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Youtube's recommendation algorithm is one of the wonders of the modern world. I discovered so many incredible videos that I would never have searched for and that no one would have recommended to me, thanks to it.

Nice anecdote. YouTube constantly recommends me stuff I have 0 interest in.

Did you give it any useful information? I mean for example, I am subscribed to a bunch of channels about music theory, and Youtube will put other videos about music theory and analysis in my feed. They are highly relevant and at least somewhat popular, so usually reasonable quality. Sometimes it will start recommending videos from a channel that is not so good, and you can tell it to never show you that channel again.

If you only watch random Youtube videos linked from other sites with no particular theme, or generic news and political videos, or don't subscribe to any channels, I can imagine the recommendations would be pretty useless. But the algorithm does seem pretty good at recommending things related to your interests if those are clear from what you watch and subscribe to. It's probably the only recommendation engine I find useful.

My point is less about the content being useful/interesting and more about being mindful of our information diet.

How many videos do you need to watch about music theory? Does it ever feel like the same content but regurgitated in different ways? Do you watch this to genuinely learn? Or is it more enjoyment/infotainment? (honest questions)

I don't study music theory, but this is how I feel about productivity/self-help/business videos, which dominate my feed. Although these videos were life changing at one point, I'm not sure how much more value I'm getting by continuing to watch these anymore. When I get to the end of these videos, nowadays, I just feel a bit 'bleh'.

It feels nice to find new, refreshing content that is completely outside of what the youtube algo would give me, and sometimes that happens by talking to friends (esp in different industries), reading books, old blog posts, etc. I want to stay curious and proactive in finding discovering new things and hobbies and interests.

I appreciate the general point of being careful about one's information diet. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking what you're consuming is bettering you, when it's really just entertainment (I consider HN to be a good example of this!)

Regarding Youtube and music education, I feel like it's a pretty healthy stream of content.

>Does it ever feel like the same content but regurgitated in different ways?

Learning an instrument is such a challenging and broad topic, there's no shortage of things to learn. One thing I like about Youtube is that the better content can surface for everyone to access. Finding a good teacher in real life can be tricky, but with Youtube I can watch 10 different people's takes on a topic and see which explanation clicks for me.

>Do you watch this to genuinely learn? Or is it more enjoyment/infotainment?

It's both. Staying motivated, interested and enthusiastic is just as important as the learning itself. Often watching a good performance or explanation of some musical idea is what makes me want to pick up my guitar in the first place. Of course there's a balance to be found - just watching videos about things you would do if you weren't so busy watching videos isn't much use.

Same here. It's constantly hoping I'll watch videos I've already watched and its forgotten I've watched.

Whether it’s flat earth theory, a pundit eviscerating a college student, the global warming hoax, or exposing how exaggerated the threat of coronavirus is, the recommendation algorithm certainly keeps us clicking!

I mean, yes, if you do click on these things, then youtube will keep recommending them to you. It's like a mirror.

I mostly use YouTube to listen to some pretty obscure music genres and I discover most of my new music through the recommendations. I guess it's hit or miss but for some it obviously works great.

honestly? same!

thanks to "the algorithm" i was able to find a bunch of amazing cooking channels that 100% improved my cooking skills.

Indeed. I can't empathise with the OP at all. I guess it depends how you use these platforms. For them, it seems to boil down to:

>I’ll still come across the best content organically - such as a friend sending me a video or a tweet, or when I go searching for that content with intent.

This person is very lucky to have such interesting friends whose interests align so closely with theirs, and who are willing to put in all the effort of content discovery on their behalf. My friends mainly send me dog videos and memes.

Agreed. I'm not sure what the OP is referring to (Astros cheating scandal), but I get great recommendations as it's based on view and like:

Starcraft 2 pro matches, interesting algorithms and maths, lots of bodyweight fitness/calisthenics/gymnastics- it's fantastic!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Astros_sign_stealing_s...

