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I spend most of my time on youtube asking it to "not recommend this channel". But even youtube is decreasing in quality theses days, regarding recommendations.

by atum47 3y ago

I spend most of my time on youtube asking it to "not recommend this channel". But even youtube is decreasing in quality theses days, regarding recommendations. God forbid if I search for something, the next day 30% of my recommendations is about that topic.

mostlysimilar 3y ago
Same thing if you click a YouTube link from a friend. I only open them in private windows now because otherwise it wrecks my recommendations, even if I tell YouTube to forget I watched it or to not recommend it etc.
- progbits 3y ago
  Removing it from watch history will have effect on recommendations, but not immediately. But yeah for a random "guilty pleasure" garbage video I use incognito too, it's just faster.
zimpenfish 3y ago
I added a whole bunch of stuff to Watch Later last week because, obvs., I wanted to watch them later. Since then, those exact same videos have been front and centre every day in the "FOR YOU" list. I mean, well done, I guess, for thinking I might want to watch videos I've specifically indicated I want to watch?
- Tildey 3y ago
  This infuriates me. I know the video exists, that’s why it’s on my watch later. It’s like adding an item to your cart, and then having an ad for it at the top of every search result. Another thing I hate is if you watch a video from a playlist (or the “podcasts” tab on a channel), and go into your watch history to continue the video, you can’t. It just shows a link to the entire playlist
  - comex 3y ago
    I on the other hand wish it would do that more often. When I open YouTube I’m always distracted by the recommendations on the initial screen, and then I never get around to the Watch Later list. So it’s nice when Watch Later videos show up on the initial screen. I wish I could tell it to consistently show me one or two Watch Later videos on the initial screen rather than doing so seemingly at random.
    - zimpenfish 3y ago
      > I wish I could tell it to consistently show me one or two Watch Later videos I would be 100% A-OK with that if it had its own section. Like there's a "News" section if I scroll down a few rows. Put "You wanted to watch these later" down there as well. Absolutely do not put them in suggestions though.
    - manigandham 3y ago
      You can also bookmark and go straight to your Watch Later playlist instead of the homepage.
- kbenson 3y ago
  I think I've interpreted your comment three different ways so far, and gotten additional insight each time. Well done. :)
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Hey, YouTube is only trying to be helpful! It knows that a half-life of a video is about 5 years - every YT video will eventually decay into error message, via one of many phenomena identified by experimental SaaSysicists, such as "geo-block decay" (and its special form, "Germany block decay"), "spontaneous demonetization", "spurious content-ID block", "channel-ban induced cascade", or "Decay Measurement Cascade Anomaly" aka. "DMCA". So it really just wants to make sure you'll watch the video before it's too late!
- kleiba 3y ago
  One rationale could be that people commonly fill up their "Watch Later" lists with hundreds of videos which they do find interesting, but ultimately forget about and never watch.
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    Yep, definitely because I'm doing the same. But don't put them in the "recommended" section - I've already accepted that I want to watch them! Put them in their own "You may have forgotten..." section.
Zetice 3y ago
Decreasing in quality relative to what? Is something you're using blowing YouTube out of the water with its recommendations?
- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  Relative to Youtube 10 years ago. It's constant enshittification[1] [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
  - hyperhopper 3y ago
    While it's trendy to link this now, users self-mutilating their content for clicks is not enshittification
    - _Algernon_ 3y ago
      Enshittification is when business goals (ie maximizing short term profits) leads to the deterioration of the platform for the users. I see the fact that the YT algorithm is tuned to encourage click-baiting as a symptom of the business goals at Youtube. It is not "self-mutilating their content" if it is required to survive on the platform.
- asciimov 3y ago
  YouTube of a few years ago, back when discovery was more important than monetization.
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  I think when people say that, which I have said before too, we usually refer to previous experience with YouTube. Same when I criticize Google's search quality for example. It's compared to how I found it before. Sure that's a bit difficult to quantify. Like for example, there was a period where discovering new channels that were right up my ally was something that happened once or twice a week. YouTube would just recommend a really interesting video from a channel I have never seen before, then I'd discover a lot of content that I really enjoy. Recently, I needed to cruise Reddit and other random sites for recommendation. Then maybe every few months I'd come across a channel that's 6 or 7 years old that's exactly the stuff I watch all the time, and some how I never saw it before despite searching for very similar terms before and finding nothing I was interested in. For example, I just discovered a channel called asianometry. He's been making videos that are exactly the kind of stuff I wanna listen to when I'm walking the dogs, but some how I came across it by a complete accident through Reddit.
satvikpendem 3y ago
Do you want recommendation? I use Distraction Free YouTube which simply blocks the main page, leaving only the search bar. When a video is playing, it blocks out the sidebar as well. As a result, I don't see recommendations anymore at all, just my subscriptions.
