Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?
Seems like the quality of youtube suggestions & shorts have been spammed by bots & other people hacking the system. Why is Google not doing anything about this?
If I subscribe to a new channel it gets recommended like hell, then it forgets about it.
BUT! Totally irrelevant things that I never watch, is kept on my front page for weeks. Like it wants me to check it or wants me to mute it, but fuck them I'm not giving them any more metrics. If I clear the fingerprints and block the acquiring of these metrics the front page gets filled with new, interesting content. Who the hell understands this? I have also observed that if you have an adblocker enabled it gives you trash all the time.
When the absolutely disgusting, braindead, bottomfeeding "depp vs amber" nightmare was ongoing I had to "mute" the same channels multiple times and then 55 others, because it just slams it into my face. Watch it, watch it, you must see this muck.
The topic of my fav channels represent... I get nothing relevant from them. :DDD
The shorts... was the pinnacle of YTs innovation. :DDDD
Goog is all about control now. Look innovation for somewhere else... well... if you can find any, lemme know........
You can't do shit with godzilla and now he does whatever he wants.
You can easily filter it, by unsubscribing to content you don't actually want. If you watch so little content of a channel that it annoys you to see it on the subscriptions pages, then you shouldn't be subscribed to them.
I can't see how adding a filter system would be less annoying at that point, you would take more time by selecting some filter than just ignoring that specific content. Out of my 352 subscriptions, I got 22 videos yesterday, quite fast to skip them.
But click one recommendation outside my interests just to check it out, and that's going to dominate for the next couple of weeks even if I decide I don't like it. Maybe I should downvote that more aggressively.
I'm in a similar position. I'm subscribed to 78 channels but typically will only watch content from a fraction of these due to preferences on quality and time (some creators have good content but end up putting up an hour video, which I am less likely to view).
Statement indistinguishable from classic cable TV user.
BUT, BUT, BUT THE PINNACLE OF INNOVATION IS YOUTUBE/GOOGLE, RIGHT?
And they host these nice and trendy videos about how advanced they are, and how you should do your coding, how you should organize your work, your life, your team, whatever. And the terrible libraries... gimme a fn break. Too bad for the end consumer, it's all about pain.
I mean even porn sites have finer grained control on content filtering than YT :DDD. I'm wondering why they are not opening their code base and let the coding done by individuals, OF COURSE, FOR FREE! ha ha ha
Honesty question here, but how do you do that?
https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
I don't have notifications on and when I visit YouTube I'll check to see what videos I want to watch since I last visited. I usually check the up next to see if anything similar/interesting is recommended and very rarely go to the home page to get recommendations.
Reminder that you don't have to have an account to subscribe:
* https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=THE_CHAN...
* https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=YOURPLA...
(Though an 'official' subscription with-in the system may help the creator.)
There are other things that drive me nuts about YouTube's recommendations, like the fact that they will never recommend me the next part of a n-part video. If I'm watching part 2/3 of something, please show 3/3 in the side bar, YouTube!
YouTube's iterative degeneration into its current state points to the folly of A/B-maximalism. In the pursuit of getting more base hits, it seems like YouTube forgot that the goal of baseball is to win games and keep fans entertained.
YouTube has been bad for a while. I suppose that some part of that is good – YT effectively killed the addictive loops that made their website irresistible. However, there is a lot that sucks about it. The utility of YouTube has gone down. Furthermore, I think YT blew open a hole in the video space for services like TikTok to emerge. TikTok may be crack, but YouTube used to be cocaine.
It used to do that, though! They should at least allow it up to a limit or something rather than making it just that stupid.
My other biggest complaint really is the recommendation system in general. It's so bad that I can guarantee you that I can fall asleep to something innocuous like Spongebob Squarepants and in the morning I'll wake up and it's playing Jordan Peterson. EVERY. STINKING. TIME. It was like that before with Lex Fridman, and I totally had to unsubscribe and unlike a lot of Lex content before it would stop autoplaying it. I can't keep playing that game, but at least I can tolerate Peterson's voice more than Lex's.
Funny thing is I was never crazy about either one. They clearly profiled me as being the kind of person who watches that stuff. No, surely the fact I watch a lot of videos about theme park rides can't mean I want to see similar content. Obviously, I want to watch Jordan Peterson!!! :D /s
Without the market dominance, YouTube would be marginally better than its competitors.
I don't get it.
None of these systems are for the people. It's either about YouTube's bottom dollar or some influencer's ego. It is really amazing to me when I come across old YouTube videos that are just people filming or discussing something interesting without fanfare. You can find newer people doing this these days as well, but it's hard. These types of videos are so refreshing because it's what YouTube should be about: people being creative in honest ways, people talking about or showing something they're interested in, etc.
