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Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

I am a huge YouTube addict and get sucked into it a lot. I used to discover all kinds of great channels and really enjoyed it. But lately I have noticed I'm not really finding much and the amount of watching I am doing has gone down a lot. Not sure if they changed the algorithm, or if I've just seen everything I like. I have definitely noticed YouTube is recommending me more clickbaity and mainstream stuff lately.

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Same here, I'm physically disabled and YouTube is the only form of "tv" I watch, so I watch a fair chunk of it (understatement) and I've distinctly noticed a massive drop over the last... I want to say 6 months?... where I've found the recommendations to be totally useless.

Way way more recommendations for stuff I'd never consider watching, recommendations for "big" youtubers (I almost exclusively watch smaller channels based around niche hobbies), stuff like that.

I used to think their recommendation engine was amongst the best of any service I've used, now it's junk.

It’s changed, I’m in the same boat. The only new channels I’ve found that I love are after seeing them promoted outside of YouTube. They clearly intersect with other channels I’ve subscribed to and watch regularly but were never recommended. I also notice that the recommendation queue for videos on these channels tries to steer you away to larger more mainstream channels that are only tenuously related.

I wonder if the cat and mouse game of seo is being played out again in “algorithm land” and content creators have learned how to optimize their own content for promotion. I usually blame just the algorithm but maybe i’ve been oversimplifying a larger problem.

It seems to be and a few content creators I watch have documented the process. I believe the spiffing brit and another v named science based channel showed how that swapping the title of the video many times as a kind of A/B test can increase your views by millions.

One of the reasons I never logged in on youtube back when I watched it a lot. Every few weeks when the recommendations were stuck, I'd just wipe cookies and get new stuff.

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