Ss m.youtube.com results search_query on top of the world searching năm 2024

Recommendation system is long time broken. I am subscribed to 100+ channels and check 10 channels on a weekly basis, meaning I watch all the new videos these creators make. So that means I want the new stuff from the frequented ones on my front page ASAP. Yet, it's a hit and miss. From the remaining 90 channels I never get anything recommended. Why?

If I subscribe to a new channel it gets recommended like hell, then it forgets about it.

BUT! Totally irrelevant things that I never watch, is kept on my front page for weeks. Like it wants me to check it or wants me to mute it, but fuck them I'm not giving them any more metrics. If I clear the fingerprints and block the acquiring of these metrics the front page gets filled with new, interesting content. Who the hell understands this? I have also observed that if you have an adblocker enabled it gives you trash all the time.

When the absolutely disgusting, braindead, bottomfeeding "depp vs amber" nightmare was ongoing I had to "mute" the same channels multiple times and then 55 others, because it just slams it into my face. Watch it, watch it, you must see this muck.

The topic of my fav channels represent... I get nothing relevant from them. :DDD

The shorts... was the pinnacle of YTs innovation. :DDDD

Goog is all about control now. Look innovation for somewhere else... well... if you can find any, lemme know........

You can't do shit with godzilla and now he does whatever he wants.

The best part of YouTube recommendations - side bar recommendations - have been broken for at least 7-9 years. I remember going on deep YouTube rabbit holes in another era, because their recommendations always pointed to new, highly related content. Then, at some point in time, YouTube switched their recommendations algorithm to direct me to a mixture of 1) videos (mostly on unrelated topics) that I've already viewed, 2) videos about topics that I've recently searched for or watched that are unrelated to the current video, 3) videos trending across all of YouTube, and etc.

There are other things that drive me nuts about YouTube's recommendations, like the fact that they will never recommend me the next part of a n-part video. If I'm watching part 2/3 of something, please show 3/3 in the side bar, YouTube!

YouTube's iterative degeneration into its current state points to the folly of A/B-maximalism. In the pursuit of getting more base hits, it seems like YouTube forgot that the goal of baseball is to win games and keep fans entertained.

YouTube has been bad for a while. I suppose that some part of that is good – YT effectively killed the addictive loops that made their website irresistible. However, there is a lot that sucks about it. The utility of YouTube has gone down. Furthermore, I think YT blew open a hole in the video space for services like TikTok to emerge. TikTok may be crack, but YouTube used to be cocaine.

It's pretty clear to me that YouTube wants to steer you towards content they want you to watch and not content that you want to watch. Watching intellectual long-form content does not equal ad revenue, user "engagement", and whatever else bullshit addictive metrics they only care about.

None of these systems are for the people. It's either about YouTube's bottom dollar or some influencer's ego. It is really amazing to me when I come across old YouTube videos that are just people filming or discussing something interesting without fanfare. You can find newer people doing this these days as well, but it's hard. These types of videos are so refreshing because it's what YouTube should be about: people being creative in honest ways, people talking about or showing something they're interested in, etc.

\>It is really amazing to me when I come across old YouTube videos that are just people filming or discussing something interesting without fanfare.

This so much. I feel the same way, I remember when people would just make creative videos or goofy animations.

\> It's pretty clear to me that YouTube wants to steer you towards content _they_ want you to watch and not content that you want to watch.

This is it. Exactly.

\>I remember going on deep YouTube rabbit holes in another era, because their recommendations always pointed to new, highly related content. Then, at some point in time, YouTube switched their recommendations algorithm to direct me to a mixture of 1) videos (mostly on unrelated topics) that I've already viewed, 2) videos about topics that I've recently searched for or watched that are unrelated to the current video, 3) videos trending across all of YouTube, and etc.

I've been working on a small team to tackle this problem. We have a working prototype if anyone is interested in checking it out. Look up a channel to get a list of channels in the same niche or related niches. It is specifically designed to surface smaller creators.

Here is our list for 3Blue1Brown, which seems to be popular around here:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/

The icons are crawlable links, so you can click the channels in a given list to go to the list for that channel.

We also have mapped the channels to provide a new way to explore. The map clusters similar channels so you can get a spatial sense of where your interests are and what interests and niches are very far away, ones you may not consider or even be aware exist. For the curious, here is a short blog post explaining the map and how to use it:

https://channelgalaxy.com/blog/article0/

I hope this isn't too self-promotional. I think there is a need for this kind of thing and it is hard to resist the many, many cries of frustration about user exploration on YouTube and the narrowness of their recommendations that I frequently see around here.

Cheers!

\> There are other things that drive me nuts about YouTube's recommendations, like the fact that they will never recommend me the next part of a n-part video. If I'm watching part 2/3 of something, please show 3/3 in the side bar, YouTube!

It used to do that, though! They should at least allow it up to a limit or something rather than making it just that stupid.

My other biggest complaint really is the recommendation system in general. It's so bad that I can guarantee you that I can fall asleep to something innocuous like Spongebob Squarepants and in the morning I'll wake up and it's playing Jordan Peterson. EVERY. STINKING. TIME. It was like that before with Lex Fridman, and I totally had to unsubscribe and unlike a lot of Lex content before it would stop autoplaying it. I can't keep playing that game, but at least I can tolerate Peterson's voice more than Lex's.

Funny thing is I was never crazy about either one. They clearly profiled me as being the kind of person who watches that stuff. No, surely the fact I watch a lot of videos about theme park rides can't mean I want to see similar content. Obviously, I want to watch Jordan Peterson!!! :D /s

Without the market dominance, YouTube would be marginally better than its competitors.

The x/n videos are mostly - not all obviously but mostly - pirated copyrighted content in shortened clips, reversed or mirrored, shrunk, made more high pitch, or something to beat the algorithm. I agree it would be nice but I see why they broke that functionality.

I'm surprised you guys still get recommendations.

YouTube disabled my entire feed a few weeks ago (https://i.imgur.com/Q78FqLQ.png) and is bullying with a big prompt to turn on tracking to restore it. What's funny is that recommendations have worked perfectly well for the last few years with history turned off (Just show me the stuff I subscribed to) but now I have to click on each subscription one-by-one to see content. Good riddance since I've pretty much stopped using Youtube at this point.

I fairly reliably get the next part of a multi-part series provided they're in a playlist (even if I'm not looking at them in the playlist).

I actually think the sidebar recommendations for a given video (at least for music) are still quite good. It's only when it starts taking into account your watch history does it start to get muddied up very fast. I wonder if there's an addon/userscript plugin that can wipe cookies upon every page refresh for a "pure" YouTube experience every time.

Same experience! I watch on NewPipe and the recommendations are very good: videos related to the video I'm watching. I open a video “How jet engines work” and the recommendations are more “engineering visualisation”-type videos, I open a lecture by Yanis Varoufakis and the recommendations are more lectures and debates on economics, I open a CCC talk on the Amiga and the recommendations are more excellent CCC talks. But the key is: not being logged in, or the “enhanced recommendations” (ironically the value-add part, supposedly) fuck everything up.

When it comes to music, it usually takes up to 5 songs on autoplay before YouTube will get in a rut and replay the same exact sequence of 8 songs. Every. Time. Forever. It's not that I dislike those songs, but I think I'm starting to at this rate.

How can Youtubd's recommendations can be so terrible compared to Spotify???

I don't get it.

If you know what you want to watch why rely on Google recommending it to you? I only visit my subscriptions page:

https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

I don't have notifications on and when I visit YouTube I'll check to see what videos I want to watch since I last visited. I usually check the up next to see if anything similar/interesting is recommended and very rarely go to the home page to get recommendations.

