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YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed. Though there is a growing number of anecdotes surrounding

YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed. Though there is a growing number of anecdotes surrounding (niche|not palatable to SV) channels who’s subscribers don’t get notified despite the bell thing being on, new videos no longer in feeds, and even people getting unsubscribed for no apparent reason. This is a problem, as I’d sooner give up peanut butter than only be served videos with open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails.

o_m 4y ago
I deleted my youtube/google account and started using RSS feeds instead.
- nullandvoid 4y ago
  The only sane way to consume YouTube these days. I also just manage a curated list of channels and consume via RSS, with YT perpetually blocked, short of a few re-review days per year.
  - RL_Quine 4y ago
    Youtube is also basically unwatchable without both adblock and sponsorblock. At this point most videos are are at least 1/3rd clipped by the latter.
    - deepdriver 4y ago
      I subscribe to YouTube Premium to skip all interstitial ads. It’s absolutely worth it to me. I like to think I’m helping someone at G make the business case for subscription-based, ad-free products and services. Sponsor segments are easily skippable with a few fast-forward fingertaps, or right-arrow taps on a keyboard.
      - RL_Quine 4y ago
        Why manually scrub through videos when there's a tool to do it automatically for you and re-cut the video into a seamless block of content?
        deepdriver 4y ago
        Every browser plug-in is an additional exploit vector. Never know when the plug-in author might sell out or get hacked. When that happens you’re one auto-update away from catastrophe. I also enjoy the more creative sponsor segments, like Internet Historian’s.
        RL_Quine 4y ago
        If this is a concern it is supported in yt-dlp and mpv.
    - abenga 4y ago
      Has anyone found a reliable way to block the ads on Android TV that isn't "root your TV and install and use this weird App you get from this website here"? Would a Pi-Hole work long-term?
      - pjbk 4y ago
        Yes. SmartTubeNext: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext. I use it with a FireTV stick since it's much easier than hacking my Samsung TV. It supports SponsorBlock too. It lacks some YT features but if you just want to browse and watch videos it works wonderfully.
- ChrisRR 4y ago
  Why not just use the subscriptions tab and ignore the home page?
  - _w8pc 4y ago
    For what it's worth, can't organize that subscriptions tab by any meaningful way. At least none that I know of.
JetAlone 4y ago
So, your mind wandered to giving up peanut butter? For me it'd be something like... Uh, Tomatoes. I had to really think about it, but yeah, I'd give up tomatoes to not live in that world, which is saying something because tomatoes in one form or another tend to help keep my morale up through many, many meatless days.
- gherkinnn 4y ago
  Onions, however, I can’t give up. What is life without onions? One sssniperwolf vid per large onion is fair.
  - JetAlone 4y ago
    Man, I hadn't thought of onions. They go well with tomatoes. Layers, donkeh.
  - spurgu 4y ago
    True. I have a hard time coming up with a dish that doesn't work (or is improved) by onions, and how many dishes would completely suck without them.
lloydatkinson 4y ago
I can refresh the home page a hundred times in a row and the exact same videos in the exact same order get displayed. It never used to be like this. I have no idea what the hell is going on at YouTube head office.
- lrem 4y ago
  I work in a different part of Google... But getting the same result when refreshing page sounds like getting served from a cache, which doesn't sound that weird. Isn't there a button to show something else?
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
    Other than navigating to say the “Subscriptions” page where you’re just given a different set of videos, there’s no other way of changing what you get on the home page. If the home page is caching it’s doing it too very aggressively - it never used to be like this and I’ve seen it across multiple devices. The home page used to be a way to find new videos but now you just have to wait a few hours and try again.
  - user_named 4y ago
    I get recommended the same videos for months. Sometimes they even show old recommendations from a year back. I'm thinking recommendations can be significantly increased by using a ruby gem because what they have now, certainly more complicated and convoluted, isn't working at all.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  That's a good thing in my book, that's a feature. Recommendations are made, and they are random in some sense. But an interface needs a certain persistence to be user friendly. Too annoying to glance something, try to go back, and it's gone. Some persistence creates an environment that is a bit more spatial and nicer to my brain.
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
shapefrog 4y ago
