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Youtube has a whole section with all the people you follow. https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions all the videos are in reverse chronological order.

Twitter has a button with stars where you can select to show only the tweets of people you follow in reverse chronological order. Called Latest Tweets.

Stop blaming users for problems introduced by massive tech companies.

Yes, I know how to find my subscriptions, that's how I know the channels I like are dying; they are posting "my channel is dying videos" and only a subset of their users are finding them.

If you're looking to find more interesting content on YouTube you might want to check this out:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/

They have lists of channels by similarity. That one is the list for the Y Combinator channel. You can look up a different channel in the search bar on top of the page.

I've definitely found a bunch of new channels through it, like Yannic Kilcher and pretty much the whole AI section of YouTube. Despite watching stuff like Robert Miles and Lex Fridman YouTube never showed me the depth of the AI section on its own. After I found it the YouTube algorithm started showing me videos in the new areas I was discovering which brought even more content.

Your other comment said:

> The content creators I've subscribed to are now rarely in my feed which is full of "recommended for you" videos and movies for rent.

The solution is to go to your subscription feed. This also wasn't a few months ago. This changed many years ago. I remember hating having to put the subscriptions page in my list of URLs because it was harder to go there. Previously there was a section of the YT home page for your latest subscription uploads, I think? I don't remember exactly.

You also need to actively watch content from your subscribed channels in order to get their videos recommended to you. I have a ton of channels I'm subscribed to but not all of them show up in my recommendations because I don't watch their content enough.

I feel that's actually better because there are channels I'm subscribed to that I don't watch all of their content, e.g. conference channels, but I do want to occasionally see if they uploaded anything I want to watch. Channels I actively watch frequently have their newest uploads pop up in my recommendations almost immediately.

> Your other comment said:

>> The content creators I've subscribed to are now rarely in my feed which is full of "recommended for you" videos and movies for rent.

It is, and I presume so is everyone's. I wasn't asking for help, I was explaining a bunch of problems I'm seeing.

> This also wasn't a few months ago.

No, something seriously changed a few months ago. 5 different channels are all suddenly have the same problem where their views are all down to 50% or less without explanation.

I got super excited for that YouTube functionality, then I clicked the link and realized that either I follow way too many people for this to be useful, or the people I follow are producing way more content than I can handle. I guess maybe if I "un-ring" the bell for a few of the bigger channels this could be useful...

People harp on social media algorithms but this right here is the actual problem. Your stated preferences, to see and be notified of all those videos, run contrary to your revealed preferences. And services catering to the former will lose to services catering to the latter. By harboring these mismatches we train these systems to ignore what we say we want or risk losing profits and market share.

The problem is that engagement is a poor proxy for preference.

Every morning I to go youtube and check my subscriptions for new videos. I have zero bell notifications because I just find it really annoying. I work from home most days so I play the interesting new videos that day from my subscriptions and really don't bother with anything else.

It's painful, but I have pruned my subscription list of people who upload often but I rarely watch. At this point my YouTube subscription list is channels where I open the video more than 50% of the time.

I don't know if that's "fair" or not, but it's how I keep the subscription page useful.

Yeah I did the same. I find the best way to use YouTube with a lot of subscriptions is just to click the subscriptions list and it shows you who has a new video and you can decide what you're in the mood for based on the channel.

Wait, people use something else to see the videos from their subscribed channels? I'm genuinely curious.

There is a reason TikTok got popular and RSS died. People really like their endless semirandom entertainment

The YouTube subscriptions page is my shortcut to YouTube.

> Instagram actively hides pics from my step kids, nephew and niece to show me "reels" from people I don't follow.

I find it all that for all the data these companies have, they don't seem to be using it well...or stopped using it.

Facebook has suddenly started flooding me with posts from political meme groups I never joined and have never even looked at.

Twitch's recommended section used to be spot-on. Now they're trying to push me to watch women in hot tubs for some reason.

For me, YouTube is the only one that still manages to surface things I actually want to watch.

I don't know what changed (I've really only noticed this in the past two months), but this is starting to feel like the old broadcast TV model of executives deciding we should all watch the same thing.

Twitch has a situation where they are trying to improve discoverability of underperforming streamers. The directory used to just be sorted by live concurrent viewers, which I guess does do a lot to ensure that the front page is full of streams that people will watch (by virtue of them already being watched) but it also leads to the site being dominated by a very small group of people.