Because I want new and fresh content from the topics I frequently watch. I want to be entertained, stimulated in various, unexpected ways. YT is sitting atop a goldmine and they offer only morsels.

I'm not subscribed to a lot of channels, and mostly relied on recommendations, which served me reasonably well for a time, but over time I noticed that some of my interests completely vanished, while others keep repeating old stuff I've already seen. And even channels I'm subscribed to, the recommendations are often old stuff and not the most recent.

But click one recommendation outside my interests just to check it out, and that's going to dominate for the next couple of weeks even if I decide I don't like it. Maybe I should downvote that more aggressively.

If you're not looking for recommendations and just your subscriptions, then you should be checking the subscriptions tab, not the home page. You'll always have all uploads from subscribed channels listed there

Shouldn't they be able to detect your preferred behaviour and put that on the homepage? They seem to be focused so much on creating magical AI that they're missing some fundamental easy stuff.

That's not what the recommendations are for. There's a separate page that list all posts by your subscriptions in chronological order, you can find it in the sidebar, IMO it's the only way to use YouTube.

Which is also nonfunctional, useless, not for human consumption. You can't filter those in any way. It looks like a relic from the 90s :DDD. Anything else you want to add?

\> You can't filter those in any way.

You can easily filter it, by unsubscribing to content you don't actually want. If you watch so little content of a channel that it annoys you to see it on the subscriptions pages, then you shouldn't be subscribed to them.

I can't see how adding a filter system would be less annoying at that point, you would take more time by selecting some filter than just ignoring that specific content. Out of my 352 subscriptions, I got 22 videos yesterday, quite fast to skip them.

If you allow several hundred subscriptions, then make sure you can filter through various ways too. So easy. There are channels who create good content, but on rare occasions. So if you unsubscribe you have to manually view their channel.

I suspect YouTube is weighting incorrectly. I miss Human Curation of content.

I am looking for other sources.

It's annoying, more often than joyful, to use YouTube for me. It feels like a half-baked project. I miss Human Curation.

My story: paying long-term YT user (no ads), watched many multi-hour "calm stream / quiet cafe" videos, Recommended list became 75% polluted w/these and un-cleanable regardless of many "Don't Like" actions by me, nuked history, still seeing some.

\> If I clear the fingerprints and block the acquiring of these metrics

Honesty question here, but how do you do that?

I'm not sure what he means by 'clearing' his fingerprint, but if you visit EFF[0], you can check if your fingerprint is at least random. I've only been able to achieve a random fingerprint on Brave browser. Even clearing all cookies/cache on your browser will not reset the fingerprint. To prevent metric collection, you can't be logged in and you need your browser settings set to block cookies for YouTube. [0] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

I find value, but at what cost? When you are info hungry you don't like your precious time being wasted bc of inefficient systems hindering your work. Do I have to write API helper scripts and scrapers in 2022 for a top10 visited internet site?

BUT, BUT, BUT THE PINNACLE OF INNOVATION IS YOUTUBE/GOOGLE, RIGHT?

And they host these nice and trendy videos about how advanced they are, and how you should do your coding, how you should organize your work, your life, your team, whatever. And the terrible libraries... gimme a fn break. Too bad for the end consumer, it's all about pain.

I mean even porn sites have finer grained control on content filtering than YT :DDD. I'm wondering why they are not opening their code base and let the coding done by individuals, OF COURSE, FOR FREE! ha ha ha

Maybe near-zero but not zero. They said that they watch content from 10 (out of the 100) creators they are subscribed to.

I'm in a similar position. I'm subscribed to 78 channels but typically will only watch content from a fraction of these due to preferences on quality and time (some creators have good content but end up putting up an hour video, which I am less likely to view).

\> I'm subscribed to 78 channels but typically will only watch content from a fraction of these

Statement indistinguishable from classic cable TV user.

What's worse, the "not interested" button is broken. I get a couple of music albums recommended fairly often and I click on "not interested" every time I see them, only to have them pop up again a few days later.

Do you also get an endless stream of shuffle dance shorts being shoved down your throat? I think I made the mistake of clicking on one months and months ago and now YT won't stop trying to force feed me those shorts. They are 100% not like anything I watch on a regular basis. So Bad.

Edit: For clarity, I had no idea WTF a shuffle dance was and curiosity got the better of me. Super great way to make me NOT curious about my non-core interests.

Or it is working exactly as intended. We forget sometimes that we have misaligned incentives: We want the most interesting content and Google wants the most ad $$$.

Their search has got pretty bad I've noticed. They've changed it to start showing random shit you might want to watch instead of the thing you actually searched for after the first 10 or so videos. They seem to repeat videos they think you ought to watch quite often in search results as well.

Significant downgrade on what it used to be.

Bad search that tries hard not to actually show you search results is another one of those dark trends I see everywhere.

Have you seen Twitter search lately? The search tab in the app doesn't even have a text field visible by default. It's all just unrelated popular garbage. You have to swipe down to reveal the text field where you can enter your search term. Then you get more unrelated garbage in the "top" result tab and you need to go to one of the other tabs to actually see what you were searching for.

Search on the iOS app store is awful too. You type in the exact name of the app you are looking for and have to scroll through 10-15 vaguely related results before you get to the one you actually want.

Search on windows is uniquely terrible. Oh, you wanted to launch that app? Let me open Edge with a bing search for that app. I especially love it when I'm trying to launch stellarium and it only suggests "stellarium 200%" unless I delete the "m" from stellarium and then it'll suggest "stellarium", "stellarium 200%" and "stellarium (OpenGL)". Anything else and the only result is "stellarium 200%"

It's total garbage. It's unreliable, sometimes typing out the full name of the app (which kinda defeats the purpose) is the only way to get the app to show in the search results, sometimes NOT typing the full name is the only way to get it to show. Sometimes you get an app, sometimes you get an unrelated app (type is prusa for prusa slicer and you get printers), often times you'll get a random log file with a similar name, or a bing search you certainly don't want.

Hot garbage.

Doesn't the Windows - R shortcut work anymore? This always worked much better than just opening the start menu and typing because it only looks for apps and doesn't try to 'help' you with other random searches. But I don't use Windows so much lately so it could be they removed that also. They seem to do that with everything that's useful.

It does, but it has no autocomplete, or suggestions. You have to type everything completely and perfectly for it to work.

If only it worked like command+space on mac.

Ah that's true but I always type the executable name. E.g. regedit, gpedit, lusrmgr... And it does have a command history that serves as autocomplete as far as I remember, you just have to have used it before.

Spotlight on Mac is indeed far superior. And so is the text launch widget thingy on KDE which I use now.

App stores are rent-seeking middle men. They provide no value over a simple Google search. In fact they seem deliberately worse, given that you almost always get the correct results at the top. Ironic that this applies to Google's Android app store as well. Their only purpose is to extract cash and control what you run on your own devices without providing value.

I usually get the result I want in the second slot. The first slot is always wrong because it's always an ad.

Google Play app store is similar IME; also, it doesn't even let you sort by ratings, like, isn't that the very first thing people want out of a curated store?

It's like Amazon's search, it's ridiculous how bad it is.

A quick glance at these shows Western Capitalism fails to optimise the market and instead optimises profit.

Google's shopping search is definitely not designed to help one shop.

The most irritating thing about App Store search is that the text field doesn’t get focus by default. I hope it’s an unintentional mistake but as it’s never been fixed I have my doubts…

Meanwhile the only way I can get to advanced search on the web site is searching for "advanced search" in the regular search box.

Yes. God help you if you're looking for a video not made by a popular youtuber. Saw an amazing fried chicken recipe ten years ago and think you can just scroll the results until you see it? Ha, fat chance. You've got about five results and then nothing but whatever horseshit is trendy today.

