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Comment by hackeraccount | Hacker News Reader

I find youtube recommendations crap because if I watch something on one subject it seems to assume the subject is now the love of my life and proceeds to offer a zillion on just that subject.

regarding what the article is talking about ... eh, it seems like they're saying it works fine but sometimes puts up videos whose politics they don't like. Short of going in and removing the stuff you don't like so that other people won't get to see it I don't see how you fix this. It's presumably the same algorithm that's working most of the time that's surfacing the crap.

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>it seems to assume the subject is now the love of my life

christ, no kidding. this was my first clue that google has fundamentally changed as a company and it was time for me to leave.

ive been using gmail since it came out and watching YouTube with a signed-in, non adblocked experience for years. the algorithim doest give a SHIT. if i watch one "The Office" clip, thats suddenly 60-80% of my feed despite the fact that i dont particularly like the show. im not sure what theyve doing with all my data theyve been harvesting like gollum, but it sure isnt being used for my benefit. (i dont have kide, no one else uses my account, dont watch youtube through vpn, etc etc)

and dont get me started on the ads. ive never installed an anime girl fighting game, from gplay or anywhere else. stop it.

Oh the ads. I cannot underestimate the annoyance it has caused to viewers. Seeing the numerous memes making fun of those asset flip adware turned "games" makes me die a little inside.

Now I actively push my normie friends to install uBlock Origin on their devices. And Vanced or NewPipe when it worked.

The midrolls are nearly always in an awful spot in the video and especially when watching something on a serious topic so jaring.

At least most television ads are placed in a slot designed for ads to be there. Though I still find them jaring for shows that arent up-beat.

To be honest, tv ads are the reason we dont watch a lot of TV anymore. The ad:content ratio is too high, and youtube has definitely as high or higher without an adblocker.

You could just pay for youtube premium?

No dark pattern there.

How else do you suggest youtube pays its costs? It probably uses more bandwidth and quite possibly more storage than just about any other website on the net.

I have no idea what you are referring to. This has never ended badly for consumers. Why, I remember when cable came out. For a small monthly fee we could get rid of all the advertising. That turned out ... just... oh wait. Okay, then Sirius Satellite! All those ads on the radio? Just get Sirius at a small monthly fee, and bam! All ads will... be... gone... forever... Well, uhmmm... Okay. Never mind. /s

Does youtube even advertise it? I would guess I would have to go into my profile and find it there, but I've never seen it mentioned by youtube.

Edit: Also, I think many are jaded by cable where you pay and still get ads. Hulu has an ad-free tier, but I forget the history and if that's existed from the start. I do remember there being a lot of outrage about paying and still getting ads at some point.

I pay for YouTube Premium in Rupees. It's £1.36 a month.

One of the weird things tho, is that I didn't see Ads with Ad Blocker. Is there some regional thing that ad blocker doesn't work in the USA but it works elsewhere?

They have no problems showing me ads for exploitive garbage like raid shadow legends or some other shit I will never ever ever install or buy. And then they tell us they use the data for serving “more relevant” adverts? I call BS.

I suspect there's a simple explanation. Sometimes people go on massive subject binges and there's likely certain videos that are more likely to trigger this than others. If you watched one the youtube algorithm is basically asking if you'd like to binge the rest because a lot of other people did.

In terms of watch time and retention on site I imagine those binges are gold hence why they've ended up being optimised for.

Indeed, if you watch a video repairing your dish washer, usually a one off task, Youtube will assume you have developed a fetish for watching white good repairs, and they will pop up in your recommendations for weeks.

Exactly. I've been on Tik Tok for a few months and I feel like I've seen a hundred times as many interesting and relevant videos that have actually improved my life and inspired purchases as I've ever seen on YouTube, mostly just on my For You Page (aka its recommendation algorithm). As a user, it doesn't feel like magical AI, it just feels like Tik Tok quickly grokked my most basic demographic information and frequently tries feeding me things that anyone would guess might be relevant to a 40 year old American dad who likes videogames (aka stuff Google knows). It's perplexing that Google, masters of A/B testing, can't figure out that parenting advice or retrogaming content might be relevant to me.

