On Twitter, no amount of curation, mutes, or blocks will save you from screenshots of content you don’t want to see.
On Reddit, you rely entirely up to the mods of a subreddit. Once a subreddit gets too popular, the submission rate overwhelms volunteer resources.
Facebook is just garbage.
Then suddenly a few weeks ago it totally stopped working. I'd click "don't recommend this channel" then refresh and the channel would be right there.
I researched and the recommendation to fix this is to clear your watch history. So I did that, and it cleared all my recommendation building entirely. "don't recommend this channel" works again but I'm starting from scratch and no doubt it'll stop working in the future again.
Whenever I see any video in my feed I don't want to watch I just do that, and since it runs out of things then it has no choice but recommend new and different things.
I'm only aware about the "Not Interested" menu option, but I doesn't reliably remove the video from my feed. It would probably get removed for a particular viewing session, but I usually found it gets recommended again after some days.
Is there anyways to remove the video permanently ?
If your recommendations are currently absolute trash it might even be best to clear your watch history altogether and start from scratch.
But FWIW... it's absolutely worth it. The YouTube recommendation algorithm, when trained, works REALLY well and is a gold mine of useful content.
If you search you'll find this is extremely common - I think there was even a HN post about it a few weeks ago.
Everything about TikTok's algorithmic malleability can be said about YouTube, so I am confused as to why this is news to anyone.
One difference is that YT also has longer videos. Unlike fixed-length blurbs of TT, this increases the challenge for recommendation algorithms, but I welcome this heterogeneity.
Personally am using it through web only.
I wish we didn't need to reverse-engineer recommendation algorithms.
Last year I spent an insane amount of hours watching what I thought was a mix of entertainment and educational videos but everything is entertainment on YouTube or as it seems in all the social networks. I’m not against entertainment but I want to be in control when I seek it, not letting myself be hooked by those algorithms all the time every day. They are so scary because they work too well.
The other thing it does, is continuously offer people extreme content of whatever genre because it thinks it can get high engagement. Whether it's UFOs, alt-right radicalizaion, or conspiracy theory of the day it constantly serves up content from the extremes of society because the people that do watch it typically become obsessive. The behavior of the people most susecptible to the fringes, because they watch so much youtube has enormous impact on what the majority of us see. YTs algorithm is absolute trash.
There is a bunch of amazing content on Youtube, but I never find it due to recommendations. Only due to external pages that link to it which then show links to other related items. YT native recommendation is terrible.
Watch a video and get recommendations for 30 other videos posted by that person, and 15 other videos on almost the exact same topic covering what you just saw. And then mixed in a few "Top 40" style videos from the genere you're in. Ie something barely unrelated, but is obviously popular. Absolute trash.
I dislike YouTube but not as much as TikTok. One makes you choose what to watch, but the other has no long-form content whatsoever. One of is motivated by greed, but the other is backed by CCP.
During pandemic at some point I started indiscriminately watching more YouTube while logged in, and do I regret it. It responded after my viewing habits changed. It seems possible to change it back gradually, but it takes some effort I wish I didn’t have to take.
Second-order volition (“want to want to”) plays a big role in allowing yourself to evolve, i.e. you can force yourself to do something until you become interested in it. In this sense recommendations become a self-fulfilling prophecy, an automatic labeling system that makes you behave the way it thinks you should behave, which is approximately how you behaved before (ideally; we set aside the issue of algorithmic manipulation).
This is true for any platform that has recommendations, and I am highly suspicious of the ones that don’t allow anonymous viewing.
Youtube's recommendation algorithm is absolutely terrible.
EDIT: Also, Tiktok allows videos of up to ten minutes now, and still works well with that length.
2. If you don't want to register a video, you can remove it from your watch history, or you can watch it anonymously. What about TikTok?
3. I know TikTok has a 10 minute limit now, I meant 40 minutes and up. Where in the world do 10 minutes count as "long"?
2/ you can dislike the video and tell it not to recommend it (unlike YouTube), and you can watch the videos on their website anonymously
3/ are you seriously watching 40+ minutes on your phone? They have two different goals, and that's fine.
And do you personally ever do that? How exactly? The crippled slow 'online viewer' that doesn't allow you to even do a simple search and blocks you with a login wall after a couple of minutes?
> are you seriously watching 40+ minutes on your phone? They have two different goals, and that's fine.
Yes, why not? An informative hands-on engineering workshop or an interview with a screenwriter easily run hours. If you will say 'TikTok is not designed for that', well that's my point, YouTube has equally great recommendation system and is designed for that equally as well as it's designed for 30-second cute animal videos.
> 10 year old account
Sorry to hear that YouTube is broken for you. I just can't imagine using TikTok for anything informative, like TFA suggests, when something like YouTube exists.
Right now it just removes toxic crap from the sidebar, but it'd be pretty simple to make it remove tweets as well. Biggest missing feature is custom filter lists.
So true about Twitter - I cannot for the life of me let it know I don't like sports.
Also, perhaps visiting a streamer’s profile, as a form of interacting with content, is training the algorithm to give you more live streams like this.