OP is basically saying, "I know about this, YT knows I know about this, and I'm still hearing about it [even-though there are theoretically more important (new) things I'm _not_ knowing about b/c of recommendation algo]"

This is, in large part, because of you. You're quite lucky, but the algorithm is designed to keep people watching Youtube, it's not designed to enrich people's lives, and that means that if someone who isn't you, and who is susceptible to clickbait titles, starts to click recommendations, the algorithm silos them and their recommendations are effectively forever at best drivel, but more often than not, active disinformation or even horrifying (plenty of stories on how the algorithm is very much not interested in making your life better over on https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/youtube-regrets/)

My personal experience with Youtube recommendations has been really bad for a long time now. The only videos it recommends that I care to watch are from channels I'm already subscribed to, so no big victory there - any content from new creators is very rarely interesting. My (unproven) theory behind this is that since I started using Firefox and Duck Duck Go, the algorithm has been starved of data about my preferences (apparently, only Youtube search and view history is not good enough).

Comparing YouTube logged in vs logged out... it's no contest really. Logged in is far more useful, even when not including Premium (no ads) and other features.

Logged out I'm seeing mostly useless viral videos that I have no interest in. By default it appears to me that YouTube recommends pure sugar. Whereas logged in you can steer it away from that.

I have a curated list of subreddits I follow on reddit without any of the large default meme-spam ones. Without that reddit is basically useless to me as I don't need even more meme-spam in my life. Same with twitter, I use it to follow some engineers and artists while avoiding the mainstream accounts that have no relevance to me. I honestly want to know what these people are up so as it's usually either beautiful or interesting or insightful.

I use Multireddits for that. They let you view a custom feed by concatenating subreddit names in the URL. No need for login or subscriptions.

E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux+privacy

This is pretty easy to do with firefox, just use the multi account containers and the temporary containers extension. During normal browsing you use temporary containers, which keeps you logged out and avoids anonymous session tracking. If you need to log in all you need to do is right click the tab and reopen in your dedicated "logged in" container

I just switched to this setup from Cookie Autodelete (or something similar), and I'm really happy with it. For some websites where you want to always login you can also set a URL to automatically open in a certain container.

I used to do this but have shifted my pattern somewhat. Now, I use many fewer permanent containers. When I want to log in, I'll do it in the temporary container. I use a password manager so this is barely less convenient than reopening the tab. To log out, I just close the tab.

Can't you just use a private window?

Private windows are all linked to each other. Different private windows are not in different private sessions. They all share the same private session, so It's not really the same.

Interesting, I didn't know that. Seems clear from the language in the initial view of the private window, but I hadn't really paid attention before.

This isn't how I think private windows should work. They should be fully isolated (tabs within the same private window could share a session, though).

Because I find video recommendations useful, because I want to upvote good content on the internet just like I do here on HN and because I actually have a nice timeline with curated content. The points of the article are rather weak to me, specially considering you are supposed to have good security for your accounts so even if you decide to actively log out yourself the next time you'd like to interact with any of these networks you will at least have to go through a manual login, 2FA using your phone and an authenticator app etc, it's a bummer so convenience wins there. If this is a problem then, I believe convincing people to never save login passwords in their browsers is more compelling than suggesting to log out. That said, if I could log in with Face ID in like 2 seconds everywhere I'd probably stay logged out until I wanted to interact in SOME networks.

With a MacBook Air and iPhone it's not too much hassle.

I use Touch ID on the MacBook Air to fill in the username and password, and then I open the 2FA app on my iPhone and tap the code to copy it. The clipboard is synchronised between the MacBook Air and the iPhone in their out-of-box configuration, so I can immediately paste the 2FA code on the MacBook Air by just pressing ⌘+V.

Thanks to this, I log out a lot of the time.

However, to make it even more friction-less I am also going to make a simple little 2FA app myself for the MacBook Air, where I just glue together a couple of libraries and make it more effortless than having to touch the phone at all.

> Why do we need to be constantly logged in to YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter?...These apps all work fine anonymously

Instagram most certainly does not work without logging in. I don't have an account, and it only lets you see at max 1 or 2 posts before prompting (and mandating) a login. Also, I don't know how Twitter is useful without being logged in - you're just seeing the "trending", very little of which is statistically likely to be interesting to you.

