Comment by gylterud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gylterud | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I found YouTube suggestions to be generally useless, so I have just disabled the suggestion sidebar completely[0]. Leaves more screen space for the video.

The reason I found them useless is that the suggestions were too specialised. I usually do not want to watch a dozen videos on the same topic. I usually want to watch one high quality video about it, then move on. Same with channels. I do not want to follow ten channels about each of my hobbies. One channel or two high quality ones is enough.

So, even though the linked project is super cool from a technical perspective, I am not sure how the algorithm could be improved to attend to my taste.

[0]: https://hakon.gylterud.net/tutorials/youtube.html (YouTube self-defence)

I like the blog!

Yeah, that's pretty much my exact gripe - that the algorithm just keeps wanting to show you more of the same. It's like a friend who gets obsessed about one thing after you said you liked it once :')

I'm not sure how best to solve this though

I like when YouTubers talk about other channels they like, and I often go check those out – especially if they are on some completely different topic. Because if someone is making content I like, they might also have good taste when it comes to what they watch. But I think in general the art of "taste-making" remains just that: an art.

Maybe a "this is cool; but enough for now" button? It would remember the category that you like but turn down its recommendation frequency for a duration (session?).

I suspect that it is the difference from other viewers who are reporting yt algo as good. I also want diversity/exploration on unknown topics rather than it repeating the same shit to me again and again. Once a channel/topic is found, I can explore it by myself, no more suggestions required.

I had no idea uBlock could do that!

I just removed my Twitter treding topics, awesome.

Bingo, me too. Did the same for the FB feed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com