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Comment by alangibson | Hacker News Reader

Youtube is astonishingly bad. I watched a Jordan Peterson talk just to see what all the fuss is about and now there's at least a clip of him in damn near every video Youtube recommends. And this is despite me actually watching aerospace related videos almost exclusively.

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Honestly at this point while logged in I only watch videos about scientific and technical subjects. Anything else I go incognito so it won't mess up my recommendations.

I have the impression that the algorithm sees that you watched something a little more popular in general and latches into that trying to bring you to a larger more generic cluster. Same thing happens with music, for me.

Try watching something like "how to fix a washing machine"; you do this several times a week for the rest of your life, right?

if you are logged in, you can go to your watch history and delete the entry for it, that does something to get it out of the algorithm. But yes, YT really likes to latch onto you watching a single thing once.

I almost exclusively pay attention to updates from creators I've subscribed to. I'm more sure that YT will eventually remove subscriptions in an effort to college TikTok than I am that the sun will come up tomorrow.

I wonder if the algorithm has not detected that somehow people watching Jordan Peterson were spending more time watching Youtube, and so it is gently nudging you into that direction.

That's for sure what's happening. On a personal level it's extremely annoying because a machine is trying to manipulate my behavior for its own benefit.

It is what it is. That same recommendation engine does wonders for music.

For controversial stuff etc, it's better to watch it in incognito. And really any topic that you're not actually interested in. I watched a few minecraft videos to figure out a redstone thing I was working on, and my recommendations were flooded with garbage minecraft videos.

I think it is likely an attempt to beat the echo chamber. If your interests are niche, the only ways to avoid showing content that is, well, cliched is to latch on to the one offs and show a small percentage of those, or show truly random content. The former likely gets much better results.

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