Granted the interaction model is very different, and who knows if I'd ever commit to watching even a 5 minute YouTube video on something I'm not primed to watch, but after Tik Tok, Youtube feels like a stale product of yesteryear.

A friend of mine has the same problem, but I don't. I almost think YouTube has him and you in some weird long-term A/B test. I sent him some French rapper as a joke one day and YouTube proceeded to send him crappy French rap for the next several weeks.

This is exactly why I browse entirely within private mode now. I always make sure I am not signed in to my Google account before clicking any YouTube link.

I do not need to be constantly reminded of a single weird video I have clicked months before.

YouTube recommendations haunted me for life.

Just edit your watch history, and recommendations will become instantly better.

Exactly this, they're not toxic, just sh*t.

search for a famous song, and the recommendations are for a zillion cover versions of the same song, or other music by the same artist.

Yes; in particular it would be nice if the algorithm mixed in "here's some videos on a topic you watched a bunch of six months or a year ago" sometimes. But it's so fixated on the very short term of your history that if a topic ever ages out of that it's gone forever, unless you personally remember it and go searching for it...

It doesn't ever seem to be short term for me... It shows me the same uninteresting videos for months.

Oh, you watched a game streams? How about I show you three of that game on the top of the page until you stop coming back.

The only thing that works to get rid of them is to downvote it. I don't want to give the downvote, but it's the only way to make the algorithm understand I don't care about what they are showing me.

It's kinda picky though in what it spams you with. For example I watch tons of space engineering bids, will watch anything from Scott Manley as soon as it comes out, yet it often doesn't recommend it to me, I gotta hunt it down somehow.

It seems to try to show mw videos I've watched 6 months ago; not topics from before, but the actual videos I've already seen.

Whats worse is that for videos I haven't watched it recommends the same videos for weeks, even though I never watch it.

I feel like half of the recommendation slots are wasted in one of these ways.

> if I watch something on one subject it seems to assume the subject is now the love of my life and proceeds to offer a zillion on just that subject.

There was a distinct point in time a couple years ago where this started to happen. Before that, my YouTube feed was always a diverse selection of all the different topics I had ever watched. Now, if I watch one car review my feed is full of car channels. If I watch one political video it fills with politics. Nothing I do seems to affect YouTube's singular focus on whatever topic I've most recently viewed.

Use private browsing...it forgets the love of your life effect

Yeah, the recommendations are completely useless for me. They get stuck in some random topic I’m not even interested in just because I watched a video once.

This is really annoying. A couple days ago, my wife was having trouble sleeping and I selected a competitive Tetris match video for her as a joke. Now I can't stop getting recommendation for all tetris-related stuff. I want my Tetrisless life back.

What happens if you start actively pressing to dislike on every video you didn't want to get recommended to you?

It’ll eventually get a little better but it takes a LOT of repetition. For example, after the gamer tantrum a few years ago anything remotely related (e.g. some designer’s talk - dry, non-provocative) would queue a bunch of anti-feminist “reaction” rants and it took many dozens of dislikes before that would stop after watching one video in the area. Science topics were similar - the angry reactionary side of the new atheism movement presumably has equal engagement numbers so the algorithm really wants you to settle in for some ad views.

This isn't my experience at all. On certain subjects, YouTube will start relentlessly pushing an agenda. If I watch some videos where people talk about sci-fi movies or TV, my recommendations become flooded with videos about how SJWs are ruining Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who, etc. It's gotten to the point that I now only watch such videos in Incognito Mode.

I get the same, together with videos about how social media is censoring conservatives while am literally being recommended their videos.

It's quite something.

This might be because there is a lot of content like that.

Spot on.

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