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Least favourite behavior of YouTube these days is the mass of pimple popping and wart removal videos that show up near the top of search results for damn near a

Least favourite behavior of YouTube these days is the mass of pimple popping and wart removal videos that show up near the top of search results for damn near anything. "Fluke 87v power on options"? Pimple popping. "Generator repair"? Wart removal. And it isn't just one, it's dozens of them, to the point where there might only be one or two relevant results and the rest are basically gore/grossout videos. It's still better than when it was constantly recommending the daily wire.

qup 3y ago
I've never seen one recommended, just a counter-point. I watch YouTube daily.
- johnnymorgan 3y ago
  Do you never see content that has no connection to your viewing habits? It happens all the time and I got hit with the warts and pimples a few months back, just a counter point, I watch YT daily. It's mostly shorts where you will see it
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
    I mostly see content that similar to the things I watch(lot of sci-com, some gaming stuff, some sports stuff, a fair share of chess content) The only offputting stuff I get recommended is these AI generated video essays with nonsense claims masquerading as scicom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ-pztYXH8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ-pztYXH8k Depresses me that this channel has over 100k subscribers... But I've never been recommended gross-out stuff. I have history enabled because otherwise all I get recommended is videos I've already seen. One thing I would recommend is disabling autoplay. I found recommendations improved markedly when the only videos I even start watching are ones I decided to. And sometimes with autoplay on I'd pass out in front of the TV and wake up to some wild shit, and get stranger recommendations because of it. But still not getting a bunch of gore or gross stuff.
    - shmeeed 3y ago
      Disabling autoplay is paramount. I've once tuned into my Chromecast to find my tablet had been autoplaying for a week and was in the middle of a long streak of middle-eastern folk music with guys playing the flute and dancing in a tent. Thankfully, the tablet has its own YT account, so my main never gut spammed with the corresponding recommendations.
    - Suppafly 3y ago
      Turn off downloading too. Every time I get a new phone, the youtube setting to downvote videos that I might be interested in somehow gets re-enabled. Caught it trying to download like a gig of random things just in case I wanted to watch them on my phone later.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - marcellus23 3y ago
    My recommendations are generally very relevant to the kind of stuff I've been watching and like to watch. I've never seen something as totally out-of-left-field as pimple popping -- even in shorts. I wonder what's causing this behavior to be so different for different users? I am very liberal with the thumbs-down button on anything I don't like. I'm also using YouTube premium, although I doubt that would significantly affect the quality of recs, and the recs were fine before I upgraded.
    - twisteriffic 3y ago
      The weird thing is that it's only in search results. I'm militant about thumbs down/don't recommend on the feed and shorts, and in those places I almost never get an irrelevant suggestion. It's only an issue in search, where there's no option to influence the results, and also where it's most irritating.
    - josefx 3y ago
      Youtube can crawl its way into irrelevancy if you leave it running unsupervised for too long. I had autoplay try to make me listen to Disney music for a while after letting it run over night and the recommendations can stick around for ages after that. Not sure how it got there, not my usual taste in music.
  - adra 3y ago
    Never heard of this myself... but the algorithm doesn't present you with content based on you watching the video but though others that are highly correlated with you. Maybe you started watching some weird fringe video channel that somewhat mirrors your habits but is also highly linked to viewers of these other things? The algo is just going to start grouping you into these groups if you like it or not. Don't like it? You can always do an rng spin of all posted videos and hope to find something you like, or just cut out your weirdly correlated video watching preferences.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    > It's mostly shorts where you will see it Maybe that says a lot about the type of person that will actually watch a short?
enobrev 3y ago
Maybe because I watch a good deal of youtube almost every day, but I do not see these sort of results.
crazygringo 3y ago
I think somebody watched a lot of pimple-popping videos while logged into your account. You might want to take a look at your viewing history: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history https://www.youtube.com/feed/history Because that's definitely not a default. I've never seen YouTube recommend one of those in my life.
- cobertos 3y ago
  Using YouTube's search through something not tied to your account like NewPipe will solve this issue of recommendations in search.
- adl 3y ago
  I've seen them pop up (hehe) while searching for multi-tools and bushcraft videos. Never seen one before.
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  > search results the real problem is that youtube has decided to just put normal recommendations on the search result page in the place where search results should go. I use the extension 'unhook' with the setting 'Hide Inapt Search Results' to remove that misfeature. this feature was presumably somebody's baby and I'd really like to read their writeup where they unironically exalt its virtues so I can try to gauge how far up their ass their head is.
  - Whooping7116 3y ago
    [dead]
  - CBLT 3y ago
    My favorite internal Google writeup of that kind was for when they doubled the number of screens you needed to click through to cancel YouTube Premium. By adding friction there, they reduced the number of people who successfully canceled their subscription. But the writeup was so very sure that all those people, in the middle of the cancel process, suddenly realized all the features they value in YouTube Premium, and that this change was making people's lives better.
throwanem 3y ago
Do you use the "not interested"/"don't recommend channel" options on these, or report them? If not, it may be worth a try. They seem to do a lot to steer Youtube's recommender away from the more gamy regions of its latent space; for example, something like a year ago I saw recommended such a video, immediately reported it for "violent or repulsive content", and thus far haven't seen another. The same has been true for the occasional weirdo along the stripe of modern Russell Brand. To be clear, I don't think the report was acted upon by Youtube, but I do think the signal inherent in the action must be accounted for in its recommendation model. Also to be clear, this is no defense of Youtube. It's pretty trash these days, and even the most innocuous recommendations I get have very little to do with anything I'm actually interested in, but this does seem to keep it from getting the idea I might want to see incels and gore.
- twisteriffic 3y ago
  There's no option to block a channel or "don't recommend" from search results, at least in the android app. Afaik that's only available in the feed.
