11 ms·

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 horr

by mastax 4y ago

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."

hollerith 4y ago
I like the algorithm, but it seems biased towards short-duration videos.
gambiting 4y ago
Same here. I pretty much only watch car channels and some meme compilations and that's exactly what YouTube shows me, nothing else.
WanderPanda 4y ago
Watching one „wrong“ video can mess everything up for a couple of weeks though, which always gives me some level of anxiety :D
- GalenErso 4y ago
  I open Incognito mode when I'm about to watch a video like that.
  - beAbU 4y ago
    I discovered the other day that incognito mode removes the Premium privileges, which makes 0 sense to me. I want to watch one video without it contributing to my history, and now I'm subjected to ads again. No thanks.
    - jimktrains2 4y ago
      It doesn't remove anything; you're not logged in, which is the point of opening in an incognito window in the first place.
    - opan 4y ago
      Watch your one-off video with mpv+yt-dlp.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  You can usually go into your history and remove it to fix it.
- deepzn 4y ago
  true, I have to say "Not interested" a couple times
  - rossjudson 4y ago
    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...
    - yreg 4y ago
      There are many decent youtubers who have clickbaity thumbnails. Unfortunately it probably makes such a large money difference that they compromise. E.g. LinusTechTips.
      - jon-wood 4y ago
        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.
        yreg 4y ago
        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.
ur-whale 4y ago
>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.
- mastax 4y ago
  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.
  - natebc 4y ago
    I always see that when visiting the YouTube site but it's very inconsistent in the Android app.
robinsonb5 4y ago
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.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  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.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  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.
- mastax 4y ago
  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.
  - silvestrov 4y ago
    The should have a page with "recently shown on home page" like the history page for actually shown videos.
  - deepzn 4y ago
    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.
    - 4y ago
Waterluvian 4y ago
Yeah, I really have no complaints. Of all “we feed you content” thingies online, YouTube has been the most adequate. The only complaint I have is what human behaviour forces even the intelligent creators to do: have a title card with an excited looking person.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  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.
  - disntthinkthis 4y ago
    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
    - mastax 4y ago
      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.
crazygringo 4y ago
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.)
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  > 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.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    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.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      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. Though maybe there is a fix in the pipeline?
seanalltogether 4y ago
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
mgfist 4y ago
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.
deepzn 4y ago
oh wow exactly. When i go on incognito, im terrified at all the "viral" kinds of news,etc type of vids recommended to me.
deepzn 4y ago
btw has anyone tried YT (& premium specifically) on an iPad? it's like 10x better. I don't use it enough. Just in my bed haha.
smeagull 4y ago
If I hear "not what you think", "may surprise you" or "what happens when" then I just close the tab as a reflex.
Spastche 4y ago
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.
kibwen 4y ago
> 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.
- dbtc 4y ago
  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.
- Applejinx 4y ago
  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 :)
usrusr 4y ago
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.
- nuker 4y ago
  > The idea that signing out would somehow give you a pristine neutral state … If you’re on Mac, try enabling iCloud Private Relay in settings.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pentagrama 4y ago
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.
- dinkleberg 4y ago
  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)
helpfulclippy 4y ago
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.
- santoshalper 4y ago
  They'll just get much shittier long before they ever actually shut down.
  - geraldhh 4y ago
    i do share that fear of the day that most of the youtube content will be "gone" (behind some kind of login-wall)
- ckosidows 4y ago
  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
  - dmix 4y ago
    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. https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/creator-dashboard https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/creator-dashboard Still it will be interesting to see how many hundreds/thousands of mom & pop careers will be built off Twitter now.
sixothree 4y ago
YouTube Premium and F1TV are my two subscriptions. I watch more YouTube than anything else. By far. My algorithm is filled with creators I admire.
fancy_pantser 4y ago
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. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-youtube-thumbnails/phmcfcbljjdlomoipaffekhgfnpndbef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-youtube-thumb...
- Aromasin 4y ago
  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: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-youtube-rec/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
wnevets 4y ago
I agree, there are several channels that I watch regular because of the algorithm show them to me.
dmix 4y ago
My YouTube subscription is worth 2x what I pay for Netflix and recently costs half as much. I'm happy YouTube figured out their algorithm.
Llamamoe 4y ago
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.
argo_navis 4y ago
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".
- pzmarzly 4y ago
  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 don't know anyone with similar setup though.
emodendroket 4y ago
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.
- Gunnerhead 4y ago
  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.
  - coldpie 4y ago
    You can remove those videos from your watch history, which should remove them from the algorithm. It's a bit of a chore, but should do the trick.
xbmcuser 4y ago
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.
nonima 4y ago
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.
layer8 4y ago
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.
- jraph 4y ago
  > 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.
- AdamGibbins 4y ago
  You can subscribe to youTube channel pages via RSS. I do this when I don't want to miss a channels videos.
- thirdsun 4y ago
  > 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.
seiteamoebe 4y ago
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
yreg 4y ago
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.
cultureswitch 4y ago
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.
grumbel 4y ago
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.
- edanm 4y ago
  > 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.
NaN1352 4y ago
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.
coffeebeqn 4y ago
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
mbar84 4y ago
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.
arethuza 4y ago
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.
danjoredd 4y ago
Pretty much all my homepage is, is video essays and Invader Zim clips
mark_l_watson 4y ago
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.
subpixel 4y ago
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.
hnfong 4y ago
+1 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.

by mastax 4y ago

hollerith 4y ago

I like the algorithm, but it seems biased towards short-duration videos.

gambiting 4y ago

Same here. I pretty much only watch car channels and some meme compilations and that's exactly what YouTube shows me, nothing else.