Recipes are particularly hopeless. There's a highly formulaic style of recipe video that caught on a year or two ago. Videos built on this formula usually have a title like "I have never eaten such delicious $X", usually with a thumbnail of a liquid being poured over some food, and frequently describe nonsensical or terrible recipes. These videos are useless for actual cooking advice, but somehow get a ton of engagement anyway -- I often get them as recommendations despite not even being interested in cooking videos.

Add it to a playlist (or bookmark it). I don't trust the videos to still be up when I might be interested in them so I've become a little bit of a data hoarder.

Yes, it only takes one scroll through your "Liked" videos and noticing how many are gone to become an archivist. The Youtube folder on my media drive is quite large.

I started using a bookmark service because of this.

And after I wrote that sentence I found the original video I was thinking about with a google search. Welp.

Its ability to use cookies from your browser is so much better than the original yt-dl it’s not even funny.

Does yt-dlp support downloading a whole channel at the highest available resolution when that might be different for every video?

I've noticed this with Google, too. Particularly when searching for things in the past, it's like they adamantly don't want 3+ months ago to exist. I now have to archive news articles and the like because I know that I'm going to have an extremely hard time finding them later.

If search works too good you are gone too quickly. Amazon figured this out A LOOOONG time ago. If Google makes you rephrase your search 10 times that 10x ads they can show you. If they take those opportunities to also drive you to crap sites that waste time but are heavily monetized by Google ads then that's even more for them. It's no different than grocery stores putting the most commonly purchased items all the way in the back. Want to run in and get milk? Maybe, we have 6 gallons that expire in the next 5 minutes up front, but if you want more you gotta walk past chips, beer, frozen pizzas and a wall of cheese.

It's definitely an accelerating trend though, online search is getting so much worse and even fast food menus are insane now. You need to the app to see anything other than the most profitable combos in many cases.

\> even fast food menus are insane now

They were really good when the kiosks were new, just like Google was.

I guess PMs hunting local revenue growth but macro loss by spamming upsell and making what you want hard to find is a common problem with these luser uncentric systems.

It used to be that I could find 5 to 10-year-old articles quickly on Google. Now it’s much harder.

I’ve started keeping a log of every interesting article I find since I know I won’t be able to find it earlier.

I’m also seeing a trend where they try and answer question and will pull from any source. The answer often being wildly wrong.

Saw one of “people also ask” where the source was some dudes fanfiction so the suggested question and answer were complete non sense.

I've found this too. And not only Google but also Bing/DDG. It's really annoying when trying to reference a past event in discussions

I've stopped using search as it's filled with non relevant content, great job messing with one thing the company was known for, search.

\> Their search has got pretty bad I've noticed

YT search was never good (that I can recall).

When I want to find content on YT, I use Google search with a site restrict [1].

Infinitely better.

I invite you all to do the same and forget the YT search box.

[1] something like : life of Albert Einstein site:youtube.com

Very ironic that you have to use Google to get decent results in YouTube. The knowledge is in the same company just not applied consistently.

As is often forgotten on HN, a company is nothing but a bunch of people, each with their own incentives and political dominions to defend.

We like to think of a company as one entity and assign to it some sort of anthropomorphic aspect, but that's just a dumbed-down simplification our minds like to make to make dealing with the world easier.

Especially for a company as large as Google, were political infighting between product verticals are a documented problem.

In that regard, it is not ironic at all, there is no such thing as consistency in such a large human organization. Hell, even the army is not capable of doing this properly.

Interesting since they are managed by the same company. But I'm not even sure Google is the best search engine for Youtube or video content in general.

Not an expert on this, but I get the feeling they're trying to dissuade people from discovering videos with lower view counts in search results, since these videos are less likely to be cached at the CDN nodes and are more expensive to serve, i.e. budget cuts, like everything else

\> the thing you actually searched for after the first 10 or so videos.

Isn't that a good thing? If you searched for something and the first 10 results aren't a match, why not introduce you to other things (one can experiment with finding how closely related those additional recommendations are, or based on other things you recently enjoyed, etc.)?

Not really, if what you're looking for is newer or less popular videos on a particular topic because you've already watched the most popular ones.

Machine learning probably had something to do with it. It notices videos with thumbnails of people with their mouths and eyes wide open doing some kind of shocked expression with red arrows pointing to something perform better than average. Then it starts recommending videos with thumbnails like this preferentially. YouTubers take notice and start producing thumbnails like this for every video.

Go to the front page right now with clean cookies and you'll see most of the thumbnails have "reaction faces" in them for no apparent reason, usually pulling some kind of exaggerated expression.

Clickbait used to mean that you baited the viewer into clicking, now it means you baited the algorithm into recommending you.

There was a Linus Tech Tips video where he admits that it's stupid, but sadly it works really well. It's a bit like when Wikipedia kept using Jimmy Wales' face in banners requesting donations. People claim to not like it, yet it's was what got the highest conversion rates.

This is a clear example of penny-wise but pound-foolish. At no point in a product's lifetime does should machine learning obviate the need for good taste.

I'm not going to argue that, but that ship sailed back in ~2014. All the FAANGs do live A/B testing like this.

2014 lines up with my memory of when YT recommendations, among many things, started to change for the worse.

On a side note, wow. I can’t believe that 8 years have already passed. It feels like yesterday that people were actively debating these topics here on HN.

Patrick McKenzie (aka patio11 here) had a post/talk about how when he was working with FogBugz they realized that people LOVE to watch Joel Spolsky talk.

In fact, A/B testing showed that the longer the video they put on the home page, the higher the conversion rate.

I've long suspected many large production recommendation algorithms suffer from a positive feedback loop problem. In the example you point out, there probably is some real behavioral bias to focus attention on highly expressive faces. Then the algorithm picks up on this small bias and amplifies it, where the entire front page turns into young people with shocked faces.

When I was playing WoW, it was hard to find, for example, "guide to blackwing lair". It would be way down the page, below videos always titled "shocked reaction to Blackwing lair boss kill", "streamer reacts to BWL speedrun".

That shit is the fucking worst. 10 results down it gives you the "People also watched" and "For You" categories before it resumes listing what you fucking searched for. Can you imagine 20 years ago trying to build a search engine and explaining that you should insert search results that people didn't fucking search for?

I think that’s an issue with the monetisation. People who needs a specific guide would be relatively small in numbers. Unless your video is watched by tens/hundreds of thousands, it is not worth making (unless for hobby). Content creators are feeling like they need to make the title and image appealing to a wide audience rather than people looking for something specific.

The search engine should prioritise videos matching your specific search so you can find what you are looking for from hobbyist creators but I’m not sure if that’s happening.

Wow nail on the head. Just did this and out of the first 8 videos, 5 were reaction videos, 4 with the exact same "shocked" faces. Scrolling down the page it is much the same. How can google allow whatever algorithm to present such homogenous content on such a general platform?

Notably though, if I log in and visit my home page I have only one video of this nature on the front page in the first ~50, so it does appear possible to teach the algorithm you will not engage with such content even without conscious effort.

You asked about bots and spam but I want to talk about the content degradation. YT has been heavily commercialised and lots of people are trying to make a living out of it. Most videos are about keeping viewers for as much time possible watching your content. As a result what would have been a 2-minute video becomes a 20-minute video with introductions, discussions about the weather and silly sales/crowd manipulation tricks. Content is key and I really don't have the time for such a time waster: I'm always skipping to the point or completely ignoring absurdly long videos.