  - verve_rat 3y ago
    Yup, no option on desktop either. This is obviously not based on viewing history, YouTube is doing something weird just with the recommendations embedded into search results. For me these "you also might like" sections in search results are 50 woodworking and 50 gross out garbage.
    - twisteriffic 3y ago
      It's nice to know my misery has company.
      - throwanem 3y ago
        It's nice to know that as poorly as I think of Youtube, that's still a significant overestimation...
humblepie 3y ago
You're not alone. I've seen it on my account, and all I watch is old jazz stuff and nothing else. My wife's account who just watches mostly bakery has been getting these cartoon or AI generated "child slavery" depictions.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  Do you have history enabled?
  - verve_rat 3y ago
    Read the rest of the responses here. It's not history.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
      I have, and I'm not convinced history doesn't play a role. No need to be rude about it.
      - twisteriffic 3y ago
        If I've ever watched one of those type of videos it's so far back in my history that I can't find it any more, as in years in the past.
      - verve_rat 3y ago
        I'm sorry if I came off as rude, but "your holding it wrong" doesn't exactly engineer civility.
yen223 3y ago
I searched "Fluke 87v power on options" on YouTube in an incognito page, and all I got were results around the multimeter. Like literally, my screen only had pictures of multimeters. For good measure I repeated the search in my main Youtube account. Same thing.
- not1ofU 3y ago
  google ignores incognito mode https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39078417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39078417
  - yen223 3y ago
    My front-page recommendations in incognito is a completely different set of videos from my front-page recommendations in my logged-in main account, except for one (a Veritasium video with 14 million views). So if YouTube is tracking me across incognito mode, then they aren't doing a very good job there.
    - justsomehnguy 3y ago
      They can't be too obvious about that. So works as intended.
- twisteriffic 3y ago
  https://i.postimg.cc/J49KjXZ2/Screenshot-20240215-183710.png https://i.postimg.cc/J49KjXZ2/Screenshot-20240215-183710.png It's likely some coincidence of my previous viewing history, though how woodworking, small engine repair and distributed systems pointed to grossout videos I have no idea. I've heard of at least a dozen other people that this happens to so far across a wide range of viewing habits.
  - dpkirchner 3y ago
    Funny, when I run that search in mobile Safari, disable my ad blocker, and then request desktop site to see if I can repro, I'm immediately redirected to one of the advertised sites (a scam/fraudulent site, naturally). Another oddity to toss on the pyre.
vdaea 3y ago
This happens to me even though 1) I never log in and 2) I clear my cookies daily. The other day I was looking for recipes and I had to see disgusting video thumbnails of faces full of zits interspersed with thumbnails of the food I wanted to cook. There's a ublock origin filter here that hides suggested videos and other crap from the search results page https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube#wiki_search_page_without_bloat https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube...
numpad0 3y ago
I don't speak web front end so I can't explain, but it seems a lot of those are fed from ad system and joined on-browser, "we already have a perfect system for this, why not just..." style. For me, enabling more adblock volunteer maintained filters, custom element filters, and parameter removals took it away, at costs of YouTube showing me ever niche-er and increasingly monotonic selections.
nonethewiser 3y ago
Well not for me
Tommy430 3y ago
Honestly, the search has been broken for a while. Half of the search results aren't even related and another thing I hate is YouTube Shorts. Anyways, for me, I just loathe how the whole site is designed in general. Opening YouTube today on a modern browser is slower than opening it on IE6 back then and the whole site relies on a JavaScript framework even though frontends like Invidious, Piped, and YT2009 (and possibly even more) show that you don't need JavaScript or have to make the entire site rely on it just to view content.
- shiroiushi 3y ago
  >Opening YouTube today on a modern browser is slower than opening it on IE6 back then This is true for so many things on computers these days: websites, various software, etc.
mathieuh 3y ago
It keeps recommending me far-right political videos for some reason. I think it's because I like watching Forgotten Weapons and InRangeTV, even though Forgotten Weapons has essentially zero politics in it and InRangeTV is run by a left-libertarian. Even after doing the "never recommend me this channel" thing it keeps recommending me this Jordan Peterson-type shit about "leftist woke idiots getting owned". Plus, no matter how many times I tap "Not interested" on the Shorts section every week it's back.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  My guess is InRange is to blame in your case. In my experience, youtube has an "engages in political content" bucket they can put people in that doesn't discriminate between the flavor of politics; watch any sort of political content and it will start recommending any sort in turn, even political content from viewpoints you cannot stand and would never watch. I guess a lot of people rage-watch political content they dislike, so this sort of category makes practical sense for youtube. This happened to me a few times. Thankfully, clearing cookies is an easy fix for me since I don't use an account; people who do may have to spend some time sanitizing their view history. I now avoid all content that has even a whiff of content that might be automatically classified as political advocacy. I still watch occasional FW videos, although not the ones where I think he'll discuss firearm laws, and InRange is out because Karl too frequently discusses the law and political landscape w.r.t. online privacy/etc. Since reaching the above conclusion and making these changes, my front page has been clear of anything with even a suggestion of partisan politics. It's all machine and mechanism videos, the way I like it. (Except for the occasional grossout pimple video in the search results, but that's another story...)
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  I think part of that is just reactionary politics on both ends of the spectrum play really well in social media in general, which YouTube is (of course) slowly turning into because everything fucking is. Anywhere the attention economy is, there is always a market for loud, irritating people doing loud, irritating things because they attract audiences, both in the people who agree with them, and the people who think they're fucking jokes. I honestly wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if in the near future we have sociologists who pin the catastrophic political divides we now experience down to, at least in part, the fact that so many massive institutions in our society at this particular moment are finding the absolute most ridiculous people and giving them the largest megaphone in the history of our species to scream into because it makes them money.
samlinnfer 3y ago
Do you use adblock?

