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Comment by fellellor | Hacker News Reader

There is too much of that going around these days. Almost as if it’s in fashion. It doesn’t really bother me, except for the ones saying, "I’m Indian too, and I hate my kind".

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.

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> It’s common to come across words from many languages, including English, interspersed in conversations.

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.

> 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.

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 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?

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.

I use YouTube almost exclusively for construction and woodworking related videos, but my recommendations are always filled with politics, sports, and music, and only rarely a video I'm interested in. I've given up telling YouTube I'm not interested because it has had no discernable effect.

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