I looked up how to pronounce a word the other day and found a 30-second YouTube video. I expected it to be a looping track of someone saying the word over and over, but what I got instead was 25 seconds of someone describing the word's origin (without saying the word itself), and explaining how many people want to know how to pronounce it. Only as the thumbnail overlay popped up at the end of the video did they actually say the word.

Try Forvo:

"Forvo is the largest pronunciation reference online. Our goal is to compile native speaker pronunciations for all the words that exist in the world, including names."

https://forvo.com/faq/

The sad thing is, this is the same problem TV has had for a long time that YouTube was solving. TV programming will take 10 minutes of content and stretch it into 40 minutes of filler with 20 minutes of commercials. YouTube used to have a much better content to filler ratio in general. "It was said that you would destroy the TV producers, not join them."

What you experience as short videos turning into long ones was to me the addition of ads inside videos everywhere.

SponsorBlock has saved my enjoyment of YouTube and allowed me to subscribe to channels I never would have watched because of their constant self-promotion.

With an adblocker stopping the ads outside the video, and SponsorBlock to stop the ads inside, I enjoy YouTube like never before.

YouTube requires videos to be eight minutes or longer to include mid-roll ads. So everybody making money from YouTube ads has an incentive to extend their video lengths to at least eight minutes.

\>As a result what would have been a 2-minute video becomes a 20-minute video

Or shouldn't have been a video at all.

Lots of people come up with some schtick they don't give a damn about because they see (or think they see) all these other people getting rich on YouTube and TikTok.

And recommendation engines are awful in general. It's a problem that even those genuinely trying to solve it really haven't.

You are correct ... because if I'm only going to make a 2 minute video I would put it on TikTok or Instagram. Way easier to get likes (which is what I'm after if I'm not monetizing it), and way easier to make that content.

I think YouTube knows this which is why they are pushing shorts so hard.

YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed.

Though there is a growing number of anecdotes surrounding (niche|not palatable to SV) channels who’s subscribers don’t get notified despite the bell thing being on, new videos no longer in feeds, and even people getting unsubscribed for no apparent reason.

This is a problem, as I’d sooner give up peanut butter than only be served videos with open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails.

\> YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed.

This used to be the case, but starting a month or two ago I get lots of completely and utterly irrelevant recommendations for things like soccer, hip-hop, "vlog" twats, and other "popular" content that I have absolutely zero interest in and that I can guarantee are 100% unrelated to any of my previous history.

I also started getting a lot of "recommendations" for things I've ... already seen. That started a bit earlier, maybe about half a year ago.

So now it's about a third forced stupid stuff, about a third things I've already seen, and maybe a third that's useful. I've been flagging things as "not interested" quite aggressively in the hopes it would improve, but I've seen no difference. I think they just changed the way recommendations work to always fairly aggressively mix in "popular content". If I wanted to watch random mindless nonsense then I would turn on my TV: I use YouTube to avoid all of that.

YouTube is slowly turning into a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser; I think very soon it will start offering me a cup of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Interesting how our experiences differ. It is true that I always watch videos that aren’t immediately related to what I want in my feed incognito.

Fuck these non-deterministic algorithms and the feeds they fill.

You can go to your history and remove videos. While I harbor no delusion that YouTube as a whole forgets that you've watched it as a result, I can vouch for the fact it does seem to mean the recommendation algorithm won't see it anymore.

I'm not immune to the occasional "cute pet" video, but the problem is the attraction basin of that is in the algorithm is so strong that if you show the slightest inclination towards it with so much as a single video view, it will instantly turn half your feed into "cute pet" videos. (There are many other such attraction basins.) Removing the view from your history fixes that problem.

It is still possible to keep the brow-level of your YouTube feed above "low". I've successfully been recommended some math videos in the past few days from channels I've not already heard of (might as well signal boost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vxW42R47bc , a nice crunchy analysis of a solution to a math problem covered on Numberphile that was unsolved at the time but surprisingly has a reasonably accessible solution). But it takes deliberate maintenance.

\> YT on a clean slate is horrendous

It makes me worry about the future of humanity, as the clean slate is what is popular in your location.

\> open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails

Dont forget to add a large amount of money to the title my $$$$250,000 computer.

But it f'ing works - I am really not sure what is wrong with people. Oh and now I get 2 ads every single video, its barely worth it ...

\> It makes me worry about the future of humanity

I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies. Teenagers are stupid. Always were, always will be. I know I was.

And yet here we are. Alive and well.

I worry for teenagers just as I do for the adults if we don't curb everything stealing our sleep and concentration. I don't think it's the same old "young people are lazy" trope, it's significant.

\> I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies

I have seen what facebook feeds boomers - it too is abhorrent.

Hey, maybe in the future you'll inherit your parents' recommendations. If you're lucky and your parents and grandparents made good choices, you'll have a pleasant experience that makes it easy to make good choices, and if they didn't, your digital life will be terrible from the start. We'll talk about recommendation mobility as the easy of adapting to a user, regardless of their ancestors.

\> Oh and now I get 2 ads every single video, its barely worth it ...

Do yourself a favor and get an ad blocker. YouTube is barely usable without one at this point.

I can refresh the home page a hundred times in a row and the exact same videos in the exact same order get displayed. It never used to be like this. I have no idea what the hell is going on at YouTube head office.

I work in a different part of Google... But getting the same result when refreshing page sounds like getting served from a cache, which doesn't sound that weird. Isn't there a button to show something else?

I get recommended the same videos for months. Sometimes they even show old recommendations from a year back.

I'm thinking recommendations can be significantly increased by using a ruby gem because what they have now, certainly more complicated and convoluted, isn't working at all.

Other than navigating to say the “Subscriptions” page where you’re just given a different set of videos, there’s no other way of changing what you get on the home page. If the home page is caching it’s doing it too very aggressively - it never used to be like this and I’ve seen it across multiple devices.

The home page used to be a way to find new videos but now you just have to wait a few hours and try again.

That's a good thing in my book, that's a feature.

Recommendations are made, and they are random in some sense.

But an interface needs a certain persistence to be user friendly. Too annoying to glance something, try to go back, and it's gone. Some persistence creates an environment that is a bit more spatial and nicer to my brain.

I don’t think you’re understanding what I’m saying. As a YouTube user I don’t want the same 20 videos displayed on the home screen ALL day. If If I haven’t watched them by then I clearly don’t want to.

No wonder I didn't understand, no time frame was mentioned. I think I understood your message and I think it is a good feature on a shorter time scale.

So, your mind wandered to giving up peanut butter? For me it'd be something like... Uh, Tomatoes. I had to really think about it, but yeah, I'd give up tomatoes to not live in that world, which is saying something because tomatoes in one form or another tend to help keep my morale up through many, many meatless days.

Onions, however, I can’t give up. What is life without onions? One sssniperwolf vid per large onion is fair.

True. I have a hard time coming up with a dish that doesn't work (or is improved) by onions, and how many dishes would completely suck without them.

I deleted my youtube/google account and started using RSS feeds instead.

The only sane way to consume YouTube these days.

I also just manage a curated list of channels and consume via RSS, with YT perpetually blocked, short of a few re-review days per year.

Youtube is also basically unwatchable without both adblock and sponsorblock. At this point most videos are are at least 1/3rd clipped by the latter.

I subscribe to YouTube Premium to skip all interstitial ads. It’s absolutely worth it to me. I like to think I’m helping someone at G make the business case for subscription-based, ad-free products and services.

Sponsor segments are easily skippable with a few fast-forward fingertaps, or right-arrow taps on a keyboard.

Why manually scrub through videos when there's a tool to do it automatically for you and re-cut the video into a seamless block of content?

Every browser plug-in is an additional exploit vector. Never know when the plug-in author might sell out or get hacked. When that happens you’re one auto-update away from catastrophe. I also enjoy the more creative sponsor segments, like Internet Historian’s.