qup 3y ago

I've never seen one recommended, just a counter-point. I watch YouTube daily.

johnnymorgan 3y ago
Do you never see content that has no connection to your viewing habits? It happens all the time and I got hit with the warts and pimples a few months back, just a counter point, I watch YT daily. It's mostly shorts where you will see it
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  I mostly see content that similar to the things I watch(lot of sci-com, some gaming stuff, some sports stuff, a fair share of chess content) The only offputting stuff I get recommended is these AI generated video essays with nonsense claims masquerading as scicom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ-pztYXH8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ-pztYXH8k Depresses me that this channel has over 100k subscribers... But I've never been recommended gross-out stuff. I have history enabled because otherwise all I get recommended is videos I've already seen. One thing I would recommend is disabling autoplay. I found recommendations improved markedly when the only videos I even start watching are ones I decided to. And sometimes with autoplay on I'd pass out in front of the TV and wake up to some wild shit, and get stranger recommendations because of it. But still not getting a bunch of gore or gross stuff.
  - shmeeed 3y ago
    Disabling autoplay is paramount. I've once tuned into my Chromecast to find my tablet had been autoplaying for a week and was in the middle of a long streak of middle-eastern folk music with guys playing the flute and dancing in a tent. Thankfully, the tablet has its own YT account, so my main never gut spammed with the corresponding recommendations.
  - Suppafly 3y ago
    Turn off downloading too. Every time I get a new phone, the youtube setting to downvote videos that I might be interested in somehow gets re-enabled. Caught it trying to download like a gig of random things just in case I wanted to watch them on my phone later.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- marcellus23 3y ago
  My recommendations are generally very relevant to the kind of stuff I've been watching and like to watch. I've never seen something as totally out-of-left-field as pimple popping -- even in shorts. I wonder what's causing this behavior to be so different for different users? I am very liberal with the thumbs-down button on anything I don't like. I'm also using YouTube premium, although I doubt that would significantly affect the quality of recs, and the recs were fine before I upgraded.
  - twisteriffic 3y ago
    The weird thing is that it's only in search results. I'm militant about thumbs down/don't recommend on the feed and shorts, and in those places I almost never get an irrelevant suggestion. It's only an issue in search, where there's no option to influence the results, and also where it's most irritating.
  - josefx 3y ago
    Youtube can crawl its way into irrelevancy if you leave it running unsupervised for too long. I had autoplay try to make me listen to Disney music for a while after letting it run over night and the recommendations can stick around for ages after that. Not sure how it got there, not my usual taste in music.
- adra 3y ago
  Never heard of this myself... but the algorithm doesn't present you with content based on you watching the video but though others that are highly correlated with you. Maybe you started watching some weird fringe video channel that somewhat mirrors your habits but is also highly linked to viewers of these other things? The algo is just going to start grouping you into these groups if you like it or not. Don't like it? You can always do an rng spin of all posted videos and hope to find something you like, or just cut out your weirdly correlated video watching preferences.
- dylan604 3y ago
  > It's mostly shorts where you will see it Maybe that says a lot about the type of person that will actually watch a short?