This so much. I feel the same way, I remember when people would just make creative videos or goofy animations.
This is it. Exactly.
I've been working on a small team to tackle this problem. We have a working prototype if anyone is interested in checking it out. Look up a channel to get a list of channels in the same niche or related niches. It is specifically designed to surface smaller creators.
Here is our list for 3Blue1Brown, which seems to be popular around here:
https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/
The icons are crawlable links, so you can click the channels in a given list to go to the list for that channel.
We also have mapped the channels to provide a new way to explore. The map clusters similar channels so you can get a spatial sense of where your interests are and what interests and niches are very far away, ones you may not consider or even be aware exist. For the curious, here is a short blog post explaining the map and how to use it:
https://channelgalaxy.com/blog/article0/
I hope this isn't too self-promotional. I think there is a need for this kind of thing and it is hard to resist the many, many cries of frustration about user exploration on YouTube and the narrowness of their recommendations that I frequently see around here.
Cheers!
YouTube disabled my entire feed a few weeks ago (https://i.imgur.com/Q78FqLQ.png) and is bullying with a big prompt to turn on tracking to restore it. What's funny is that recommendations have worked perfectly well for the last few years with history turned off (Just show me the stuff I subscribed to) but now I have to click on each subscription one-by-one to see content. Good riddance since I've pretty much stopped using Youtube at this point.
dont, bookmark https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
Edit: For clarity, I had no idea WTF a shuffle dance was and curiosity got the better of me. Super great way to make me NOT curious about my non-core interests.
I am looking for other sources.
It's annoying, more often than joyful, to use YouTube for me. It feels like a half-baked project. I miss Human Curation.
My story: paying long-term YT user (no ads), watched many multi-hour "calm stream / quiet cafe" videos, Recommended list became 75% polluted w/these and un-cleanable regardless of many "Don't Like" actions by me, nuked history, still seeing some.
Significant downgrade on what it used to be.
It's definitely an accelerating trend though, online search is getting so much worse and even fast food menus are insane now. You need to the app to see anything other than the most profitable combos in many cases.
They were really good when the kiosks were new, just like Google was.
I guess PMs hunting local revenue growth but macro loss by spamming upsell and making what you want hard to find is a common problem with these luser uncentric systems.
I’ve started keeping a log of every interesting article I find since I know I won’t be able to find it earlier.
I’m also seeing a trend where they try and answer question and will pull from any source. The answer often being wildly wrong.
Saw one of “people also ask” where the source was some dudes fanfiction so the suggested question and answer were complete non sense.
Have you seen Twitter search lately? The search tab in the app doesn't even have a text field visible by default. It's all just unrelated popular garbage. You have to swipe down to reveal the text field where you can enter your search term. Then you get more unrelated garbage in the "top" result tab and you need to go to one of the other tabs to actually see what you were searching for.
It's like Amazon's search, it's ridiculous how bad it is.
A quick glance at these shows Western Capitalism fails to optimise the market and instead optimises profit.
Google's shopping search is definitely not designed to help one shop.
It's total garbage. It's unreliable, sometimes typing out the full name of the app (which kinda defeats the purpose) is the only way to get the app to show in the search results, sometimes NOT typing the full name is the only way to get it to show. Sometimes you get an app, sometimes you get an unrelated app (type is prusa for prusa slicer and you get printers), often times you'll get a random log file with a similar name, or a bing search you certainly don't want.
Hot garbage.
If only it worked like command+space on mac.
Spotlight on Mac is indeed far superior. And so is the text launch widget thingy on KDE which I use now.
YT search was never good (that I can recall).
When I want to find content on YT, I use Google search with a site restrict [1].
Infinitely better.
I invite you all to do the same and forget the YT search box.
[1] something like : life of Albert Einstein site:youtube.com
We like to think of a company as one entity and assign to it some sort of anthropomorphic aspect, but that's just a dumbed-down simplification our minds like to make to make dealing with the world easier.
Especially for a company as large as Google, were political infighting between product verticals are a documented problem.
In that regard, it is not ironic at all, there is no such thing as consistency in such a large human organization. Hell, even the army is not capable of doing this properly.
And after I wrote that sentence I found the original video I was thinking about with a google search. Welp.
https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
Of course, the actual history search box is confusingly smaller and off to the side of the much larger search box for all of YouTube.
