4 ms·

> You decide for yourself what kind of content to get from YouTube, they don't force you into harmful habits. Have you ever used Youtube? Serious question? T

by w-ll 3y ago

> You decide for yourself what kind of content to get from YouTube, they don't force you into harmful habits. Have you ever used Youtube? Serious question? There is next to no way to tell them what kinda of content I want. I pay for YT premium and recently my Android tv youtube is full of sports/football games at the top, never i have watched a sports game on YT. Shorts are shoved down your thrown on desktop or mobile, even with paid thers no way to turn that off.

carlosjobim 3y ago
If you subscribe to only high quality channels you will almost exclusively get high quality recommendations. Except for the shorts, those are a plague. I have a YT account only for the TV and the recommendations are incredible. If that doesn't work, you can use your subscription page as your entry to YouTube and you won't see any recommendations at all.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dns_snek 3y ago
  That's not true in my experience, I only subscribe to the type of content I want to watch, but my homepage is still filled with tons of garbage. God forbid I watch a one-off video on a topic I'm not typically interested in, like woodworking. Current iteration of Youtube algorithm seems to boil down to "oh I see that you watched ONE woodworking video? Well half of your homepage is about woodworking for the next week!". I've started watching videos in incognito mode which I definitely didn't need to do a couple of years ago. Current Youtube UX is beyond terrible, half the time I can't even find what I'm looking for through search because they arbitrarily cut off real search results to push clickbaity dopamine-sucking content. If they want me to pay for Premium, they need to do more than just removing ads, the entire experience needs to feel, well, Premium. They could add customization options for the homepage and search results so we can remove shorts and all the "For you" crap, add knobs to tweak recommendations, return dislike counters which were the best way of quickly filtering out terrible/clickbaity/dangerous content. They could even add some power user features like being able to find videos by searching through their indexed transcripts rather than by the title alone.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    Like I wrote, use your subscriptions page as your YouTube homepage, and you wont be pestered by irrelevant stuff. I also have a separate account for watching work or hobby related instructional videos or other crap, so as to not mess up the recommendations on the TV. YouTube makes it very easy to switch between several accounts. YouTube search results are awful, can't disagree with you on that. The same for shorts. Searching for videos on Kagi or FreeTube instead of inside YouTube can be a better option. I've also noted that YouTube search results are much better on the TV than on desktop, and that they don't suggest "Others also watched.." crap there. As for premium, I only consider it that I'm paying for the bandwidth to have the videos delivered to my computer, phone and TV without any ads. Just for that, it is incredible value already. Adding the features you list would make it even better.

by w-ll 3y ago

carlosjobim 3y ago

If you subscribe to only high quality channels you will almost exclusively get high quality recommendations. Except for the shorts, those are a plague. I have a YT account only for the TV and the recommendations are incredible. If that doesn't work, you can use your subscription page as your entry to YouTube and you won't see any recommendations at all.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dns_snek 3y ago
That's not true in my experience, I only subscribe to the type of content I want to watch, but my homepage is still filled with tons of garbage. God forbid I watch a one-off video on a topic I'm not typically interested in, like woodworking. Current iteration of Youtube algorithm seems to boil down to "oh I see that you watched ONE woodworking video? Well half of your homepage is about woodworking for the next week!". I've started watching videos in incognito mode which I definitely didn't need to do a couple of years ago. Current Youtube UX is beyond terrible, half the time I can't even find what I'm looking for through search because they arbitrarily cut off real search results to push clickbaity dopamine-sucking content. If they want me to pay for Premium, they need to do more than just removing ads, the entire experience needs to feel, well, Premium. They could add customization options for the homepage and search results so we can remove shorts and all the "For you" crap, add knobs to tweak recommendations, return dislike counters which were the best way of quickly filtering out terrible/clickbaity/dangerous content. They could even add some power user features like being able to find videos by searching through their indexed transcripts rather than by the title alone.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Like I wrote, use your subscriptions page as your YouTube homepage, and you wont be pestered by irrelevant stuff. I also have a separate account for watching work or hobby related instructional videos or other crap, so as to not mess up the recommendations on the TV. YouTube makes it very easy to switch between several accounts. YouTube search results are awful, can't disagree with you on that. The same for shorts. Searching for videos on Kagi or FreeTube instead of inside YouTube can be a better option. I've also noted that YouTube search results are much better on the TV than on desktop, and that they don't suggest "Others also watched.." crap there. As for premium, I only consider it that I'm paying for the bandwidth to have the videos delivered to my computer, phone and TV without any ads. Just for that, it is incredible value already. Adding the features you list would make it even better.