There is value in being able to reliably filter by language. After all, if you can't understand a lecture video, then there's little point in watching it.
But how some of the commenters choose to express their thoughts comes across more as "I hate people from India" than "This is inconvenient".
I've only gone through the ones I could see on the first page, I personally think that OP and a lot of the people there are just frustrated with their Youtube search results and there's a lot more hate for Google's apparent callousness there than for India or Indian creators.
> But how some of the commenters choose to express their thoughts comes across more as "I hate people from India" than "This is inconvenient".
There's always gonna be those people in every single community. I found the page hilarious, wonder if I've become desensitised.
Violent crime is also a grim reality we all have to live with, even if things are as a whole improving (statistically).
> I found the page hilarious, wonder if I've become desensitised.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it can come in handy (e.g. easier to remain calm in a bad situation). I hope neither of us ever has to find out.
Also, some might not know this, but English is pretty widely spoken in India. It’s common to come across words from many languages, including English, interspersed in conversations.
And also, my YouTube is filled with these elaborate cooking videos from China and east Asia. Tech content from Germany, that I can’t understand. It’s never really bothered me though.
In general, it’s accurate to say that I’ve never come across great videos because YouTube recommended them to me.
A bit more than common! If you watch Indian (or at least Hindi) TV, you'll understand about every third word. When I was there a lot of youth would either never use, or even not know what common words were in their native language, say words like problem or college.
That does not mean that they have a good grasp of English though. Vocabulary and sentence structure are different beasts entirely, and had I not known the native language, I would have had much more difficulty understanding English/Hinglish - lots of direct translations just didn't work in English. This is common for pretty much anyone that learns a language, though.
I'm a little confused at how people are getting these bad recommendations from YouTube, because my recommendations - at least on my Samsung TV's YouTube app - are mostly spot on. It knows I'm interested in music production, long form studio tours and interviews, 8-bit retro gear & repair, and that's pretty much all it recommends. It can infer that from my subscriptions, but seems to go more by what I actually watch & like.
I assume you are clicking like on the videos that you enjoyed? Do you treat YouTube like a spam filter and rate things as "Not Interested" if it recommends something wrong? Or maybe Google's algorithms are just really really terrible outside of US / UK / Canada / Aus?
On the other hand, my recommendations on the mobile app aren't as good. It's almost as if YouTube treats each client as a separate account/context, even though I'm signed in on all of them.
I do those things often, but not all the time. They usually recommend every single video from a random channel, if you happen to watch just one of their videos. So it’s not all the popular Chinese cooking videos, rather all the videos from this one channel alone. That sort of stuff. Almost like they want some people to get large followings and become influencers, because it’s more profitable to have influencers on your platform rather than having many great videos from different creators.
In a way I’m happy that YouTube recommendations are not so great. That way at least, I’ll not get hooked on the platform and be even more of a time wasting failure than I already am.
Neither Hindi nor English are my mother tongue. Between the two I am more comfortable in English although I speak a lot of Hindi at home. Some may argue that Hindi is the national language of India. It certainly is a national language. It also happens to be a regional language of some parts of North and central India that by happenstance got branded as a national one.
A filter to choose the spoken language used in the video would be very nice indeed.
But, the BlockTube extension from Chrome can be configured to hide channels/videos based on Unicode regexps. An equally honked off YT user asked about this problem on the project's Github page and got some suggestions.