> YT on a clean slate is horrendous It makes me worry about the future of humanity, as the clean slate is what is popular in your location. > open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails Dont forget to add a large amount of money to the title my $$$$250,000 computer. But it f'ing works - I am really not sure what is wrong with people. Oh and now I get 2 ads every single video, its barely worth it ...
- gherkinnn 4y ago
  > It makes me worry about the future of humanity I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies. Teenagers are stupid. Always were, always will be. I know I was. And yet here we are. Alive and well.
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    > I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies I have seen what facebook feeds boomers - it too is abhorrent.
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    I worry for teenagers just as I do for the adults if we don't curb everything stealing our sleep and concentration. I don't think it's the same old "young people are lazy" trope, it's significant.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Hey, maybe in the future you'll inherit your parents' recommendations. If you're lucky and your parents and grandparents made good choices, you'll have a pleasant experience that makes it easy to make good choices, and if they didn't, your digital life will be terrible from the start. We'll talk about recommendation mobility as the easy of adapting to a user, regardless of their ancestors.
- jgwil2 4y ago
  > Oh and now I get 2 ads every single video, its barely worth it ... Do yourself a favor and get an ad blocker. YouTube is barely usable without one at this point.
Beltalowda 4y ago
> YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed. This used to be the case, but starting a month or two ago I get lots of completely and utterly irrelevant recommendations for things like soccer, hip-hop, "vlog" twats, and other "popular" content that I have absolutely zero interest in and that I can guarantee are 100% unrelated to any of my previous history. I also started getting a lot of "recommendations" for things I've ... already seen. That started a bit earlier, maybe about half a year ago. So now it's about a third forced stupid stuff, about a third things I've already seen, and maybe a third that's useful. I've been flagging things as "not interested" quite aggressively in the hopes it would improve, but I've seen no difference. I think they just changed the way recommendations work to always fairly aggressively mix in "popular content". If I wanted to watch random mindless nonsense then I would turn on my TV: I use YouTube to avoid all of that. YouTube is slowly turning into a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser; I think very soon it will start offering me a cup of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
- gherkinnn 4y ago
  Interesting how our experiences differ. It is true that I always watch videos that aren’t immediately related to what I want in my feed incognito. Fuck these non-deterministic algorithms and the feeds they fill.
  - jerf 4y ago
    You can go to your history and remove videos. While I harbor no delusion that YouTube as a whole forgets that you've watched it as a result, I can vouch for the fact it does seem to mean the recommendation algorithm won't see it anymore. I'm not immune to the occasional "cute pet" video, but the problem is the attraction basin of that is in the algorithm is so strong that if you show the slightest inclination towards it with so much as a single video view, it will instantly turn half your feed into "cute pet" videos. (There are many other such attraction basins.) Removing the view from your history fixes that problem. It is still possible to keep the brow-level of your YouTube feed above "low". I've successfully been recommended some math videos in the past few days from channels I've not already heard of (might as well signal boost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vxW42R47bc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vxW42R47bc , a nice crunchy analysis of a solution to a math problem covered on Numberphile that was unsolved at the time but surprisingly has a reasonably accessible solution). But it takes deliberate maintenance.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
This is only the case if you subscribe to channels that churn out content on a daily or weekly basis and have no interest in finding tangential content by new creators. I've given up on using YouTube for discovery, I have to actively fight the search in order to find anything remotely useful and the main feed is just the same crap repeated over and over again no matter how many I mark as not interested. Whatever happened to it several years ago has completely lobotomized the recommendation engine, it's just trash now. I'm hopeful that content creators will continue to trend towards uploading to multiple video platforms so I can find new stuff.
ChrisRR 4y ago
I've been using the same google account for so many years and still every damn Youtube video I get 2-3 ads for Tiktok. How does the algorithm not get that I have probably watched 10,000 ads for Tiktok, I am not installing that shit! Stop trying!
- marshray 4y ago
  Tiktok must have ad budget to blow regardless of individualized conversion rate considerations. Google's algorithm is happy to oblige.