kolja005 3y ago
I do this as well. My experience was that after doing it for long enough, none of the videos being recommended were of any interest to me. This made me realize that roughly 90% of my YouTube usage was viewing content I didn't actually care about. I concur with others that using browser extensions that get rid of recommendations and only show the search bar is the healthiest way to use YouTube, at least for me. I get some FOMO when doing this, but I've found that reiterating to myself that my natural inquisitiveness should be enough to still find interesting content on the platform when I want to seek it out.
Bellend 3y ago
I am convinced that music.youtube.com upvotes and downvotes are irrelevant. I have been frequently using "Discover Mix" for 3 years. It seems pretty simple, I like dance music with no lyrics. I have downvoted maybe a few thousand songs. I get the usual snackbar. "We will tune your recommendations". What really gets my goat is when I flip back to the browser to see something I have already previously downvoted since there is a "thumbs down" highlight. Whatever algorithm is being used, it doesn't have the ability to not play something that has previously been disliked. Why I find this amazing is because if you told me to write a "Discover Mix" algorithm, the first or last step of that is going to be the only thing I really know. Filter out the manual dislike clicks.
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  music.youtube.com can't even play a playlist on shuffle correctly. I have a list with ~600 songs in it. It always just picks like 14 random ones and loops through them for ever.
- Nathan2055 3y ago
  It’s bizarre, because I understand why YouTube recommends heavily disliked videos or just things that you personally are likely to dislike. Anger leads to massively increased engagement, as Zuckerberg famously discovered. But music? Most people don’t listen or engage with music they dislike, and just skip to the next track. They can’t even serve additional ads that way, at least as far as I know. Unless they’re trying to inflate some made-up “total streams started” metric or something, it doesn’t make any sense to avoid filtering out disliked tracks. It’s purely a net negative for them.
  - itairall 3y ago
    I don't get it either. What is is even worse is that the algorithm has pulled a some incredible music recommendations for me but they are so few and far between. My fav is Countdown at Kusini by Manu Dibango. The soundtrack to a 1976 Nigerian action film that I absolutely love. Totally from left field. Most recommendations though are just absolutely terrible. Either stuff I would never listen to or David Bowie "Let's Dance" because I am a Bowie fan. The most trivial,useless, brain dead recommendation possible. At this point I just assume Google is far less competent than what it it seems like they should be.
mxfh 3y ago
The could have added an option to block channels from recommendations ages ago, it's by design. Especially negligent with the amount of kids on the platform.
unforgivenpasta 3y ago
I've done this to the point of getting less than a half page of recommendations, only autogenerated "Mix" playlists with music from 5+ years ago or almost exclusively videos from a channel i recently watched or subscribed to. I installed a channel blocker[1] extension to block channels from ever showing up. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-cleaner/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-clean...
worrycue 3y ago
> God forbid if I search for a something, the next day 30% of my recommendations is about that topic. Wipe your search (and watch) history - assuming you meant YouTube Search (which is getting worse by the day but I digress); Google Search at least for me doesn’t affect my YouTube recommendations at all.
- 00kevn 3y ago
  I wiped my search history and told it to not remember my search history. I left my watch history alone. I'm pretty happy with the recommendations I get from this combo. It generally doesn't recommended things I've seen, and doesn't have my search keywords polluting the recommendations
try_the_bass 3y ago
Have you considered that the first sentence might be the cause of the second and third? It seems to me that if you spend all your time telling YouTube its recommendations are bad, it can only respond by giving you worse recommendations. Given your expressed lack of interest in everything it has recommended thus far, have you considered that when you search for something, that might become the strongest signal of interest that the recommendation engine can work with?
2-718-281-828 3y ago
> theses days not really these days if you ask me. yt has been terrible at suggestions for years. it came to a point where i went on yt almost anxious in anticipation of all those thumbnails featuring open mouthed morons staring at me.
timvisee 3y ago
I use container tabs in Firefox to mitigate this. I have a "Garbage" container which unauthenticated YouTube. When I search something that I suspect will affect my feed in a bad way, I'll open it up in the container. The same can be done with a private tab, this just works a bit better.
- teh_klev 3y ago
  This is pretty much what I do but in a separate Chrome profile.
filoeleven 3y ago
I spend even more time telling YouTube: Not interested Tell us why! I’ve already watched this video Submit I’m kind of okay with it recommending channels that I may or may not care about. The channel name can be a decent indicator here. Watching one video about building practical car ramps does NOT mean I want to watch the “V8BALLZ” channel. I tell it to stop, and it does, and that’s fine. But odten OVER HALF of my YouTube feed is shit that I’ve already watched from channels that I follow, and The Algorithm Almighty won’t take the fucking hint to stop showing me the same shit no matter how many times I click furiously at the incantation. It’s almost like they really wanti to emphasize the “submit” part.

