recently. It would be nice to have a setting to adjust that recency weighting.
Another, non-algorithm related complaint is that it’s difficult to watch a channel from oldest to newest, that is, keeping track of up to where you’ve already watched within the channel’s history, in order to pick up where you last stopped, in particular for channels with hundreds of videos.
> Another, non-algorithm related complaint is that it’s difficult to watch a channel from oldest to newest, that is, keeping track of up to where you’ve already watched within the channel’s history
Invidious with an account has been has been very useful for this. In the channel's pages, it shows what videos have been watched, up to which point.
> Another, non-algorithm related complaint is that it’s difficult to watch a channel from oldest to newest, that is, keeping track of up to where you’ve already watched within the channel’s history, in order to pick up where you last stopped, in particular for channels with hundreds of videos.
Absolutely. Furthermore Youtube is surprisingly bad at syncing progress within a single video. I often switch from iPad to desktop and back, and there's a lot of overlap between where I left off and where Youtube decides to continue, which forces me to manually seek forward. At the very least Youtube should save my play position whenever I hit pause but apparently it doesn't.
The main problem with Youtube, and almost every other social site, is not the algorithm itself, but that the algorithm is the only way you can interact with that site. The moment you want to do something different, it just doesn't work.
Try watching the old videos of a channel you just discovered, that's 20 clicks and a lot of waiting just to get to the bottom of that endless scroll list. There is no user visible tracking of what you watched, no way to bookmark the end of that list and really nothing you can do than give up.
Don't like the over produced Youtube content and want something that gets to the point quicker? Well, use TikTok, since Youtube has exterminated that style of video quite successfully over the last decade with the help of their algorithm.
Meanwhile Shorts just feels utterly stupid, it's a broken interface with the ability to seek through the video removed. It's just annoying. The irony is that Youtube can display Shorts just like regular video, but you have to do some URL editing to do so. Most Shorts are just parts of full videos anyway, so there isn't even much point in having them. They should have called it YoutubeZap and just be time stamps into the interesting parts of videos that already exist on their site instead of this duplication of content.
Another big problem is how under utilized playlists are. They exist, but since you can't subscribe or pin them, you'll have forgotten that they exist by the time you open up Youtube again.
The algorithm itself also has some big problems, such as never being able to put multipart videos together properly. When you see a video marked with "Part 4", you'd think the other parts would show up, but they don't or when they do it often skips parts.
And of course the algorithm filter bubbles you to an extreme. You get exactly the recommendations for the videos you just watched. It doesn't really try to broaden your horizon. It ignores your subscriptions. And really just doesn't have a way to change directions. The only thing that worked for me was to create different browser profiles with different accounts and switch between them, that keeps recommendations for different topics apart. And whenever I click a wrong video I have to go into the history and clean it up, or the profile is turned into a mess for weeks.
As watch-time optimizer and ad delivery machine the algorithm does a good job. But it really feels like the algorithm is using you, more than the other way around.
> Try watching the old videos of a channel you just discovered, that's 20 clicks and a lot of waiting just to get to the bottom of that endless scroll list.
This is where locally archiving the videos you like helps.
> Try watching the old videos of a channel you just discovered, that's 20 clicks and a lot of waiting just to get to the bottom of that endless scroll list.
Some of your complaints are valid (though they are mostly UX gripes), but this one I don't get.
I've done this multiple times and it's like three clicks. You click the channel's name, you click "videos", and you scroll down, that's it.
> You click the channel's name, you click "videos", and you scroll down, that's it.
It's an infinite-scroll list, it loads in 9 or so videos at a time, than it takes a second to update your scrollbar before you can scroll down further. You can't instantly jump to the last page, load all videos at once or invert the sort order. Every time you accidentally click away from the page you have to start from scratch as it doesn't remember your position, you can't bookmark it either. Some channels have hundreds or even thousands of videos. It's impossible to access them in any timely manner with the normal YouTube interface.
I mean, I'm not saying you're exactly wrong, but I just tried and it took me like 30 seconds to go back a year on a channel that released like 2-3 videos a day.
It's certainly not the most convenient UX, but, you know, first world problems and everything. The greatest store of knowledge almost-instantly availalbe at our fingertips, these minor UX quips are small-potatoes IMHO.
