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Why is this so bad? What are your hundreds of data scientists doing?
YouTube only knows your interests by the videos you watch. It knows you like speedruns, so it will show you speedruns, easy. But you certainly have other unrelated interests: cooking, woodworking, old cars, whatever. So, from time to time, Google takes a chance and shows you a random topic just to gauge your interest.
It works on a global scale too. They want some variety, they don't want to depend only on a few topics and previously successful YouTubers. So sometimes, they may pick a random video and so it to everyone, and if it succeeds, they have something new.
It is actually rather clear when you look at your recommendations to determine which are which. Typically you are going to find a mix of videos related to the video you just watched, videos relative to your global interests, trending videos, and random stuff.
If some generally effective machine learning algorithm acts really stupid from time to time, chances are that it is exploring, that is: it is asking you a question instead of giving you an answer.
Edit: someone mentionned the multi-armed bandit, yes, this is such an algorithm
Say you go on reddit/r/iloveredcars - all you will see upvoted (ie ... RECOMMENDED by users) will be red cars. You'll never see blue cars. You'll never know they even exist. All you've ever seen are red cars. Not only this but you'll notice that over time it's always the same red car pictures being reposted over and over again.
By inserting "wrong" results a small percentage of the time this ensures that users will be exposed a tiny bit to different content, that may be they end up liking, opening an entiere new tree of recommendation opportunities.
Now I'm sure some people don't want this and they do want to see the same red car pictures over and over, but personally, I appreciate that they do this.
The videos that YT recommends over and over again are probably videos that have a high ratio of advertising revenue (meaning good demographics) to playback cost (meaning low overall byte size) and a high likelihood of going viral by being shared off-platform (meaning broad appeal, non-controversial, short, safe for religious conservatives, safe for work, and easy to summarize within 280 characters).
The videos you want to watch don't meet these criteria, so Youtube won't find them for you.
I'm right now on a browser without my account and on which I don't usually watch YT, basically only when someone pastes a link while gaming. About half of the front page are things I might have clicked on when bored. A third are long. Two are definitely controversial. I don't buy your hypothesis.
Disclosure: I work in Google, but my closest contact with YouTube was drinking whisky with a YouTube SRE some four years ago.
It's like a wild species with vibrant, sometimes garrish colors saying 'Look at me!', where to discriminant viewers it's typically poisonous.
I'm pretty cautious.
But for a large number of my favorite content creators it's a bait and switch. Bait your clicks and actually provide really meaty content.
That aside, my personal favorite trend in the digital media space are the 1-4 minute tutorials for people who already know the software.
These people typically make money outside of Youtube and don't rely on snaring views.
> "binging random content"
gets recommended random popular content
> "why are recommendations so bad"
They can't read your mind, you know
I'd take your point if they only recommended bass videos, but presumably it's just one recommendation in a list of many, with the point being to explore your preferences while also satisfying your demands
davie504 is basically a musically-themed comedy act, so this doesn't seem that unreasonable.
Other than that, I'm pretty happy with my recommends. I think the Google spooks have built a good file on me.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-clean...
I'd love for it to learn that anything with a shocked face thumbnail and CrAzY question for video name is not desired.
That's the problem with marking things as not-interesting. The algorithm will wildly overreact in the opposite direction.
The only thing that works for me is finding the video in my watch history that's causing the recommendations and removing it there. Often it's even something I didn't watch all the way through or even gave a thumbs-down; apparently thumbs-down also means I secretly want more of this content?
YouTube's recommendation algorithm is somehow worse than useless.
With enough time Tiktok will look as bad. I.e. I don't think it's algorithm related "for the most part"
Slap like right now