Has anyone found a reliable way to block the ads on Android TV that isn't "root your TV and install and use this weird App you get from this website here"? Would a Pi-Hole work long-term?

For what it's worth, can't organize that subscriptions tab by any meaningful way. At least none that I know of.

This is only the case if you subscribe to channels that churn out content on a daily or weekly basis and have no interest in finding tangential content by new creators. I've given up on using YouTube for discovery, I have to actively fight the search in order to find anything remotely useful and the main feed is just the same crap repeated over and over again no matter how many I mark as not interested. Whatever happened to it several years ago has completely lobotomized the recommendation engine, it's just trash now. I'm hopeful that content creators will continue to trend towards uploading to multiple video platforms so I can find new stuff.

I've been using the same google account for so many years and still every damn Youtube video I get 2-3 ads for Tiktok.

How does the algorithm not get that I have probably watched 10,000 ads for Tiktok, I am not installing that shit! Stop trying!

Tiktok must have ad budget to blow regardless of individualized conversion rate considerations. Google's algorithm is happy to oblige.

YouTubers have become more professional and post a large number of videos optimized for monetization (trendy videos, videos around 10 minutes long with additional ads inserted in the video, etc.).

In addition, in order to maximize advertising revenue, YouTube tends to place more importance on new click-bait videos that have a rapid increase in views, rather than high quality videos that can be viewed over a long period of time.

That is the reason why many of those clickbait-like videos are the third one on the right side of the screen when a particular video is played.

Specifically, YouTube stops suggesting videos from your channel if you aren't posting weekly. They need to keep posting bad videos just to keep the revenue increasing on the good ones.

I'm personally regularly suggested videos from content creators with infrequent posting schedules. Heck, I fairly frequently get suggested a video from a creator who hasn't posted a video in more than a year.

Ah, but are they treating it as a business that needs to earn a reasonable amount of money.

\> YouTubers have become more professional and post a large number of videos optimized for monetization (trendy videos, videos around 10 minutes long with additional ads inserted in the video, etc.).

That's how I feel about it, too. The quality of the content has gone down because of the incessant urge of popular YouTubers to produce a "clickable" stream of videos on a regular basis. In a way, it feels addictive like porn - you know what you are going to see, it's just that the reviewed product, or the shown environment is different in the new video.

\> trendy videos, videos around 10 minutes long with additional ads inserted in the video, etc

This is why we need user-controlled recommendations. I want that shit blocked.

\> YouTube tends to place more importance on new click-bait videos that have a rapid increase in views

This sounds like TikTok, and likely trying to compete with them.

The answer is super simple.

Wrong incentives + lack of mechanisms to find, navigate to and promote interesting content.

Nowadays, people create content on Youtube essentially only for profit (be it actual profit from Youtube or promotion).

That's it. That's what you are selecting from.

There are of course exceptions, but these are rare enough to not dictate the general quality of content.

And if you are dissatisfied with general quality, that's it. There is no catalog where you can drill down and search for stuff that you don't know but you might be interested in. You can only search for things you already know -- and really interesting things tend to be a bit outside of what you already know.

This is almost boringly textbook late-stage "monopoly in practice" playing out. Start with an "edge". Get big because edge. Use "big" to sharpen edge further. Use big (and/or edge) to consolidate market. Once sufficiently consolidated and/or controlled, raise costs.

This is what costs getting raised looks like in a monopoly market. Who's gonna stop them.

Totally agree but I think it's only part of it, other problems probably take par in this:

- spammers are getting better and Google is less able and willing to moderate - the use of AI without much design around it. It's speculation since who knows how their algorithm works, but from what I've read and the general mindset in ML these days, it's very possible that they just use a recommendation AI with a single target (I've heard watch time, but again, who knows) with little to not design around it. This just does not work, especially if the AI is good at his job. It's a similar problem to decision makers blindly following KPIs, knowing if you did well and choosing criterias can be as hard as taking the decision itself, and an AI can't do that, you can't avoid designing your product.

\>Who’s gonna stop them

Ive been thinking for a while that Netflix could. They desperately need to seperate themselves from the competition and they already have the video distribution tech and captive audience to launch a real challenge to youtube.

That's ... brilliant?

I mean amazon prime is full of "kids cartoons" that started out as youtube fodder ten years ago. So yeah Netflix could maybe start a "yourflix" side bar - but they would have to work with people who were actual production companies for fear of, well everything.

Something tells me if they setup a package for everyone who had got 100k views on youtube, handed them a better microphone and a contract, they might stand a chnace of building a thousand new production companies.

Why is Google not doing anything about this?

The obvious answer is "because they've measured how much money they make, and found lower quality feeds result in higher revenue."

That might be counter-intuitive, but the other options like "the devs can't fix it", or "they don't know it's bad", etc are much less likely.

Because they don't care? They're an ad company and seem more interested in their bottom line than what users feel about their services or having a consistent portfolio. I think right now they're trying to ensure tik-tok doesn't eat their lunch by promoting shorts, whilst also still trying to get youtube to make a profit.

I can't think of a single google service they offer that I really like, they all kind of suck in a variety of interesting ways.

Aggressively clicking the drop-down and "Not interested"or "Don't recommend channel" on bad recommendations has significantly improved my YouTube suggestions.

also, it feels like this stops working after a while. I sure as hell remember doing this to as much sports content as I possibly could, and it worked for a while, but now it's coming back.

Didn't feel like it at all when I did it.

Maybe they didn't understand the reasons - I hate clickbait thumbnails and titles.

This is part of a bigger problem of indexing, searching and result recommendations. We used to have to go to forums and threads to find the content we need, but we grew increasingly reliant on NLP search and feed. I remember fondly of the time Orkut was dominant. No recommendations, no feeds, you had to personally go to a community of interest and find threads there. You had to find communities by interacting with people, and that was key to it. The content you consumed was directly tied to your own social circle, instead of being controlled by a central corporation.

We might have to find a way to divorce ourselves from search engines until something comes along to replace them. I see no problem using YouTube and such as a hosting platform, but for finding and consuming content, a more personal approach is needed. I doubt however that the mainstream consumer will sacrifice convenience and content volume for better quality content. We don't have to act as a mainstream consumer though.

I keep reading they are an ad company and that’s fair except they are doing a really bad job. I keep seeing the same ad over and over and over again. Those are annoying loud ads that are more region than preference based. You don’t need some personalized ad system to find out what kind of ad a person watching a video game video would be interested.

Skipping a video to look for a certain scene will trigger double ads and sometimes you will see another set of ads a few seconds later.

If a video is less than 3 minutes long and it starts with unskipable 12 seconds ad followed by another one I don’t even bother.

My general experience with the platform is brands advertising on YouTube gives me repulse instead of wanting to buy something.

I don't know if abuse is the right word considering that youtube most likely just breaks even.

It has been one year since I can't find interesting stuff in the recommended section anymore. I also thought about building my own recommendation system using YouTube's RSS feed for each individual channel, Telegram for notifications and some simple logic written in Rust and SQLite (of course) and always running on my VPS, where I manually add and remove the channels I like and I also give them a score to have a priority system. Will probably do this next week, when I'm at sea with my family.

EDIT: grammar

\> I also thought about building my own recommendation system

Awesome! Please do and document it. A lot of "tech should serve its users" people seem to be completely opposed to recommendation algorithms, but I would disagree. I find automatic recommendation immensely valuable when it works, it just needs to work for me (e.g. be more configurable).

At some point during Covid they seemed to just decide they wanted to abuse users and its been a steady decline since.

