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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

YouTube suggestions are worthless now. Used to be if you were watching "Jack cooks a 4 course meal part 2" the recommended videos would be "Jack cooks a 4 course meal part 3", Part 1, and some other videos by the same user. Now it's a host of other unrelated bullshit.

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A few weeks back I got a weird fan biopic of Himmler created by some account with the SS logo in their picture recommended to me after watching a video on some obscure DNS features. I reported it but it's still there.

Google is beyond broken. Chasing those engagement numbers on a forever treadmill, just hoping they inch up a little more at any cost.

I still get the old-style suggestions from time to time. It seems like the functionality is still there to display videos related to the one you're watching, but half the time it displays the same mix of recommendations you get on the youtube homepage. I'm not sure what it is that triggers the related video recommendations instead of the "personalized" recommendations.

I went through a "This Old Tony" binge a couple months ago because i stumbled upon one of his videos and youtube kept recommending more. But that seems to be the exception rather than the norm.

I remember that! That system was so sensible, it was great when I was following the lessons on ExcelIsFun/VBAisFun. The next video in the series would play seamlessly.

Now, thanks to the all powerful algorithm, I can watch a video about a rescued pitbull living with his new family, and have it followed up by "10 times Ben Shapiro owned the libs".

it changed from being “users who watched this video watched X next” to “You would like Y videos based on your watch history” (somewhat biasing the first 2 or 3 to be related to current video)

I like that it seems heavily based on the watch history because it gives me some control.

In general I find the selction on the homepage to be useful, however it does take some work as I regularly remove a lot of random things.

I also open random videos in a private window to keep my watch history more focused.

So it works fairly well for me, bringing up videos from channels I like that I haven't seen before... but it takes effort to get it to work for me. So it is arguably not very good for a typical user.

Good point, I hate how multi-part videos aren't automatically queued up. I also don't like getting videos queued that I've already seen.

I was curious why this is happening now. Someone mentioned it may be because I was using an adblocker or had privacy settings on google too high, I haven’t checked.

Currently I see absolutely zero related content next to the current video I’m watching, from the current user or the subject matter.

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