And for sure I don't think the statement "the only way to interact is via the algorithm" is accurate, when what stands between us and finding old videos is to wait a few extra seconds. That's a really strong statement compared to the reality.
I think I've said Not interested in channel hundreds of times.
Creators get one shot with me, and if I think your thumbnail is clickbaity, or you do anything to annoy me...your channel is out.
My youtube recommendations are pretty good. I subscribe to a decent-sized set of pretty great creators -- ones that follow my personal rules without even knowing what they are...
There are many decent youtubers who have clickbaity thumbnails. Unfortunately it probably makes such a large money difference that they compromise. E.g. LinusTechTips.
I see LinusTechTips recommended so often and I just don't get it. Everything I've seen from him has been clickbait, or surface level looks at technology, it never has any more depth than a technology enthusiast magazine. I guess that's fine if you're a technology enthusiast, but I find it weird how he gets so much air time even in a community like this which is populated by actual professionals.
Most people here are 'technology enthusiasts', are they not? I for one am a software engineer and definitely not a hardware professional. I might not be able to even build a PC on my own.
The YouTube algorithm is honestly pretty good at surfacing stuff I'd want to watch. My biggest carp is it's heavily based on what I was watching recently but my interest in various topics waxes and wanes and I don't necessarily want wall-to-wall basketball content just because I watched a lot of that last week.
Agreed. One annoying example is that I occasionally play white noise when I can’t sleep. YouTube will now always recommend me white noise and sleep noises when I’m casually browsing. No matter how often I press that I’m not interested.
this is how low we've sunk, you don't even say that youtube is adequate, you say it's the most adequate
Just to add my anecdata to the mix, I'm waist deep in logging-in to gmail and workplace apps, etc, but to compensate have abandoned android for iPhone, and I never use google search, and while I watch plenty on youtube, it's never required me to log in so I've never logged in, I don't even have any idea how much it "integrates" with other google logins or not at all. Am I missing out on something, is there some benefit to logging in?
My main complaint about youtube is that it used to be fun and quirky and have lots of "raw" content, and now everything is overproduced, festooned with graphics and clickbait. So many channels I would like to blacklist but nothing like that is possible. Technologically it works well, and I know there's content out there that I'll like, but unless I have a link to it or know exactly what to search for, it's very hard to find things. If there are channels I like and watch regularly, I sure don't need the algorithm showing them to me, but any sort of "maybe you'd like this too" seems totally broken, or at least completely lowest common denominator.
It is definitely worth logging in. For each recommended video you will then have the option of selecting 'not interested' or 'don't recommend this channel'.
YouTube has been showing me a ton of channels with low Hundreds of views recently, and they’re very to my taste. Ymmv but they’re doing well at exactly what you’re complaining about in my experience
Yeah I've noticed that YouTube almost always recommends me one or two videos with less than 100 views now. Must be a relatively recent change. The videos are often pretty relevant and pretty good, which is a bit depressing. Seeing people put a lot of work into videos that nobody watches (by YouTube standards) is sad. Though that is the reality of most channels. Maybe this change will help them.
I have a conjecture, they're using you as a barometer to see how you react to it compared to people with similar profiles
I've seen a couple that go on to get decent viewcounts, but I don't care enough to keep tabs on anything in particular
Then again, I do have 10 hour a day watch time average, my data is vast, but highly skewed
Generally agree, but I have had a couple of long term complaints which are seemingly never going to be fixed:
* There's no option to regulate how many times it recommends a video I have already watched. Ideally I'd like this to be arbitrarily close to zero.
* The recommendations are much, much, much too biased on recently watched videos.
I also think my recommendations are really good, but I believe it also takes a great deal of care and will.
I make a conscious effort to avoid watching 'dumb' tiktok-ey content as much as possible. Not because I would think watching it from time to time is inherently bad, but because I believe I would be prone to watching more and more of it and it would absolutely flood my recomendations. It's addictive. For this reason I also never watch shorts on my account.
If I really want to watch something from these categories, I do so without being logged in.
>I'm going to go against the grain here and say my YouTube algorithm is great.
I agree with the minor caveat that I'd like a "broaden" button and a "change theme" menu.
My search algorithm presents me with content that I find quite enjoyable, but I'd like to be exposed to a little more stuff that's outside of my bubble.