enobrev 3y ago

Maybe because I watch a good deal of youtube almost every day, but I do not see these sort of results.

crazygringo 3y ago

I think somebody watched a lot of pimple-popping videos while logged into your account. You might want to take a look at your viewing history: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history https://www.youtube.com/feed/history Because that's definitely not a default. I've never seen YouTube recommend one of those in my life.

cobertos 3y ago
Using YouTube's search through something not tied to your account like NewPipe will solve this issue of recommendations in search.
adl 3y ago
I've seen them pop up (hehe) while searching for multi-tools and bushcraft videos. Never seen one before.
jabroni_salad 3y ago
> search results the real problem is that youtube has decided to just put normal recommendations on the search result page in the place where search results should go. I use the extension 'unhook' with the setting 'Hide Inapt Search Results' to remove that misfeature. this feature was presumably somebody's baby and I'd really like to read their writeup where they unironically exalt its virtues so I can try to gauge how far up their ass their head is.
- Whooping7116 3y ago
  [dead]
- CBLT 3y ago
  My favorite internal Google writeup of that kind was for when they doubled the number of screens you needed to click through to cancel YouTube Premium. By adding friction there, they reduced the number of people who successfully canceled their subscription. But the writeup was so very sure that all those people, in the middle of the cancel process, suddenly realized all the features they value in YouTube Premium, and that this change was making people's lives better.

throwanem 3y ago

Do you use the "not interested"/"don't recommend channel" options on these, or report them? If not, it may be worth a try. They seem to do a lot to steer Youtube's recommender away from the more gamy regions of its latent space; for example, something like a year ago I saw recommended such a video, immediately reported it for "violent or repulsive content", and thus far haven't seen another. The same has been true for the occasional weirdo along the stripe of modern Russell Brand. To be clear, I don't think the report was acted upon by Youtube, but I do think the signal inherent in the action must be accounted for in its recommendation model. Also to be clear, this is no defense of Youtube. It's pretty trash these days, and even the most innocuous recommendations I get have very little to do with anything I'm actually interested in, but this does seem to keep it from getting the idea I might want to see incels and gore.

twisteriffic 3y ago
There's no option to block a channel or "don't recommend" from search results, at least in the android app. Afaik that's only available in the feed.
- verve_rat 3y ago
  Yup, no option on desktop either. This is obviously not based on viewing history, YouTube is doing something weird just with the recommendations embedded into search results. For me these "you also might like" sections in search results are 50 woodworking and 50 gross out garbage.
  - twisteriffic 3y ago
    It's nice to know my misery has company.
    - throwanem 3y ago
      It's nice to know that as poorly as I think of Youtube, that's still a significant overestimation...

humblepie 3y ago

You're not alone. I've seen it on my account, and all I watch is old jazz stuff and nothing else. My wife's account who just watches mostly bakery has been getting these cartoon or AI generated "child slavery" depictions.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
Do you have history enabled?
- verve_rat 3y ago
  Read the rest of the responses here. It's not history.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
    I have, and I'm not convinced history doesn't play a role. No need to be rude about it.
    - twisteriffic 3y ago
      If I've ever watched one of those type of videos it's so far back in my history that I can't find it any more, as in years in the past.
    - verve_rat 3y ago
      I'm sorry if I came off as rude, but "your holding it wrong" doesn't exactly engineer civility.

yen223 3y ago

I searched "Fluke 87v power on options" on YouTube in an incognito page, and all I got were results around the multimeter. Like literally, my screen only had pictures of multimeters. For good measure I repeated the search in my main Youtube account. Same thing.

