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Comment by deith | Hacker News Reader

When I go on youtube, my front page is full of the normiest things of my country. Makes me think... either I'm really good at blocking, or they don't care enough to actually try harder to track me. Or they do actually track me hard enough and they are pretending not to by showing me normie stuff, which gives me false hope about how good I am at hiding my tracks. How far does the rabbit hole go??

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Have you considered that you might be a normie?

Even when I let youtube track me, I find that they often like to recommend "normiest" things despite nothing in my view history suggesting I'm into the things they're advertising. Particularly I mean clips from late night TV shows, ads for super hero movies, that sort of thing. Very mainstream corporate content. They know I don't watch that kind of stuff but they keep on trying.

I don't really get it. I don't think their recommender is that broken, so it seems to me like they're deliberately injecting those recommendations contrary to their expectations of what I like. I suspect those videos represent the content youtube wants me to watch, rather than the content they think I want to watch. Probably those videos are more profitable for youtube.

I've had an ad blocker on my computer from day one on my work computer. From watching exclusively programming conference talks on my work computer their algorithm has seemed to guess I'm a guy so I get recommendations for programming videos, action movies, and things featuring large breasted women. Its pretty annoying for that to constantly show up when I go to the youtube homepage on my work computer when I've only ever watched conference talks.

I worked for a content provider who used to market their search as better than Netflix. Behind the scenes the execs would provide a daily list of what must be the top X results for specific phrases. Sometimes it was make sure some title exists as #1 in any relevant searches.

What I’m trying to say is maybe YouTube’s recommendations are very loosely based off your viewing habits, but they would rather you watch Doug demuro’s highly monetized channel over randomjoeschmoe’s excellent non-ad enabled review of a 10 year old car

>I don't really get it.

You get it perfectly. They'll try to make any connection they can between what you want and what they want to show you, but they'll just throw it in randomly if they can't.

Welcome to the world of being stereotyped. The gestalt “you” is not what you respond to; it’s what people like you are.

Stereotypes exist for a reason. But that reason isn’t optimal - it’s just convenient.

The recommender used to work, before they decided it was more important to show you what they want you to watch, as well as not to show you what they don’t want you to watch. Whether you call that “broken” or not is a matter of taste.

Do you like watching normie stuff? Like 90% of what I watch on YouTube is recommendations for my weird tastes, and I feel like without a recommendation algorithm the site would be largely useless?

I never go to YouTube looking for a recommendation of something to watch. The recommendations algorithm is entirely useless for me. YouTube without a recommendation algorithm is just fine.

I go there either because I'm linked to a specific video, I'm searching for something specific (too specific for the recommendation algorithm), or to check if any of the few channels I follow have posted anything new.

>Do you like watching normie stuff?

I don't watch popular youtubers, I don't listen to (currently) popular music, I don't watch the television, I don't watch sports. I even get make-up tutorials, and I'm a male! That's all the front page of youtube has to offer to me: things that I'm unlikely to ever click on.

>I feel like without a recommendation algorithm the site would be largely useless?

That's because for you and many other people youtube is an activity, like turning on the telly. You open youtube and you expect to be entertained, and that's what the recommendation algorithm is for. For me, youtube is a tool: I open it, search for something, watch it, then close it.

That's so sexist of you to think males can't do make-up!

I have the same experience, I don't think I'd use YouTube at all if it recommended me the default garbage I see when I open it in incognito.

I get that on Youtube too, without blocking anything—just use Google’s privacy dashboard. The dashboard is overly complicated for sure, but they actually do respect your choices, at least in terms of what’s user-visible.

There was a time when I used a South Asian VPN service for YouTube, and I saw a lot of "single woman in your neighborhood" ads. I guess either that was the norm in South Asia, or that's what VPNs are for...

I think they heavily silo Google's idea of you and Youtube's idea of you to avoid trouble in an anti-trust suit.

Why would they separate just 1 property from the other 19?

Probably because YT and Google are the only two of the 20 big enough to be an antitrust danger.

Yep, Google handles the most search queries of any site. Youtube is #2. Google has well over 50% of the market and over 50% of what's left over through Youtube too.

Are they actually that useful to combine? The things I do on google and the things I watch on youtube are almost completely unrelated. Combining them would probably just make both google and youtube worse for me.

They don't silo them at all. The whole pitch of their Google Marketing Platform and DoubleClick DV360 products to entreprise clients is that all data is in one set and they can target consumers everywhere.

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