by atum47 3y ago

mostlysimilar 3y ago

Same thing if you click a YouTube link from a friend. I only open them in private windows now because otherwise it wrecks my recommendations, even if I tell YouTube to forget I watched it or to not recommend it etc.

progbits 3y ago
Removing it from watch history will have effect on recommendations, but not immediately. But yeah for a random "guilty pleasure" garbage video I use incognito too, it's just faster.

zimpenfish 3y ago

I added a whole bunch of stuff to Watch Later last week because, obvs., I wanted to watch them later. Since then, those exact same videos have been front and centre every day in the "FOR YOU" list. I mean, well done, I guess, for thinking I might want to watch videos I've specifically indicated I want to watch?

Tildey 3y ago
This infuriates me. I know the video exists, that’s why it’s on my watch later. It’s like adding an item to your cart, and then having an ad for it at the top of every search result. Another thing I hate is if you watch a video from a playlist (or the “podcasts” tab on a channel), and go into your watch history to continue the video, you can’t. It just shows a link to the entire playlist
- comex 3y ago
  I on the other hand wish it would do that more often. When I open YouTube I’m always distracted by the recommendations on the initial screen, and then I never get around to the Watch Later list. So it’s nice when Watch Later videos show up on the initial screen. I wish I could tell it to consistently show me one or two Watch Later videos on the initial screen rather than doing so seemingly at random.
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    > I wish I could tell it to consistently show me one or two Watch Later videos I would be 100% A-OK with that if it had its own section. Like there's a "News" section if I scroll down a few rows. Put "You wanted to watch these later" down there as well. Absolutely do not put them in suggestions though.
  - manigandham 3y ago
    You can also bookmark and go straight to your Watch Later playlist instead of the homepage.
kbenson 3y ago
I think I've interpreted your comment three different ways so far, and gotten additional insight each time. Well done. :)
TeMPOraL 3y ago
Hey, YouTube is only trying to be helpful! It knows that a half-life of a video is about 5 years - every YT video will eventually decay into error message, via one of many phenomena identified by experimental SaaSysicists, such as "geo-block decay" (and its special form, "Germany block decay"), "spontaneous demonetization", "spurious content-ID block", "channel-ban induced cascade", or "Decay Measurement Cascade Anomaly" aka. "DMCA". So it really just wants to make sure you'll watch the video before it's too late!
kleiba 3y ago
One rationale could be that people commonly fill up their "Watch Later" lists with hundreds of videos which they do find interesting, but ultimately forget about and never watch.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  Yep, definitely because I'm doing the same. But don't put them in the "recommended" section - I've already accepted that I want to watch them! Put them in their own "You may have forgotten..." section.

Zetice 3y ago

Decreasing in quality relative to what? Is something you're using blowing YouTube out of the water with its recommendations?

_Algernon_ 3y ago
Relative to Youtube 10 years ago. It's constant enshittification[1] [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
- hyperhopper 3y ago
  While it's trendy to link this now, users self-mutilating their content for clicks is not enshittification
  - _Algernon_ 3y ago
    Enshittification is when business goals (ie maximizing short term profits) leads to the deterioration of the platform for the users. I see the fact that the YT algorithm is tuned to encourage click-baiting as a symptom of the business goals at Youtube. It is not "self-mutilating their content" if it is required to survive on the platform.
asciimov 3y ago
YouTube of a few years ago, back when discovery was more important than monetization.
eddythompson80 3y ago
I think when people say that, which I have said before too, we usually refer to previous experience with YouTube. Same when I criticize Google's search quality for example. It's compared to how I found it before. Sure that's a bit difficult to quantify. Like for example, there was a period where discovering new channels that were right up my ally was something that happened once or twice a week. YouTube would just recommend a really interesting video from a channel I have never seen before, then I'd discover a lot of content that I really enjoy. Recently, I needed to cruise Reddit and other random sites for recommendation. Then maybe every few months I'd come across a channel that's 6 or 7 years old that's exactly the stuff I watch all the time, and some how I never saw it before despite searching for very similar terms before and finding nothing I was interested in. For example, I just discovered a channel called asianometry. He's been making videos that are exactly the kind of stuff I wanna listen to when I'm walking the dogs, but some how I came across it by a complete accident through Reddit.

satvikpendem 3y ago

Do you want recommendation? I use Distraction Free YouTube which simply blocks the main page, leaving only the search bar. When a video is playing, it blocks out the sidebar as well. As a result, I don't see recommendations anymore at all, just my subscriptions.

kolja005 3y ago

I do this as well. My experience was that after doing it for long enough, none of the videos being recommended were of any interest to me. This made me realize that roughly 90% of my YouTube usage was viewing content I didn't actually care about. I concur with others that using browser extensions that get rid of recommendations and only show the search bar is the healthiest way to use YouTube, at least for me. I get some FOMO when doing this, but I've found that reiterating to myself that my natural inquisitiveness should be enough to still find interesting content on the platform when I want to seek it out.