o_m 4y ago

I deleted my youtube/google account and started using RSS feeds instead.

nullandvoid 4y ago
The only sane way to consume YouTube these days. I also just manage a curated list of channels and consume via RSS, with YT perpetually blocked, short of a few re-review days per year.
- RL_Quine 4y ago
  Youtube is also basically unwatchable without both adblock and sponsorblock. At this point most videos are are at least 1/3rd clipped by the latter.
  - deepdriver 4y ago
    I subscribe to YouTube Premium to skip all interstitial ads. It’s absolutely worth it to me. I like to think I’m helping someone at G make the business case for subscription-based, ad-free products and services. Sponsor segments are easily skippable with a few fast-forward fingertaps, or right-arrow taps on a keyboard.
    - RL_Quine 4y ago
      Why manually scrub through videos when there's a tool to do it automatically for you and re-cut the video into a seamless block of content?
      - deepdriver 4y ago
        Every browser plug-in is an additional exploit vector. Never know when the plug-in author might sell out or get hacked. When that happens you’re one auto-update away from catastrophe. I also enjoy the more creative sponsor segments, like Internet Historian’s.
        RL_Quine 4y ago
        If this is a concern it is supported in yt-dlp and mpv.
  - abenga 4y ago
    Has anyone found a reliable way to block the ads on Android TV that isn't "root your TV and install and use this weird App you get from this website here"? Would a Pi-Hole work long-term?
    - pjbk 4y ago
      Yes. SmartTubeNext: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext. I use it with a FireTV stick since it's much easier than hacking my Samsung TV. It supports SponsorBlock too. It lacks some YT features but if you just want to browse and watch videos it works wonderfully.
ChrisRR 4y ago
Why not just use the subscriptions tab and ignore the home page?
- _w8pc 4y ago
  For what it's worth, can't organize that subscriptions tab by any meaningful way. At least none that I know of.

JetAlone 4y ago

So, your mind wandered to giving up peanut butter? For me it'd be something like... Uh, Tomatoes. I had to really think about it, but yeah, I'd give up tomatoes to not live in that world, which is saying something because tomatoes in one form or another tend to help keep my morale up through many, many meatless days.

gherkinnn 4y ago
Onions, however, I can’t give up. What is life without onions? One sssniperwolf vid per large onion is fair.
- JetAlone 4y ago
  Man, I hadn't thought of onions. They go well with tomatoes. Layers, donkeh.
- spurgu 4y ago
  True. I have a hard time coming up with a dish that doesn't work (or is improved) by onions, and how many dishes would completely suck without them.

lloydatkinson 4y ago

I can refresh the home page a hundred times in a row and the exact same videos in the exact same order get displayed. It never used to be like this. I have no idea what the hell is going on at YouTube head office.

lrem 4y ago
I work in a different part of Google... But getting the same result when refreshing page sounds like getting served from a cache, which doesn't sound that weird. Isn't there a button to show something else?
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  Other than navigating to say the “Subscriptions” page where you’re just given a different set of videos, there’s no other way of changing what you get on the home page. If the home page is caching it’s doing it too very aggressively - it never used to be like this and I’ve seen it across multiple devices. The home page used to be a way to find new videos but now you just have to wait a few hours and try again.
- user_named 4y ago
  I get recommended the same videos for months. Sometimes they even show old recommendations from a year back. I'm thinking recommendations can be significantly increased by using a ruby gem because what they have now, certainly more complicated and convoluted, isn't working at all.
kzrdude 4y ago
That's a good thing in my book, that's a feature. Recommendations are made, and they are random in some sense. But an interface needs a certain persistence to be user friendly. Too annoying to glance something, try to go back, and it's gone. Some persistence creates an environment that is a bit more spatial and nicer to my brain.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago

shapefrog 4y ago

> YT on a clean slate is horrendous It makes me worry about the future of humanity, as the clean slate is what is popular in your location. > open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails Dont forget to add a large amount of money to the title my $$$$250,000 computer. But it f'ing works - I am really not sure what is wrong with people. Oh and now I get 2 ads every single video, its barely worth it ...

