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Comment by wastedhours | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only person who gets actually relevant recommended videos when logged in?

I'd say 80% of the recommended videos are directly related to the interests I've shown with my viewing habits. I went through a period of watching at least an hour a day so perhaps that's it and they have some serious data behind me (and I never watch conspiracy, politics or prank videos for them to appear anywhere near them).

Whenever I'm logged out though, then yeah, complete dumpster-fire.

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I just checked. The "up next" column seems pretty relevant. I probably wouldn't watch the Area 51 video or the "what did we find when we searched pennies" but they weren't awful ideas

https://imgur.com/kG0uUDt

(And that Navier-Stokes video was very good!)

I'm really happy with my YouTube recommendations as well. I'm sure they could be better at finding new stuff I haven't seen, but I don't get any "garbage" (e.g. I see no political stuff at all).

I also like how they're not afraid to surface older evergreen videos. I just got this 2-year-old video about a WW2-era Monopoly set recommended to me (never watched videos about board games, monopoly or WW2) and I thought it was fantastic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsrC79QV7cU

Same for me. I've found that if I exhaust every video of every one of the few people I watch, it might start showing their videos once again, but only after it's been months since I've seen it and it's only one or two of the 10+ they put on the home page.

Worth noting that I pay for YT Premium, so maybe Google is training my recommendation model more or feeding more niche YouTube videos to it than they would for ad-driven (or ad blocking) viewers.

I've gotten some real gems, but also some really irritating stinkers. Recently YouTube recommended a newly uploaded song with ~12 views listed and that was fantastic, but at the same time they recommended a "this is what <game co>'s planning for <game>" video... that I'd already watched... from two years ago.

same boat. I get really good recommendations logged in but it is a dumpster fire if logged out

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