WanderPanda 4y ago

Watching one „wrong“ video can mess everything up for a couple of weeks though, which always gives me some level of anxiety :D

GalenErso 4y ago
I open Incognito mode when I'm about to watch a video like that.
- beAbU 4y ago
  I discovered the other day that incognito mode removes the Premium privileges, which makes 0 sense to me. I want to watch one video without it contributing to my history, and now I'm subjected to ads again. No thanks.
  - jimktrains2 4y ago
    It doesn't remove anything; you're not logged in, which is the point of opening in an incognito window in the first place.
  - opan 4y ago
    Watch your one-off video with mpv+yt-dlp.
kevingadd 4y ago
You can usually go into your history and remove it to fix it.
deepzn 4y ago
true, I have to say "Not interested" a couple times
- rossjudson 4y ago
  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...
  - yreg 4y ago
    There are many decent youtubers who have clickbaity thumbnails. Unfortunately it probably makes such a large money difference that they compromise. E.g. LinusTechTips.
    - jon-wood 4y ago
      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.
      - yreg 4y ago
        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.

ur-whale 4y ago

>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.

mastax 4y ago
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.
- natebc 4y ago
  I always see that when visiting the YouTube site but it's very inconsistent in the Android app.

robinsonb5 4y ago

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.

sebzim4500 4y ago
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.
kccqzy 4y ago
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.
mastax 4y ago
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.
- silvestrov 4y ago
  The should have a page with "recently shown on home page" like the history page for actually shown videos.
- deepzn 4y ago
  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.
  - 4y ago

Waterluvian 4y ago

Yeah, I really have no complaints. Of all “we feed you content” thingies online, YouTube has been the most adequate. The only complaint I have is what human behaviour forces even the intelligent creators to do: have a title card with an excited looking person.

fsckboy 4y ago
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.
- disntthinkthis 4y ago
  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
  - mastax 4y ago
    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.

crazygringo 4y ago

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.)

MichaelZuo 4y ago
> 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.
- flangola7 4y ago
  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.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    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. Though maybe there is a fix in the pipeline?

seanalltogether 4y ago

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

mgfist 4y ago

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.

deepzn 4y ago

oh wow exactly. When i go on incognito, im terrified at all the "viral" kinds of news,etc type of vids recommended to me.

deepzn 4y ago

btw has anyone tried YT (& premium specifically) on an iPad? it's like 10x better. I don't use it enough. Just in my bed haha.

smeagull 4y ago

If I hear "not what you think", "may surprise you" or "what happens when" then I just close the tab as a reflex.

Spastche 4y ago

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.

kibwen 4y ago

> 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.

dbtc 4y ago
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.
Applejinx 4y ago
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 :)

usrusr 4y ago

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.

nuker 4y ago
> The idea that signing out would somehow give you a pristine neutral state … If you’re on Mac, try enabling iCloud Private Relay in settings.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pentagrama 4y ago

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.

dinkleberg 4y ago
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)

helpfulclippy 4y ago

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.

santoshalper 4y ago
They'll just get much shittier long before they ever actually shut down.
- geraldhh 4y ago
  i do share that fear of the day that most of the youtube content will be "gone" (behind some kind of login-wall)
ckosidows 4y ago
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
- dmix 4y ago
  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. https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/creator-dashboard https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/creator-dashboard Still it will be interesting to see how many hundreds/thousands of mom & pop careers will be built off Twitter now.

sixothree 4y ago

YouTube Premium and F1TV are my two subscriptions. I watch more YouTube than anything else. By far. My algorithm is filled with creators I admire.

fancy_pantser 4y ago

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. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-youtube-thumbnails/phmcfcbljjdlomoipaffekhgfnpndbef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-youtube-thumb...

Aromasin 4y ago
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: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-youtube-rec/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...

wnevets 4y ago

I agree, there are several channels that I watch regular because of the algorithm show them to me.

dmix 4y ago

My YouTube subscription is worth 2x what I pay for Netflix and recently costs half as much. I'm happy YouTube figured out their algorithm.

Llamamoe 4y ago

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.

argo_navis 4y ago

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".

pzmarzly 4y ago
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 don't know anyone with similar setup though.

emodendroket 4y ago

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.

Gunnerhead 4y ago
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.
- coldpie 4y ago
  You can remove those videos from your watch history, which should remove them from the algorithm. It's a bit of a chore, but should do the trick.

xbmcuser 4y ago

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.

nonima 4y ago

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.

layer8 4y ago

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.

jraph 4y ago
> 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.
AdamGibbins 4y ago
You can subscribe to youTube channel pages via RSS. I do this when I don't want to miss a channels videos.
thirdsun 4y ago
> 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.

seiteamoebe 4y ago

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

yreg 4y ago

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.

cultureswitch 4y ago

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.

grumbel 4y ago

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.

edanm 4y ago
> 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.

NaN1352 4y ago

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.

coffeebeqn 4y ago

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

mbar84 4y ago

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.

arethuza 4y ago

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.

danjoredd 4y ago

Pretty much all my homepage is, is video essays and Invader Zim clips

mark_l_watson 4y ago

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.

subpixel 4y ago

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.

hnfong 4y ago

+1 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.