not1ofU 3y ago
google ignores incognito mode https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39078417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39078417
- yen223 3y ago
  My front-page recommendations in incognito is a completely different set of videos from my front-page recommendations in my logged-in main account, except for one (a Veritasium video with 14 million views). So if YouTube is tracking me across incognito mode, then they aren't doing a very good job there.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    They can't be too obvious about that. So works as intended.
twisteriffic 3y ago
https://i.postimg.cc/J49KjXZ2/Screenshot-20240215-183710.png https://i.postimg.cc/J49KjXZ2/Screenshot-20240215-183710.png It's likely some coincidence of my previous viewing history, though how woodworking, small engine repair and distributed systems pointed to grossout videos I have no idea. I've heard of at least a dozen other people that this happens to so far across a wide range of viewing habits.
- dpkirchner 3y ago
  Funny, when I run that search in mobile Safari, disable my ad blocker, and then request desktop site to see if I can repro, I'm immediately redirected to one of the advertised sites (a scam/fraudulent site, naturally). Another oddity to toss on the pyre.

vdaea 3y ago

This happens to me even though 1) I never log in and 2) I clear my cookies daily. The other day I was looking for recipes and I had to see disgusting video thumbnails of faces full of zits interspersed with thumbnails of the food I wanted to cook. There's a ublock origin filter here that hides suggested videos and other crap from the search results page https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube#wiki_search_page_without_bloat https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube...

numpad0 3y ago

I don't speak web front end so I can't explain, but it seems a lot of those are fed from ad system and joined on-browser, "we already have a perfect system for this, why not just..." style. For me, enabling more adblock volunteer maintained filters, custom element filters, and parameter removals took it away, at costs of YouTube showing me ever niche-er and increasingly monotonic selections.

nonethewiser 3y ago

Well not for me

Tommy430 3y ago

Honestly, the search has been broken for a while. Half of the search results aren't even related and another thing I hate is YouTube Shorts. Anyways, for me, I just loathe how the whole site is designed in general. Opening YouTube today on a modern browser is slower than opening it on IE6 back then and the whole site relies on a JavaScript framework even though frontends like Invidious, Piped, and YT2009 (and possibly even more) show that you don't need JavaScript or have to make the entire site rely on it just to view content.

shiroiushi 3y ago
>Opening YouTube today on a modern browser is slower than opening it on IE6 back then This is true for so many things on computers these days: websites, various software, etc.

mathieuh 3y ago

It keeps recommending me far-right political videos for some reason. I think it's because I like watching Forgotten Weapons and InRangeTV, even though Forgotten Weapons has essentially zero politics in it and InRangeTV is run by a left-libertarian. Even after doing the "never recommend me this channel" thing it keeps recommending me this Jordan Peterson-type shit about "leftist woke idiots getting owned". Plus, no matter how many times I tap "Not interested" on the Shorts section every week it's back.

lupusreal 3y ago
My guess is InRange is to blame in your case. In my experience, youtube has an "engages in political content" bucket they can put people in that doesn't discriminate between the flavor of politics; watch any sort of political content and it will start recommending any sort in turn, even political content from viewpoints you cannot stand and would never watch. I guess a lot of people rage-watch political content they dislike, so this sort of category makes practical sense for youtube. This happened to me a few times. Thankfully, clearing cookies is an easy fix for me since I don't use an account; people who do may have to spend some time sanitizing their view history. I now avoid all content that has even a whiff of content that might be automatically classified as political advocacy. I still watch occasional FW videos, although not the ones where I think he'll discuss firearm laws, and InRange is out because Karl too frequently discusses the law and political landscape w.r.t. online privacy/etc. Since reaching the above conclusion and making these changes, my front page has been clear of anything with even a suggestion of partisan politics. It's all machine and mechanism videos, the way I like it. (Except for the occasional grossout pimple video in the search results, but that's another story...)
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
I think part of that is just reactionary politics on both ends of the spectrum play really well in social media in general, which YouTube is (of course) slowly turning into because everything fucking is. Anywhere the attention economy is, there is always a market for loud, irritating people doing loud, irritating things because they attract audiences, both in the people who agree with them, and the people who think they're fucking jokes. I honestly wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if in the near future we have sociologists who pin the catastrophic political divides we now experience down to, at least in part, the fact that so many massive institutions in our society at this particular moment are finding the absolute most ridiculous people and giving them the largest megaphone in the history of our species to scream into because it makes them money.

samlinnfer 3y ago

Do you use adblock?