My largest use cases were watching DJ sets, music videos, stand up comedians, instructional videos, and life of (random career) videos

Music videos have multiple ads before and after now. The music videos are still watchable but it sucks to put youtube on at a party now.

Life of videos from channels worth watching have started to turn off ads in place of putting in their own sponsored content. Annoying but similar to TV commercials of the past and are always skippable.

But they have started destroying all of the other content I enjoyed. Instructional videos are overly long with the interrupting ads to the point of questioning whether the visual information with more time but easier understanding vs the extra reading becomes a serious contemplation.

But comedies and extended DJ sets are unwatchable. The ML "predicts" natural breaks in language to insert ads into. When it comes to comedies its usually right before the punch line/the laughing, but the developers do not care at all that after the commercial ends and are resuming a second or two after the punch line. Not only is the timing ruined but you often miss the joke entirely. They have not figured out what to do with DJ sets so they just randomly interrupt in the middle of songs. I had ad breaks 3 times within 10 minutes of a 60 minute set today before I switched to AirPlaying my computer with AdNauseum installed.

Anything I think I might want to watch ever again is immediately added to a playlist for yt-dlp. It makes the content watchable again and protects against channels that will delete content so they can add it back later for increased later views or because of fake DMCA takedowns.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

\> Music videos have multiple ads before and after now. The music videos are still watchable but it sucks to put youtube on at a party now.

If you want entertainment that is not funded by ads, why not subscribe to YouTube Premium? "YouTube and YouTube Music ad-free, offline, and in the background"

https://www.youtube.com/premium

I use adblock plus, and don't remember the last time I watched an ad on youtube (website, not app of course).

Google has seemed to have taken the line of pretending to not care about ad blocking web extensions in favor of aggressively making sure the mobile and casting experience has them.

When there are extensions that actively fight profiling like Ad Nauseum they've abused their dominant position in developing a web browsers to block the extension on Chrome.

But when you don't have an easy ability to block ads like casting to a TV on their app on Roku and Apple TV or when using an iOS device they aggressively push the ads. On Android where there is an ability to block ads, they aggressively pursue apps like Vanced.

This isn't a problem, people have to pay their bills somehow. You can either watch ads or pay for Premium and not watch ads.

Hi marty,

Are you the creator of Blockbattle.net? You seem to be the creator of this subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/a:t5_2sezu/)? I remember playing it a couple years ago but it seems to have been taken down. Have you thought about open-sourcing it potentially? I've been wanting to re-create it for a while but really like to keep to original aesthetic, so having access to the CSS and game-logic would be great so I could faithfully re-create it. You can contact me at [email protected]

Your timeframe is right, but it's not just about ads.

In 2017, Youtube altered search results following the mass shooting at the Las Vegas nightclub "to quell the spread of conspiracy theories". [1]

It wasn't their first time changing the algorithms, but since then, they've applied measures of varying degrees of severity following similar domestic and certain politically sensitive events, like the attack on the Google campus.

In 2018, "YouTube announces sweeping changes to the way it handles breaking news. News videos will now be ranked based on what YouTube deems to be "authoritative." [2]

In 2019, Youtube search again went on lockdown following the act of domestic terrorism on mosques in Cristchurch, disabling the ability to filter by recent across the entire site. [3] This one lasted for weeks and the original function was never fully restored.

Youtube has taken a more active approach to content curation, suppression, and promotion since the Trump presidency, and it's made it a worse resource for academic and informational searches. Once relatively neutral, they've begun to exert a more overt regulation of customers' interactions with content, going so far as qualifying certain media as aligning with certain viewpoints or not, disclosing affiliations with certain groups or political bodies, and minimizing the ability to specifically or organically locate certain non-promoted content.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/10/05/youtube-alter...

[2] https://mashable.com/article/youtube-announces-changes-break...

[3] https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-restricting-search-newzeal...

A tangential quibble: Terrorism, not domestic terrorism. The perpetrator was foreign.

Youtube start reminding me a video platform from 3rd world country. There was this "look&feel" difference where you have more expensive less-adds and good quality. That was their competitive advantage. Right now everything desperately optimized for money. That's how platform dies. They don't know how to grow organically. They become no different. Just another video hosting.

The third-world feel also comes from the types of ads they show.

They are all scammy with some sort of gimmick to keep your eyes peeled past the skip ad button, usually some sort of claim to subvert the “system”.

This plays well to a poorly-educated population (which may be the crowd stuck on their phone during the daytime), but comes off slimy to any savvy consumer.

For a while they would run 5-second TikTok ads with a siren and a baseball flying towards the viewer. Along with text in arabic. What the fuck?

I haven’t seen a YouTube ad in over six years. Seriously the best couple of dollars per month you can spend.

uBlock Origin and ReVanced are the best 0€ I've ever spent. Getting a good deal on YouTube premium apparently requires a VPN to Argentina or something.

It's certainly unwatchable with the ads, as I was reminded when I actually opened up the YouTube app on my TV instead of just mirroring my laptop's screen. Not gonna do that again.

Lots of interesting YouTubers have been demonetized for dubious reasons and have simply stopped using the platform.

This has been and always will be the problem with having a "Youtube career". You are completely at the behest of a monolith company run by automated bots that can demonetize you on a robotic whim.

Successful YouTubers get a good chunk of their income from brand deals.

Doesn’t matter if your video gets monetized if a company has loaned/gifted you a product and paid you to make a video featuring it.

It drives ad revenue. Content quality doesn't matter, only you watching as much ad's as possible.

I've switched to using Yewtu.be, it's a proxy where you can have subscriptions and, for instance, only see new content, chronologically, from your subscriptions. Does make it a bit harder to find new stuff, but at least no spam.

And the search seems less spammy too, not sure.

Why not just using the "subscriptions" tab in the official YouTube app? It does exactly that. What's the difference?

Videos that should be 45 seconds get stretched out to 10 minutes because of the monetization limit. Some we execs at YouTube have been trying really hard to turn YouTube into the wasteland that TV is. This is why TikTok is kicking their ass.

TV has been a wasteland as long as it's existed, because it's an advertising medium pretending to be an entertainment medium. The S.S. Minnow on Gilligan's Island was even named as a dubious tribute to Newton Minow, an FCC head who famously referred to television as a "vast wasteland" in the early 60s.

I can't say I love it when I view one video about some random topic (or worse, my son does - we watch a lot on the living room TV), and then I'm spammed for the next month with related videos. You can tell when the server process is run, as it'll be a day or so later and suddenly everything recommended to me is about (just checked) Chess, for example. Just because I checked out a couple chess videos does not now mean I need 500 Magnus Carlsen clips recommended to me. It's insane.

To anyone complaining about ads, FFS, just pay the money for the subscription. Life is too short. I haven't seen an ad for years.

I consume a lot of YouTube content. I have also been a full time content creator for the past decade (so I consider myself a dinosaur in social media land).

I have noticed significantly less interesting content on YouTube over the past 2 years, but I attribute most of it to a lack of small creators on the platform now. It takes a ton of time and effort to even make a good 10 minute video. This is a big time commitment on top of your other job, family, etc.

10 years ago there were no professional outfits on YouTube. Then everyone started to "grow up". About 5 years ago people started seeing there was money to be made on YouTube, so a ton of new creators joined the platform and there was tons of content. Fast forward to now and creators have realized it's actually very hard to live off YouTube, so a lot of them have moved on.

If all they want to do is show off their project they now turn to Instagram and/or TikTok. If all you are after is likes (and don't care about monetization) it is actually way easier on those platforms (due to their discovery engines) with a fraction of the production time.

I think YouTube knows this (hence shorts). The general rule of thought around YouTube now is to grow your brand using shorts and then monetize it using long form videos. So unless a creator has a large enough following to support their work making long form videos (over 90s) there is really no incentive anymore.

