Hacker News Reader

Comment by debarshri | Hacker News Reader

Social media tells you what you should see based on some implicit determination. Sure sometimes you can discover new things that did not interest you. You can feel serendipitous. With RSS feed, you can actually gain control, you could actually say when you see items in the feed, alert me. With current social media, I am constantly discovering things, which gives me a short high of finding new things which lasts for few minutes and then I find another new thing. I haven't been able to find what interests me for eg. In YouTube, where I get bored quickly even though I keep seeing new things, new domain I just discovered.

View on HN

YouTube is far better if you can completely bypass their algorithm.

Half the time I use YouTube through NewPipe, a FOSS Android alternative to the YouTube app. If you import your subscriptions, it shows you exactly all the videos from your subscribed channels in chronological order, not what it or YouTube thinks you want to see. The search is seemingly less algorithmically influenced and there is no autoplay. There's a "trending" tab, but that's easy to ignore and you can just set your subscription feed as the default tab. The very fact that I don't feel like what I'm seeing is what corporations and billionaires want me to see changes my usage into something that is active rather than passive. It feels different, better, to participate in the power process to not only have confidence in that I'm seeing all the updates I specified to see but that I have to seek out what I want to watch/listen to. Psychologically, it's healthier, IMO.

Peep the settings, you can remove the Trending tab altogether.

YouTube itself does have that same option under the subscriptions tab, it will only show videos from your subscriptions in chronological order.

That is true, except YouTube doesn't always show you all your subscription content. In fact it frequently hides subscribed content from me, including live streams, even when I set the bell-icon to "All". The difference between the subscriptions tab on YouTube and NewPipe is that the latter literally scans every subscribed channel for uploaded content, so I have yet to find out that I've ever missed something through it. Whereas on YouTube I often discover that I missed out on either a live stream or an upload that did actually interest me but it never appeared in either my notifications or in the Subscriptions tab. The subscriptions tab is better than anything that's on the home page, but I prefer to not have an algorithm lie to me that I can see "All" new uploads.

EDIT: Also, random semi-related complaint; YouTube on web never honors when I click "Set Reminder". It doesn't matter if I permanently allow notifications in my browser or what. I get no emails either. I have a hard time believing the YT devs have written any tests for it. Then again, I've never tried it in Chrome. ¬‿¬

Not sure about YT app which I don't use, but on desktop browser it does show all including live streams from subscribed channels, at least for me.

Newpipe is fantastic.

> there is no autoplay.

There is now, it got turned on when I installed a recent update. The option is: settings->video and audio->auto-queue next stream.

YouTube has rss.

Serendipity is sadly an endangered experience with today's popularity algorithms. If every suggestion you see is based on what you and people with similar behavior as you are most likely to click, then what you get is a rut. The things you discover may be things you haven't seen before, but they can hardly be called new.

The beautiful thing about flipping through a magazine, or browsing a library, is that everyone gets the same options regardless of who they are. It allows me, someone who isn't into a particular thing, to discover that thing. To accidentally read something I wouldn't have thought I agreed with, and discover that they actually made a decent point.

I think these types of popularity algorithms are deeply problematic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com