Youtube does very well but it's a lot easier to categorize and tag 10-minute videos than it is to do so to a currently active livestream... and I will point out that discovering livestreams on youtube is abysmal. I've got one person that I follow pretty closely and if they arent super good about setting up the stream beforehand it is real easy to miss because youtube will make zero effort in informing you.

But the thing is, a year ago, Twitch actually did a good job suggesting people with only six viewers. *Now* for some reason, they're pushing people in hot tubs who already have thousands of viewers. That's what I'm complaining about.

> I find it all that for all the data these companies have, they don't seem to be using it well...or stopped using it.

They've stopped using it to serve their users. They use it to serve their customers. The content they show you is what they want you to see so they can sell to advertisers, not what you want to see.

these changes are all driven by a/b testing and watching user average watchtime increase.

this stuff is appealing to most people. they measured it. it's how they make money

When in the Instagram app, click on the word Instagram. A select menu appears, and you can choose "Following" - you have to do this every time you open the app, and who knows when it will get the axe, but it's made this terrible platform a little more usable for me.

I agree that they're "broken" in that they don't work the way I want them to - but they're functioning perfectly normally to maximize profit. I think TikTok kinda broke the dam on this and we see it in more apps now, but it seems like we've found out that people will spend more time on the app when you show them random new people based on their interests compared to showing them just the people they chose to follow.

I think the main solution to this would be some sort of public social media platform that isn't trying to be profitable. As long we we're requiring companies to prioritize profit we're not going to get outcomes that go against that

This. They're not broken, they're working as intended for their customers, who are quite emphatically not us.

> All of social media is broken right now.

Not all, at least for me.

VKontakte is the least broken of them all. There's still chronological feed and 95% of it is posts from people and pages you follow. But I imagine it's not very popular, or even known, outside of Russian-speaking countries. Don't get me wrong, there are product managers now and they do keep on relentlessly pushing their agenda (the TikTok clone aka "clips" no one asked for), but compared to what Facebook/Instagram routinely pulls off, VK feels extremely conservative.

Twitter has an algorithmic feed at all? I tend to forget that. There's a small button at the top right that I never click. One thing that DOES annoy the crap out of me though, is their insistence on exposing me to people I don't follow. Those "%user% liked" and "%user% follows" things. If only there was a dedicated button for showing someone else's tweet to your followers!

All entertainment seems to be broken. Let me watch something on netflix my recommended list is almost identical to comedy, adventure, etc. Their machine learning must show that people will just watch what is in front of them.

My audible app is full of recommendations for books I ALREADY HAVE I MY LIBRARY.

Netflix seems to be actually getting better, for a while, watching a single video could entirely change my recommended list.

Facebook served me an ad a couple of months back urging me to apply for a job at the hospital I've worked for since 2015, WHILE I WAS ACCESSING FACEBOOK FROM MY WORK VPN. I have it listed as my workplace and I was coming from a IP addy owned by it and still the computer thought it should show me the ad. I just don't get it.

Spotify transitions to a “song like those in your playlist” when a playlist finishes…and 95% of those songs are from the playlist I just finished listening to…makes no sense.

>> Facebook does this weird thing were after someone I know recommends a video, my feed switches to recommended videos entirely until I click back to home

This switching to similar 'stuff' because you looked at one thing seems to be common on social media and my guess is that this is due to 'wrong' application of recommendation engines. Twitter, LinkedIn does it too.

While logged in to Twitter, you click a 'one-off' tweet and suddenly your timeline is filled with those types of tweets and those type of topics. If you go to your settings/topics, you will see that it is now populated with variations of that topic.

Same thing with LinkedIn. You view a job and your feed/job recommendation is now populated with those type of jobs.

Social media companies don't seem to be accounting for - oh, maybe I was just being curious about this tweet or this job or this company. It's especially bad for Twitter given that you already follow certain people so they have an idea of your interest

Using Twitter as an example, it ran into the problem around 2010 or so where it, in my opinion, had found the perfect set of features. All of the tweets from the people you follow would be shown in chronological order for you. Liking a tweet simply showed support for that tweet, while retweeting it would repost it for all of your own followers. It was simple and clean. However they then ran into the problem where they felt the need to do something to maximize user retention on the site. Algorithms dictate what order things are seen in, new users and tags and trendy things are being shown to you, your likes are now also shown to the people who follow you but only sometimes, anything they could do to try and get people to consume more. It's not just Twitter; these long running social media networks are so afraid of becoming stagnant that they are chasing every trend they come across, and at some point it's going to catch up to them.

You can click on the little star top right on Twitter and choose “Latest tweets” to get a mostly chronological feed