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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

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andrewmcwatters

I can appreciate this, but isn't one of YouTube's biggest selling points its recommendations?

I really don't want to see what is trending for YouTube's primary demographic, because I'm certainly not in it.

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For me the biggest selling point is that the content I like is on YouTube. Everything else I can do without.

I consume it through their RSS, which is nice, I suppose.

Do you subscribe to individual channel RSS feeds independently or do you have a way to get your subscription list as an RSS feed?

I've been needing to do something like this for a while.

I wrote a custom tool that automatically pulls in videos from channels I've "subscribed" to via RSS.

I suppose if I used RSS for anything else I could have just plugged those feeds into my RSS reader, but YouTube is the only thing I use it for.

Interesting, I always liked this approach. Let the tech company do the hard work of making a seamless UX (or one of the great open source alternatives) and then just syncing the subscriber list from them, instead of having to manually plug in and manage it all in a separate app.

> I can appreciate this, but isn't one of YouTube's biggest selling points its recommendations?

Not for me. I get very poor recommendations. I rarely look at that section of the page, and am usually disappointed when I do.

When you see the front page without being locked in, that can be pretty jarring, and to me a little insulting that they would show this crap to anyone.

But for me the value is that if I need to know or see how anything is done, learn about anything I like, hear any song or rewatch any news clip I can find it on youtube.

Unless you mean to also cover related videos in recommendations. Those are normally pretty useful.

YouTube's biggest selling point is the size of its library.

No, their recommendations to me are their worst selling point. The recommendations I get must be paid promotions cause they are nothing like the things I watch, and seem to be clickbait.

Not sure what you're doing then, because my recommendations are great and never clickbait. My only problem is they're too much like what I've already been watching, rather than a little deviation from it.

Another part of it is that clickbait YouTubers continue to push clickbait and are associated with other clickbait. Just don't watch anything from them, and you tend to get less clickbait overall, because your recommendations are more likely to come from less trashy sources.

Whenever I aggressively clear search/watch history, delete YouTube browsing data, watch incognito, and/or try to protect my "privacy" from YouTube, the recommendations unsurprisingly turn into complete drivel.

Unsurprisingly, if I just watch what I like watching from the official UI, with history turned on, without removing searches, etc, the algorithm invariably just shows me more like what I've watched and works very well.

That’s the trending tab. But your main page is tailored based on the videos that you clicked on or watched.

I just listen to specific genres of music so my recommendations are all great.

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