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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

I didn't realize that Reddit even recommends you content. And I can't tell the difference between before and after these recommendations are coming in. The blog post feels like one that Youtube made about their recommender system and how it improved but, their recommender system doesn't work.

Reddit has been sort of this weird place where they face the issues that Digg and Twitter have and want to slowly transition itself into some Facebook competitor but due to the communities that exist on the platform its a really hard sell. The new UI is harder to use and visually distracting. It feels like they just want you to use the App so you have to look at their advertisements.

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Reddit's recommendations are total garbage. But YouTube is actually even worse.

For instance, Eddie Van Halen recently died. So I clicked on a few links from Twitter to check out some concert highlights from his life and career.

Now my entire YouTube recommendations feed is nothing but Van Halen and 1980s rock music.

The Go-Go's recently got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I clicked on a few links from Twitter to see some highlights.

Now my entire YouTube recommendations feed is nothing but the Go-Go's and 1980s pop music.

And not only that, but because I don't use Google search anymore, the only signal that Google can get from me is my YouTube watching, so my Google Now (swipe-left sidebar on Android phones) is nothing but Van Halen and the Go-Go's.

It's the dumbest freaking recommendation engine on planet Earth. It's ridiculous how bad it is.

I remember when I started using YouTube, their recommendations were excellent. I could get completely lost in each next recommendation and they were nearly allr elated to the content I just watched (and was thus clearly in the mood for).

Nowadays it's hot garbage. I just checked. There's 7 videos in there it's been pushing on me for the better part of the year but I have no interest in. 4 videos I've already watched (and it KNOWS this because it shows the full red bar at the bottom), 3 videos I bailed out of because they were not interesting. How many that are related to the video I just watched? Zero.

The original algorithm was clearly and forcefully replaced by something that was advantageous to YouTube's metric but I'd wager detrimental to the majority of their users. Everything feels dumbed down now and it's clear video's are playing to this new kind of algorithm in attempts to cling to their audience.

YouTube has been recommending me pregnancy videos for over a year now. My youngest child was born in 2006.

My ads have slowly been progressing from medicine to planning your own funeral before you die, in order to save the hassle from your near and dear.

Sometimes I wonder if The Algorithm know something that we don't.

That's hilariously dark.

Honestly, though, that is the ad targeting that people are scared of (I know I am), but I am absolutely unconvinced that's what it is. Whenever I need a fresh perspective on tracking, I turn off all of my anti-tracking things and adblockers and search for toilets. Everything you see after that is related to toilets like you're some kind of collector and hoarder of toilets.

"Am I prepared to get more of this recommended until the end of time?"

I ask myself this question every time I watch a youtube video. A lot of them I watch with private browsing to avoid it. Though lately it feels like I'm getting stuff recommended despite the private browsing measure.

> Though lately it feels like I'm getting stuff recommended despite the private browsing measure

Absolutely, some of the recommendations seems to be recommended based on IP. I don't watch anime but I have friends that do, sometimes after they visit my place, I start getting ads for manga and anime for a few days, until they figure out I'm not actually interested in it.

I also browse stuff via Firefox Focus on my phone, and get related content recommended on my desktop just minutes after watching something for the first time on the phone.

Hmmm, that makes me wonder whether it would be better to have a second account to watch those videos with. Then the video view would be tied to an account rather than anonymous through the IP address.

Basically in firefox do a "open in container tab" instead of "open link in private window".

> But YouTube is actually even worse.

Youtube's recommendation engine is to get you click on it and watch a certain percentage.

It's not designed to show you things that you "like." It's way more sophisticated than that.

That's a strange definition of "sophisticated" you got there.

The recommendation engine is indeed garbage, but the default related video algorithms are excellent. I wonder if there's some plugin that clears all cookie information on every YT page refresh. That would give a good vanilla YT experience.

Youtube's algorithm has a major recency bias. Whatever topics and channels you last watched will be constantly recommended forever until you forcefully change.

> It feels like they just want you to use the App so you have to look at their advertisements.

I browse using iOS Safari in privacy mode. Over the past few months Reddit has been doing everything they can to discourage that, including blocking me from reading threads by throwing up a non-dismissible modal with the bogus statement “We cannot verify this content yadda”, preventing sub-comment expansion, and screwing with the URL made available to the iOS share via messages.

The latter is just stupid: instead of the URL for the thread, they substitute the Reddit homepage. Instead of being able to track which of the links I send are interesting to the recipients, they get no useful info whatsoever, and discourage me from attracting eyeballs to their product. It’s stupid, squared.

All they are really accomplishing is hardening my resolve to not give an inch. Eventually another popular headline & dopamine feed will come along and they’ll lose my eyeballs.

I use old.reddit.com

Which, IIRC, doesn’t support clicking a preview to display the full (usually) image. That’s fine for the subs posting headlines, but sucks for memes.

YouTube primarily recommends me videos that I've already seen

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