\> It takes a ton of time and effort to even make a good 10 minute video

Does it?! I know some creators (MKBHD) obsess over cinematic videos and insanely expensive equipment to film in 8K and whatever ... but I kinda don't care and I think most people don't. I'm certainly among the millions of people who enjoy penguinz0's shittily produced one-take rants about as much.

I don't disagree that making a good video depending on the subject takes a lot of planning, writing, setup, multiple takes and editing - but that's not new.

In fact it seems like smaller creators are still very much around - they're just drowned out by the bigger ones being heavily promoted.

I can't relate. I primarily watch videos from my subscription page, but my homepage is full of videos similar to or related to the other videos I watch. There isn't a single video on my homepage that made me think "why would I get that recommended to me?", it's all at least potentially interesting.

And I agree shorts suck, but IMO that's because they suck as a format; the content of the shorts that are recommended to me are at least relevant.

\> Why is Google not doing anything about this?

Probably because engagement and ad metrics are fine. What’s not relevant for you might result in people spending mindless hours in the app.

They got rid of the visibility of downvotes. They rewarded longer viewing times (stuff that used to be 5-10 minutes is now 20-30 minutes, sometimes longer).

And part of it is just spammers learning to hack the recommendation system that already existed. And without the negative feedback of downvotes, people watch spam content for long enough that the spam content gets recommended to others.

Shorts hasn't been around for very long, so it kind of always was terrible.

I'm using different blockers on Desktop and alternative apps on mobile. I used yt mobile and,I kid you not, I got 3 ads in less than 1 min.

I just waiting for some channels to start using alternative platforms and start consuming them there.

Yeah suggestions have got worse. Shorts are shit. There is still great stuff but they bury it. I rely on subscriptions and blocking crap channels that is repeatedly suggested. Gone are the days the optimise for best recommendations, now its about ad revenue. Adblocking youtube apps on Android TV are a godsend.

This morning I noticed a new source of videos in my "subscriptions" feed from "ThisMorning" a channel I would never subscribe to (fluffy cooking / morning show stuff)... turns out that's a thing Youtube does, randomly subscribe you to stuff.

I guess they're finally fully admitting that subscriptions mean nothing anymore and are YOLOing away.

I’ve given up, and I dislike having content pushed to me in general.

I use a combination of Remove YouTube Suggestions[1] and prefacing “intitle:” before any YouTube search to avoid weird matches that point me to irrelevant content.

I think it’s ridiculous that I need to constantly click “show less like this” and exert so much effort to train YouTube. I also hate how they’ll insert random unrelated videos “For Me” or “Watch it Again” in my search results. It’s all designed to keep me on the site and distracted… better to avoid it entirely.

[1] https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions

I like to use adblock's element picker to get rid of:

- recommendation bar on the right

- comments

- videos recommended at the end of the video by youtube

Plus I subscribe only through rss feeds. This way, I left just with the content and completely isolated from the toxicity that is the recommendation system.

Because Google is an R&D company not a consumer product company.

It doesn’t give a shit about UX, but generating piles of data for PhDs to generate statistics from.

Sundar bailed on the moonshots, but it’s hiring culture was already established and he’s not been able to turn the focus to interesting things relying on statisticians and leetcoders seeking the so called prestige of churning out nothing.

It’s funny how big corps LARP changing our world but the careless resource waste, rent seeking, gaming agency through corporate propaganda all smell like traditional political correctness to me.

cause people don't make videos for fun anymore. nobody finds them. nowadays - it's all about that stupid, surprised face of mr beast

From the title I thought you were talking about video quality. I've noticed the quality of videos is abysmal lately. Anything close to noise in a scene (like a waterfall, confetti etc.) is unwatchable. I don't get why they push the higher resolutions like 4K and 8K when upping the bitrate of 1080p would probably have a better impact. Marketing, I suppose.

Could it be just that producing relevant recommendation for every one at all times is a complicated problem that gets even more complicated as the volume of uploaded videos continually increases and SEO tactics get ever more sophisticated? Maybe what worked a few years ago is no longer cutting it and they have yet to figure it?

I proactively hide YouTube videos (mark them 'Not Interested', etc). If I'm intending to find a good 15-30 minute video, I actually do a pass where I add the good recommendations to my Watchlist and hide bad/clickbait/unrelated videos as I go. I take a very active role in curating the stuff I see on the front page.

This only takes a couple minutes every few days, but it really keeps my recommendations accurate. Every week or so, I go through my watch history and delete videos I accidentally clicked on, or videos I hated so much that they shouldn't be used to generate further recommendations. Pruning your watch history has a particularly powerful effect that I think people miss out on.

Also, I try not to be let down if a particular week has no cool videos. There's no law of the universe that says that every week has to have incredible videos.

My YouTube recommendations while being logged in are usually quite low quality. Mostly stuff already seen, some gaping mouth people and klickbait the rest stuff I don't care about.

Having a cookie for work and the private stuff while not being logged in works quite well, especially for music.

Adblock removes the Add crap and another plug in keeps the playback in the background going for music.

And I blocked the Shorts block in uBlock since that is 100 percent complete garbage.

No idea what purpose this serves seems to be some low effort Tiktok clone...

Maybe someone can develop a plug-in for vertical video, gaping mouths, click bait and lists (10 YouTube recommendations that you don't care about, number 5 will annoy you) and just dowvotes that so it does not show up in the personal recommendations anymore.

I never liked shorts on Youtube, even from the creators that I follow. If I want shorts, I go to Tik Tok.

Except that, the Youtube suggestions for me aren't bad. I do believe they are less good than before, because in the past I was able to find at least one new really good channel per month and now it has been a long time without one. It could also be that I found most channels that interest me, or that the pandemic did affect this quite a bit. I still get mostly good recommendations, a third are channels I already subscribe to (which is redundant on the frontpage as I go to the subscriptions pages for that) and videos I already watched, but everything else is mostly content I may be able to enjoy.

The moment a platform start the "monetization war" and have some "influencers" working for them and get traction... that moment will kill/bury original and honest content made from passion and not "to make a living, to win $".

The same way blogs died long ago, remember all the craze about having a blog, affiliate links, earn a living blabla

People jumped in.. and so advertisers.. and so 'they killed Kenny"

Imagine YT videos without ads (ok, buy a premium but.. the trash is still there just wihout ads), so it's not a solution, not anymore.

I just stopped watching YT, I just try to find articles and read them, using adblockers and imagine what: I disabled all images in Firefox, too much distraction.

If only I can find articles. There are a lot of people who know how to do something interesting, but they are not writing articles they are recording videos. I prefer written articles, but often I can't find anything, but I can find videos on youtube. Or maybe it is just that search for articles has the same problem?

I subscribe to scores of channels, yet YT persists in showing me only a few (and many, many vids I've already seen), along with a bunch of totally irrelevant suggestions. How about show new vids from more of the channels I subscribe to?

Goog pays lots of talented people a lot of money to make everything worse over time.

Personal complaint: the latest youtube android app no longer allows sorting a channel's videos by date ascending. UGH. Sometimes I want to watch the oldest ones!

I wonder how much removing the public downvote count has led people to reduce or stop reporting altogether. Now it's just another signal that does into the void, so who cares. Its now solely up to YouTube to consider that metric and possibly down rank videos. It used to, at least in part, be a social effect. It was an aggregate signal from many people to many people. Even if YouTube didn't consider it at all in ranking it would have power. Now YouTube is on the hook for modeling all of that.

I really like it. I accidentally tried a clean YouTube the other day and I was shocked what bs is on there.