Even if you log out don’t they still know who you are based on IP or other fingerprints to serve relevant content? Anecdotally I’ve been on online shopping sites that will email me my cart to ask if I want to check out even when I’m not logged in, so it seems unlikely that you’ll be any more anonymous by signing out.

IP: use commercial VPN so you blend in with thousands of other users

fingerprinting: use firefox and turn on resistfingerprinting

Having a browsable & searchable history of "every youtube video ever watched on any device" is something pretty valuable to me.

Just use your local browsing history?

That doesn't cover the 'on any device' requirement.

Today being logged out might equate to choosing the “default” view of the world (as far as the internet is concerned) while the AI creates a view for every “logged in” person that distorts the world to fit their biases almost completely

I am subscribed to a lot of small subreddit I would not see content from if I wasn't logged in.

I follow people on Twitter.

But most importantly, I _really_ started using youtube about a year ago. I replaced my TV watching at 90% (everything except movies at night). Not only I am subscribed to enough channels that there are at least 2-3 new videos per day I would want to watch, the recommendations algorithm is very good and I can literally go on Youtube multiple times a day and be recommended new videos that I like and introduce me to new channels I will subscribe to.

Reddit is a pointless stream of memes if you are not logged in to see your subscribed subreddits.

YouTube still recommends content when you’re logged out. In fact, I used YouTube for years logged out, and when I started having to log in because I got YouTube Premium, I was unhappy to find all my recommendations reset! I’m starting over from the generic recommendations (which are quite frankly a little terrifying). I wish there was a way to move the recommendation data between accounts.

I wish Reddit would implement a recommendation engine like YouTube. I don't want to ever log into Reddit and I just treat it as my funny pages, but every single day without fail I am subjected to all sorts of abhorrent, deviant content that is essentially forced onto their "popular" timeline despite the fact that it's not really popular.

Many times when you read the comments on these types of posts, if you sort by controversial, you can see people asking "Why is this on the front page?" or, just by counting the number of deleted comments you can see how unpopular that content really is.

But what is the benefit of logging out? It's not like these websites can't track you and your interests anyway.

Question for anyone working on ranking at Youtube:

Recommendation quality got way worse ~March of this year, presumably due to capacity restrictions after a surge in post-shutdown usage. Anecdotally, the quality has not recovered and is still worse than pre-COVID. Is my experience widespread? What's going on?

I ask as somebody working on a similar product, where capacity caused recommendation quality degradation in March/April but recovered soon after.

Maybe you just run out of interesting content to watch?

Golly.

I almost never log in to any of those services. Am I missing out? Yikes. Self doubt starts, gnawing at me....

Presuming you "browse" the service (e.g. look at whatever equivalent it has to a front page), you're seeing only the "mainstream" of its content, without any "niche" content.

For many of these services, most of the reason that people even use/recommend them is that they allow each person to conveniently "browse" within the set of long-tail niches that interest them. Reddit, for one, is certainly not popular because of its mainstream/default subreddits. It's popular in spite of them.

On the other hand, presuming you do no "browsing" of the service, but just get linked to specific content on the service from elsewhere, you're pretty much getting the full experience either way. (I think one difference is that some services won't show you all the comments unless you log in; and sometimes the comments themselves are what was interesting-enough to link to.)

Also, some particular services (e.g. YouTube) track you and build a viewer profile of you even if you never create an account there, and so "browsing" them will still result in niche content if that's what you've previously visited there. But most services don't do this.

I like apple solution for that, logging using a randomized apple account ID per service

My tweetdeck layout is by far the most effective way to use twitter. My youtube subscription page is my first port of call. Reddit.... its just highly vexing if you aren't logged in.

There’s invidio.us to avoid YouTube as much as possible.

Also, strongly disagrees with

  >> While logged in, my YouTube recommended feed is doing a great job of serving me interesting content - but is that a good thing?

I see one related item and then a barrage of the worst of humanity.

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