It knows what I like based on what I've watched, but it doesn't know me and therefore can't infer stuff I don't know but would enjoy if I was exposed to it.
On the top of the home page they have a category control that lets you look for different genres of stuff from your algorithm plus a "new to you" category. I think that's supposed to be what you're after. I hardly ever use it because I forget it's there or don't need it to steer the algorithm my way.
So the reward for signing into YouTube is being able to "reset" by signing out? Because (on desktop) I do all of my youtubing with browsers that have never been logged into any Alphabet service and yet the algorithm has a very clear idea about what to show me. The idea that signing out would somehow give you a pristine neutral state seems quite naive from this perspective.
I rarely check the Home (algorithmic) feed or Trending feed, I just check my Subscriptions feed and I get amazing and lots of content. It take me time to build my subscriptions list, usually via recommendations by channels that I'm subscribed.
YouTube is my preferred app to watch videos by a mile, I never ever will change it for Netflix, HBO, TikTok, etc.
This is what I do too and am quite satisfied with it. It seems like a lot of people don't use the subscription page, as it seems like there are frequent complaints about missing new videos unless they have hit the notification bell. I've never had that problem as the subscriber page does exactly what it is supposed to do (though I suppose if you were subscribed to hundreds or thousands of channels you'd probably run into issues)
I've been trying out an extension to hide the thumbnails to see how it changes what I wind up clicking. The problem with my little experiment is I don't go back to see what they would have been afterward to record an observation, so I'm not meeting the Adam Savage criteria for doing science.
May I suggest "Unhook"? It's great for switching different parts of the UI on and off. I quite often disable everything except subscriptions now; no recommendation, no comments, no explore/trending, among other things. It's change my YouTube usage tremendously:
Me too but I have to constantly manage my history.
Thankfully the AppleTV app makes this easy if you click and hold in the History view you can remove single videos after watching them (so my home is not filled with lolcats).
Like, I like Courtney Ryan but I’ll never keep a video in my watch history (only Follow), otherwise I start seeing all those Tarzan-meets-Jane podcasts etc. that the author mentions.
Mainly it seems to be about keywords so you have to kinda guess what keywords go with a video and remove it from watch history if ypu dont want the algorithm to go down that route.
It’s a shame YT doesnt have a separate history for gaming and music,along with a separate "recommened" there. I would go on binges there frequently while still being able to chill in the evening on my tv with the content I expect in the Home tab. Without this I am forced to stay away from exploring music or gaming, too much watch history maintenance.
Years ago youtube offered a choice between their recomendations and your subscriptions as a homepage. Then they removed the choice and forced their recommendations on everyone. So i installed an extension to redirect from my youtube homepage to my subscriptions. Haven't even seen the algorithm in ages. When i feel like watching something I go to my subscriptions and browse a chronologically sorted list of videos from creators I like. Another extension hides all youtbe shorts. I've never clicked a bell either. The idea of having a notification shoved in my face when someone posts a video sound ridiculous to me. I've definitely complained before about the older generation being stuck in their ways and not adapting with the times, but I wonder if I'm not the same already, in my thirties and hell-bent on using youtube "wrong".
I'm in the same boat as you, being in early twenties. I also have a userscript to hide the recommendation panel right of the video player and the cards at the end of the video, though I turn that off if I'm bored enough to discover new channels and content.
I agree. My wife and I get the YouTube Premium with Music family plan, and we both agree that of all of the monthly subscriptions we pay, YouTube Premium is the best deal because we use YouTube as much as Netflix, HBO, Prime, etc. combined.
For me, the hidden jewels on YT are philosophy and other “thoughtful” style streams, Chess, Thai Chi, some alternative news, news from foreign countries, and short sci-fi content. But, there are thousands of niches like what I follow, something for everyone.
The recommendation algorithm is not perfect for me, I need to do some work to find content, but it works well enough.
> Signing out of YouTube and viewing the default home page is a reminder of the horrors that lie beyond, but my little corner of it is a bit too good.
I resonate with the "a bit too good", so much so that I exclusively use YouTube in incognito mode because the recommendation algorithm is too addictive, and the content that it causes me to consume doesn't really do anything but waste my time in the long run.
I also second the "horrors that lie beyond", the stuff that regularly surfaces on the default YouTube home page would suffice as an excuse for aliens to blow up our planet and put a freeway through it.