However, the quality of the educational videos is just getting better and better imo. Also I never look at my subscriptions anymore just my mainpage.

Don't let this be known to redditors in case youtube shuts it down for widespread use ala ytdl... you can search for youtube videos with the intitle:

for exact matches. This has helped me tremendously.

I really really miss stumble video. algorithm was simple, like a video and the next video would be one someone liked who liked that video, dislike and the next would be a video someone like who also disliked that one, just click next and get a video you havent seen before with lots of likes. It was heaven. These days bounce between bitchute or a couple of other for random giggles and 3 or 4 subscriptions on TY on computing and manufacturing. otherwise just stick with ones that get recommended on discord, mostly telegram it seems.

I really only use youtube for very specific things. Music, and watching sumo wrestling. For those purposes, it's pretty good.

But Youtube is absolutely intending to replace broadcast television. So they want everyone talking about the same stuff, they want endless passive engagement, etc.

I never visit the homepage, I just have a bookmark https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s with the shortcut `yt` and search for what I want directly.

Why is the Discovery channel a bunch of cheap to produce shows about ghost hunters or whatever it is these days? MTV long since is all reality TV and nothing about music. Pushing drivel like Heard-vs-Depp drives ad revenue and is what "the people" want to watch, and they can most easily get more revenue by trying to hook as many people as possible on that stuff. The fact that you in particular are turned off by all that is mostly irrelevant to them because you're no longer the target audience.

Advertisers want the lowest common denominator: means no monetization or recommendation for anything that might upset any part of their possible consumer base. A lot of interesting content about topics that 'trigger' different groups or that contain inflammatory opinions is thus only accessible to those who already know about it, and it's not monetized or recommended.

Imagine a restaurant that starts removing anything from the menu that a customer complains about. You eventually end up with nothing but bland glop.

I really recommend using something similar to firefox' containerized sessions. I like to have a few I rotate around and try and engage in different content each time. I have discovered a lot more new content this way. I also only login on one of them where I keep my subscribed channels that I rarely add to.

As it is right now, the recommendation engine is just not optimised for people like us here. I think most people engage with extremely similar or constantly nostalgic content, or current pop culture

Counter argument: YouTube has been absolutely great for me. Spend at least 2 hours a day on it and YouTube knows me.

On my desktop it shows me action sports and high energy stuff. While in bed on my phone it's mostly science and documentaries and historical boxing fights. It doesn't ever recommend me anything mainstream.

Sometimes YT treats me on some really good gems as well.

The biggest problem is, the first 1-2 rows are mostly videos I haven't clicked on. Have to scroll more down to get to the good stuff.

Hate to break it to you but action sports, high energy stuff, documentaries and historical boxing fights all sound pretty main stream especially if you define mainstream as easily monetized / inoffensive to advertisers.

Suggestion: Have an AI or text analyzer assign a grade level to all documentaries and talks. I say this after wasting some time tonight trying to find a documentary or lecture on early humans. The first 4 I tried were 6th to 8th grade level while one was in the style of Bible stories, so it was for even younger.

The nearest I can figure is home schoolers are creating these for their kids and uploading to pass them around. Their popularity appears to crowding out all the college level material.

I can't help feeling this is a modern day repeat of JWZ's old aphorism on regexes, and the root cause of quite a lot of user frustration with Google products:

\> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use AI." Now they have two problems.

I don't know what you call a tool that ranks text by grammar complexity and word obscurity so I called it AI or just "text analyzer"

Ahh I see what you mean, sorry HN has broken my brain a little around the word "AI". Here when it's proposed as a solution to something is often used like "unspecified magic", but the application you have in mind is quite specific and reasonable :)

It's the same as it is for Google search: Youtube is now much to much in favor of the producer rather than the consumer. In clear text: advertisment ruins it for all

One way to tackle this would be exporting your subscriptions from Takeout as a JSON and importing it to something like Newpipe or Freetube. No ads and all the usual needed stuff without recommendations. 1 have around 170 channels by now and it should be clear that this is more than enough for consumption. While watching videos, the sidebar still shows up so I can simple subscribe to them if I like the channel.

Like with everything, once you get to a certain scale it's just very hard. This is not Netflix and their tiny catalog. We're talking about millions of videos added to YT every day. My main issue with YT lately is the increase in ads before videos are played. I use it much less because of it. I know they have a mo ads tier. It's probably worth it for someone using YT often.

For the same reason the quality of Google search has reduced drastically. Need to feed the ad business by catering to the lowest common denominator.

My Youtube recommendations are a palace, I am perfectly balanced on the machine learning gradient. I have like 80 subscriptions, and I literally derank every single video on my page that I don't want to see. One mistaken click, one slip up and I have to spend a week clicking "I don't want to see this" over and over.

It's almost a zen meditation at this point

And more importantly, how can we as a community take advantage of this opportunity to promote / establish some open alternatives?

Well, ideally, the best platform for video is one that is not for video, but instead simply attaches appropriate information to existing videos, or aggregating links to existing videos present on the internet and attaches that information as a third party service, which then allows them to be searched via a standard search engine and viewed/downloaded directly. Like it was before youtube in the good old altavista days, and like is still the case for images.

But if you must have a platform, there are several alternatives to youtube: peertube, odysee, lbry, ipfs, (legal) torrents, internet archive, oldskool p2p tech, ...

There's also alternative interfaces to youtube (e.g. youtube-dl, newpipe libretube), though that's a suboptimal solution to the larger problem.

I've actually really enjoyed some of the recommendations I get - my homepage is usually videos on Java, networking, DCS related content and for some reason last week I got a recommendation for a video by this channel that recreates historic life and the video was how to make a typical dinner as if it were 1820 - it was so random but awesome.

I too enjoy finding new stuff - Imagine being able to tell the algorithm that!

I'm baffled by tech companies taking highly complex recommendation engines with tons of tunable parameters and exposing literally 0 of them to the user. I don't want to see the same things all the time. And I especially don't want to keep seeing that one video all the time!

All creators are hacking the algorithms. More subscribers, more views, more comments, more like etc.

As the hacks get more open , Youtube needs to include more granular details from user perspective. Like community subscribers, comments, retention cohorts for the channel etc.

Also, feel that youtube is pushing monetization a lot.I am seeing every creator putting 3-4 ads in good videos.

I have noticed a change recently, 3-5 weeks ago. Quality is down.

This is good for me, I waste less time there, but I miss the good suggestions...

I feel like search as declined too. Still leagues ahead of bing.

Obviously, it sin't solely google's fault. They are exploited by content creators (and i will count geekforgeeks and other copycats as content creator there) and with the space those takes, it is now way harder to do an accurate selection.

Delete all your search and watch history, and perhaps all your comments and likes. After a hard refresh, you should see the algorithm suggest something new again. Also, whenever you see a bot/spam channel or a channel with robotic voice, click don't recommend channel again.

How do you get to the top of YouTube search results?

21 Top Tactics for YouTube SEO.

Conduct keyword research first. ... .

Choose keywords with good reach potential. ... .

Create a good video title. ... .

Add tags to the video. ... .

Write smart descriptions. ... .

Edit the file name. ... .

Create transcriptions and captions for the videos. ... .

Make longer videos..

What are the top YouTube searches?

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According to 2024 data, the most searched thing on YouTube in the United States is “PewDiePie,” with 4,570,000 searches. The next most popular searches are “ASMR” and “Music.”

How do I open a YouTube page?

Learn more about Brand Accounts..

Sign in to YouTube on a computer or the mobile site..

Go to your channel list..

Choose to create a new channel or use an existing Brand Account: ... .

Fill out the details to name your new channel. ... .

To add a channel manager, follow the instructions to change channel owners and managers..