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I'm starting to consider creating different accounts / profiles for my different interests. The problem that I have with YouTube is that it can't know what I'm
by gspencley 2y ago
I'm starting to consider creating different accounts / profiles for my different interests. The problem that I have with YouTube is that it can't know what I'm in the mood for at any given moment and it thinks that if I click on one single video about a sensitive topic that suddenly I want my entire home page to be overrun with recommendations about that.
To give a specific example, something that honestly kind of baffles and bothers me is the amount of firearms related videos in my recommendations despite the fact that I never watch them, I don't own any firearms and I keep clicking "Don't Recommend Channel" and they never seem to go away. It has to be because the topic is tangentially related somehow to something I've watched, or maybe people who are into firearms overlap with some of the content I watch. But it's the volume and the non-responsiveness to my feedback that annoys me.
Another example: my wife and I enjoy watching the Eurovision Song Contest every year. So naturally we've watched a lot of that content in the days and weeks leading up to it. Obviously the algorithm is going to recommend content related to Eurovision, but my home page is completely flooded with these recommendations to the seeming exclusion of most other stuff that I want to watch. And I keep clicking "Don't Recommend Channel" on the various "reaction" videos that are just feeder content featuring people reacting to the songs and performances ... because I CAN'T STAND reaction videos in general and NEVER watch them. But they keep appearing in the recommendations nonetheless.
Recommendation algorithms are a hard problem to solve, for sure. I'm not trying to be unfair to YouTube because I know these recommendations are somehow related to what I do watch. I just know that it feels like 90% of those recommendations miss the mark regardless. YouTube is starting to feel like cable TV these days ("200 channels and nothing to watch") where my wife and I often find ourselves just doom scrolling and refreshing the home page (we watch on our TV) hoping that something we're interested in watching at that moment will appear. Often times nothing does and we go do something else.
- gspencley 2y agoReplying to myself because I just thought of a 3rd example that is extremely common for me: news channels. I don't watch news on YouTube, ever. If I see a video from a news outlet I automatically click "Don't Recommend Channel." And I've done that with all of the big major news channels like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC etc. But that doesn't stop videos from local affiliates showing up in a never ending game of whack-a-mole. To be fair these do not tend to "flood" my recommendations. But I want them to go away all together and I can't seem to make that happen.