gherkinnn 4y ago
> It makes me worry about the future of humanity I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies. Teenagers are stupid. Always were, always will be. I know I was. And yet here we are. Alive and well.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  > I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies I have seen what facebook feeds boomers - it too is abhorrent.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  I worry for teenagers just as I do for the adults if we don't curb everything stealing our sleep and concentration. I don't think it's the same old "young people are lazy" trope, it's significant.
luckylion 4y ago
Hey, maybe in the future you'll inherit your parents' recommendations. If you're lucky and your parents and grandparents made good choices, you'll have a pleasant experience that makes it easy to make good choices, and if they didn't, your digital life will be terrible from the start. We'll talk about recommendation mobility as the easy of adapting to a user, regardless of their ancestors.
jgwil2 4y ago
> Oh and now I get 2 ads every single video, its barely worth it ... Do yourself a favor and get an ad blocker. YouTube is barely usable without one at this point.

Beltalowda 4y ago

> YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed. This used to be the case, but starting a month or two ago I get lots of completely and utterly irrelevant recommendations for things like soccer, hip-hop, "vlog" twats, and other "popular" content that I have absolutely zero interest in and that I can guarantee are 100% unrelated to any of my previous history. I also started getting a lot of "recommendations" for things I've ... already seen. That started a bit earlier, maybe about half a year ago. So now it's about a third forced stupid stuff, about a third things I've already seen, and maybe a third that's useful. I've been flagging things as "not interested" quite aggressively in the hopes it would improve, but I've seen no difference. I think they just changed the way recommendations work to always fairly aggressively mix in "popular content". If I wanted to watch random mindless nonsense then I would turn on my TV: I use YouTube to avoid all of that. YouTube is slowly turning into a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser; I think very soon it will start offering me a cup of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

gherkinnn 4y ago
Interesting how our experiences differ. It is true that I always watch videos that aren’t immediately related to what I want in my feed incognito. Fuck these non-deterministic algorithms and the feeds they fill.
- jerf 4y ago
  You can go to your history and remove videos. While I harbor no delusion that YouTube as a whole forgets that you've watched it as a result, I can vouch for the fact it does seem to mean the recommendation algorithm won't see it anymore. I'm not immune to the occasional "cute pet" video, but the problem is the attraction basin of that is in the algorithm is so strong that if you show the slightest inclination towards it with so much as a single video view, it will instantly turn half your feed into "cute pet" videos. (There are many other such attraction basins.) Removing the view from your history fixes that problem. It is still possible to keep the brow-level of your YouTube feed above "low". I've successfully been recommended some math videos in the past few days from channels I've not already heard of (might as well signal boost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vxW42R47bc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vxW42R47bc , a nice crunchy analysis of a solution to a math problem covered on Numberphile that was unsolved at the time but surprisingly has a reasonably accessible solution). But it takes deliberate maintenance.

throwaway4aday 4y ago

This is only the case if you subscribe to channels that churn out content on a daily or weekly basis and have no interest in finding tangential content by new creators. I've given up on using YouTube for discovery, I have to actively fight the search in order to find anything remotely useful and the main feed is just the same crap repeated over and over again no matter how many I mark as not interested. Whatever happened to it several years ago has completely lobotomized the recommendation engine, it's just trash now. I'm hopeful that content creators will continue to trend towards uploading to multiple video platforms so I can find new stuff.

ChrisRR 4y ago

I've been using the same google account for so many years and still every damn Youtube video I get 2-3 ads for Tiktok. How does the algorithm not get that I have probably watched 10,000 ads for Tiktok, I am not installing that shit! Stop trying!

marshray 4y ago
Tiktok must have ad budget to blow regardless of individualized conversion rate considerations. Google's algorithm is happy to oblige.