Isn't that a good thing? If you searched for something and the first 10 results aren't a match, why not introduce you to other things (one can experiment with finding how closely related those additional recommendations are, or based on other things you recently enjoyed, etc.)?
Because that's not what I told it to do.
Go to the front page right now with clean cookies and you'll see most of the thumbnails have "reaction faces" in them for no apparent reason, usually pulling some kind of exaggerated expression.
Clickbait used to mean that you baited the viewer into clicking, now it means you baited the algorithm into recommending you.
The search engine should prioritise videos matching your specific search so you can find what you are looking for from hobbyist creators but I’m not sure if that’s happening.
https://www.canva.com/p/templates/EAFBCRpOy3g-yellow-black-e...
On a side note, wow. I can’t believe that 8 years have already passed. It feels like yesterday that people were actively debating these topics here on HN.
In fact, A/B testing showed that the longer the video they put on the home page, the higher the conversion rate.
Notably though, if I log in and visit my home page I have only one video of this nature on the front page in the first ~50, so it does appear possible to teach the algorithm you will not engage with such content even without conscious effort.
SponsorBlock has saved my enjoyment of YouTube and allowed me to subscribe to channels I never would have watched because of their constant self-promotion.
With an adblocker stopping the ads outside the video, and SponsorBlock to stop the ads inside, I enjoy YouTube like never before.
Trolling the algorithm seems fun, but I've had a few undesired encounters when trying to search for recipes for example.
"Forvo is the largest pronunciation reference online. Our goal is to compile native speaker pronunciations for all the words that exist in the world, including names."
Or shouldn't have been a video at all.
Lots of people come up with some schtick they don't give a damn about because they see (or think they see) all these other people getting rich on YouTube and TikTok.
And recommendation engines are awful in general. It's a problem that even those genuinely trying to solve it really haven't.
I think YouTube knows this which is why they are pushing shorts so hard.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/technology/youtube-automa...
Though there is a growing number of anecdotes surrounding (niche|not palatable to SV) channels who’s subscribers don’t get notified despite the bell thing being on, new videos no longer in feeds, and even people getting unsubscribed for no apparent reason.
This is a problem, as I’d sooner give up peanut butter than only be served videos with open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails.
I also just manage a curated list of channels and consume via RSS, with YT perpetually blocked, short of a few re-review days per year.
Sponsor segments are easily skippable with a few fast-forward fingertaps, or right-arrow taps on a keyboard.
The home page used to be a way to find new videos but now you just have to wait a few hours and try again.
I'm thinking recommendations can be significantly increased by using a ruby gem because what they have now, certainly more complicated and convoluted, isn't working at all.
Recommendations are made, and they are random in some sense.
But an interface needs a certain persistence to be user friendly. Too annoying to glance something, try to go back, and it's gone. Some persistence creates an environment that is a bit more spatial and nicer to my brain.
It makes me worry about the future of humanity, as the clean slate is what is popular in your location.
> open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails
Dont forget to add a large amount of money to the title my $$$$250,000 computer.
But it f'ing works - I am really not sure what is wrong with people. Oh and now I get 2 ads every single video, its barely worth it ...
I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies. Teenagers are stupid. Always were, always will be. I know I was.
And yet here we are. Alive and well.
I have seen what facebook feeds boomers - it too is abhorrent.
Do yourself a favor and get an ad blocker. YouTube is barely usable without one at this point.
This used to be the case, but starting a month or two ago I get lots of completely and utterly irrelevant recommendations for things like soccer, hip-hop, "vlog" twats, and other "popular" content that I have absolutely zero interest in and that I can guarantee are 100% unrelated to any of my previous history.
I also started getting a lot of "recommendations" for things I've ... already seen. That started a bit earlier, maybe about half a year ago.
So now it's about a third forced stupid stuff, about a third things I've already seen, and maybe a third that's useful. I've been flagging things as "not interested" quite aggressively in the hopes it would improve, but I've seen no difference. I think they just changed the way recommendations work to always fairly aggressively mix in "popular content". If I wanted to watch random mindless nonsense then I would turn on my TV: I use YouTube to avoid all of that.
YouTube is slowly turning into a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser; I think very soon it will start offering me a cup of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Fuck these non-deterministic algorithms and the feeds they fill.
I'm not immune to the occasional "cute pet" video, but the problem is the attraction basin of that is in the algorithm is so strong that if you show the slightest inclination towards it with so much as a single video view, it will instantly turn half your feed into "cute pet" videos. (There are many other such attraction basins.) Removing the view from your history fixes that problem.