It's weird how different my experience is, simply from spanking the algorithm every time it shows me something clickbaity that I haven't already seen.
I actively use the 'not interested' every time the recommendation algorithm tries to show me something where I don't already know what it is. I pretty much only want to see recommended videos I've already watched :)
It takes some patience to get this going, but it seems to work. Any time I see anything novel, it will get excited for a while until I settle it down and tell it I hate all its ideas. Usually I don't have to tell it never to show channels, though if it's obvious enough I will. Eventually it's back to old faves again :)
I started using an extension that blocks all recommendations. I have my subscriptions and I have the search. Of course, I'm missing out on all that new and undiscovered content... but what I get instead is life, so I think it's a fair trade.
Have you set your google/youtube account to remove your history after a certain period of time. I have set mine to auto delete history older than 3 months. I think that had a big effect on my recommendations.
Completely agree. You need to feed the algorithm the right data. Spend a little time to explicitly tell it to not recommend specific content and channels. You see a channel doing outrage porn (X destroys Y!) and clickbait thumbnails that tell you exactly zero about the content, shallow content mill: Right click -> Don't recommend channel. Completely ignore Shorts. Pay for youtube premium to get rid of ads. Add extensions: Sponsorblock and Video Speed Controller.
Mine is pretty good too, but what I'd appreciate more than a page of random algorithm-matched videos is something with structure.
Like a tree, where a video I watched, or one of my subscriptions, points to suggestions. To wit, often the links suggested at the end of a video are the most interesting to me.
As someone who uses YouTube to consume foreign news, I'd also love a setting that lets me see only content and recommendations in a given language.
Might be a case of A/B testing or I've heard a theory that Adblock users are penalized- most certainly, for me, the frontpage is worthless to a point where it singlehandedly reduced my YouTube use to nearly zero.
All it does is show the same few videos from the same few popular creators in the same few advertiser-friendly categories it binned me into. None of them actually interest me, but it just doesn't catch on.
It's decent but I feel like it lacks granularity. Everything is either genre A or genre B or genre C, with each being very narrow fields - sometimes a "genre" might contain a few select youtubers, even though there are thousands of channels that feature similar content.
Whereas twitter for me is much more nuanced, and I'm constantly being exposed to the fringes of my interests which helps me organically grow my feed.
Yeah I continue to be impressed by their recommendation engine - and the very well executed niche channels. The latest example I’ve seen is Idaho Horseshoeing School which is some combination of woodworking, artisan craftsmen/women, animal welfare videos, etc. and that I had no idea I would enjoy but I can see why the algorithm figured out that’s in some Venn diagram for me
The algorithm that YouTube uses to suggest videos to me is really good.
Whatever mechanism is used to select the ads to show me seems like a stubborn practical joke - it is appalling. And I'd love to know why it likes to show me ads for commercial products (such as accountancy software) when I watch on my Apple TV but completely different nonsense on my other Apple devices.
agreed. I've found some great music from youtube's algorythym (niche and rare old music comes up ALL THE TIME for some reason I don't understand but I'm not gonna argue), and it's definitely better than the youtube shorts one, which shows me bullshit all the time, whereas my main feed is mostly relevant stuff.
I feel like i used to rely on reddit to surface all the new and interesting content creators on youtube, but nowadays i just go to youtube itself when I'm looking for something new to watch. I think all of the new content creators I've found in the past year have come from youtube recommendations
Completely agree. Generally look forward to checking my feed for podcasts and science videos. I actually don’t even watch videos so much as listening to most of them while working. Pretty much replaced every other platform for music and videocontent for me personally
I've been referring to it as the "Youtube synchronicity algorithm". Often it suggests channels and videos that are niche-ish but hugely relevant to me personally. It's one of the few things from Google I still love.
I love that it often recommends me videos from small channels, often with 0 view. This started happening only about a few months ago I don't know if it's just me.
There was a period of time semi-recently when the algorithm was better than my heuristics, too. I had associated too-good thumbnails with overproduced shallow clickbait videos churned out by content mills and "grindset" individuals. But at some point basically everybody started optimizing their titles and thumbnails and some of the stuff the algorithm was suggesting was actually good even though it looked "too flashy."