Bellend 3y ago

I am convinced that music.youtube.com upvotes and downvotes are irrelevant. I have been frequently using "Discover Mix" for 3 years. It seems pretty simple, I like dance music with no lyrics. I have downvoted maybe a few thousand songs. I get the usual snackbar. "We will tune your recommendations". What really gets my goat is when I flip back to the browser to see something I have already previously downvoted since there is a "thumbs down" highlight. Whatever algorithm is being used, it doesn't have the ability to not play something that has previously been disliked. Why I find this amazing is because if you told me to write a "Discover Mix" algorithm, the first or last step of that is going to be the only thing I really know. Filter out the manual dislike clicks.

eddythompson80 3y ago
music.youtube.com can't even play a playlist on shuffle correctly. I have a list with ~600 songs in it. It always just picks like 14 random ones and loops through them for ever.
Nathan2055 3y ago
It’s bizarre, because I understand why YouTube recommends heavily disliked videos or just things that you personally are likely to dislike. Anger leads to massively increased engagement, as Zuckerberg famously discovered. But music? Most people don’t listen or engage with music they dislike, and just skip to the next track. They can’t even serve additional ads that way, at least as far as I know. Unless they’re trying to inflate some made-up “total streams started” metric or something, it doesn’t make any sense to avoid filtering out disliked tracks. It’s purely a net negative for them.
- itairall 3y ago
  I don't get it either. What is is even worse is that the algorithm has pulled a some incredible music recommendations for me but they are so few and far between. My fav is Countdown at Kusini by Manu Dibango. The soundtrack to a 1976 Nigerian action film that I absolutely love. Totally from left field. Most recommendations though are just absolutely terrible. Either stuff I would never listen to or David Bowie "Let's Dance" because I am a Bowie fan. The most trivial,useless, brain dead recommendation possible. At this point I just assume Google is far less competent than what it it seems like they should be.

mxfh 3y ago

The could have added an option to block channels from recommendations ages ago, it's by design. Especially negligent with the amount of kids on the platform.

unforgivenpasta 3y ago

I've done this to the point of getting less than a half page of recommendations, only autogenerated "Mix" playlists with music from 5+ years ago or almost exclusively videos from a channel i recently watched or subscribed to. I installed a channel blocker[1] extension to block channels from ever showing up. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-cleaner/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-clean...

worrycue 3y ago

> God forbid if I search for a something, the next day 30% of my recommendations is about that topic. Wipe your search (and watch) history - assuming you meant YouTube Search (which is getting worse by the day but I digress); Google Search at least for me doesn’t affect my YouTube recommendations at all.

00kevn 3y ago
I wiped my search history and told it to not remember my search history. I left my watch history alone. I'm pretty happy with the recommendations I get from this combo. It generally doesn't recommended things I've seen, and doesn't have my search keywords polluting the recommendations

try_the_bass 3y ago

Have you considered that the first sentence might be the cause of the second and third? It seems to me that if you spend all your time telling YouTube its recommendations are bad, it can only respond by giving you worse recommendations. Given your expressed lack of interest in everything it has recommended thus far, have you considered that when you search for something, that might become the strongest signal of interest that the recommendation engine can work with?

2-718-281-828 3y ago

> theses days not really these days if you ask me. yt has been terrible at suggestions for years. it came to a point where i went on yt almost anxious in anticipation of all those thumbnails featuring open mouthed morons staring at me.

timvisee 3y ago

I use container tabs in Firefox to mitigate this. I have a "Garbage" container which unauthenticated YouTube. When I search something that I suspect will affect my feed in a bad way, I'll open it up in the container. The same can be done with a private tab, this just works a bit better.

teh_klev 3y ago
This is pretty much what I do but in a separate Chrome profile.

filoeleven 3y ago

I spend even more time telling YouTube: Not interested Tell us why! I’ve already watched this video Submit I’m kind of okay with it recommending channels that I may or may not care about. The channel name can be a decent indicator here. Watching one video about building practical car ramps does NOT mean I want to watch the “V8BALLZ” channel. I tell it to stop, and it does, and that’s fine. But odten OVER HALF of my YouTube feed is shit that I’ve already watched from channels that I follow, and The Algorithm Almighty won’t take the fucking hint to stop showing me the same shit no matter how many times I click furiously at the incantation. It’s almost like they really wanti to emphasize the “submit” part.