It is still possible to keep the brow-level of your YouTube feed above "low". I've successfully been recommended some math videos in the past few days from channels I've not already heard of (might as well signal boost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vxW42R47bc , a nice crunchy analysis of a solution to a math problem covered on Numberphile that was unsolved at the time but surprisingly has a reasonably accessible solution). But it takes deliberate maintenance.
How does the algorithm not get that I have probably watched 10,000 ads for Tiktok, I am not installing that shit! Stop trying!
In addition, in order to maximize advertising revenue, YouTube tends to place more importance on new click-bait videos that have a rapid increase in views, rather than high quality videos that can be viewed over a long period of time.
That is the reason why many of those clickbait-like videos are the third one on the right side of the screen when a particular video is played.
That's how I feel about it, too. The quality of the content has gone down because of the incessant urge of popular YouTubers to produce a "clickable" stream of videos on a regular basis. In a way, it feels addictive like porn - you know what you are going to see, it's just that the reviewed product, or the shown environment is different in the new video.
This sounds like TikTok, and likely trying to compete with them.
This is why we need user-controlled recommendations. I want that shit blocked.
Wrong incentives + lack of mechanisms to find, navigate to and promote interesting content.
Nowadays, people create content on Youtube essentially only for profit (be it actual profit from Youtube or promotion).
That's it. That's what you are selecting from.
There are of course exceptions, but these are rare enough to not dictate the general quality of content.
And if you are dissatisfied with general quality, that's it. There is no catalog where you can drill down and search for stuff that you don't know but you might be interested in. You can only search for things you already know -- and really interesting things tend to be a bit outside of what you already know.
This is what costs getting raised looks like in a monopoly market. Who's gonna stop them.
- spammers are getting better and Google is less able and willing to moderate - the use of AI without much design around it. It's speculation since who knows how their algorithm works, but from what I've read and the general mindset in ML these days, it's very possible that they just use a recommendation AI with a single target (I've heard watch time, but again, who knows) with little to not design around it. This just does not work, especially if the AI is good at his job. It's a similar problem to decision makers blindly following KPIs, knowing if you did well and choosing criterias can be as hard as taking the decision itself, and an AI can't do that, you can't avoid designing your product.
Ive been thinking for a while that Netflix could. They desperately need to seperate themselves from the competition and they already have the video distribution tech and captive audience to launch a real challenge to youtube.
I mean amazon prime is full of "kids cartoons" that started out as youtube fodder ten years ago. So yeah Netflix could maybe start a "yourflix" side bar - but they would have to work with people who were actual production companies for fear of, well everything.
Something tells me if they setup a package for everyone who had got 100k views on youtube, handed them a better microphone and a contract, they might stand a chnace of building a thousand new production companies.
The obvious answer is "because they've measured how much money they make, and found lower quality feeds result in higher revenue."
That might be counter-intuitive, but the other options like "the devs can't fix it", or "they don't know it's bad", etc are much less likely.
I can't think of a single google service they offer that I really like, they all kind of suck in a variety of interesting ways.
Maybe they didn't understand the reasons - I hate clickbait thumbnails and titles.
We might have to find a way to divorce ourselves from search engines until something comes along to replace them. I see no problem using YouTube and such as a hosting platform, but for finding and consuming content, a more personal approach is needed. I doubt however that the mainstream consumer will sacrifice convenience and content volume for better quality content. We don't have to act as a mainstream consumer though.
Skipping a video to look for a certain scene will trigger double ads and sometimes you will see another set of ads a few seconds later.
If a video is less than 3 minutes long and it starts with unskipable 12 seconds ad followed by another one I don’t even bother.
My general experience with the platform is brands advertising on YouTube gives me repulse instead of wanting to buy something.
EDIT: grammar
Awesome! Please do and document it. A lot of "tech should serve its users" people seem to be completely opposed to recommendation algorithms, but I would disagree. I find automatic recommendation immensely valuable when it works, it just needs to work for me (e.g. be more configurable).
My largest use cases were watching DJ sets, music videos, stand up comedians, instructional videos, and life of (random career) videos
Music videos have multiple ads before and after now. The music videos are still watchable but it sucks to put youtube on at a party now.
Life of videos from channels worth watching have started to turn off ads in place of putting in their own sponsored content. Annoying but similar to TV commercials of the past and are always skippable.
But they have started destroying all of the other content I enjoyed. Instructional videos are overly long with the interrupting ads to the point of questioning whether the visual information with more time but easier understanding vs the extra reading becomes a serious contemplation.
But comedies and extended DJ sets are unwatchable. The ML "predicts" natural breaks in language to insert ads into. When it comes to comedies its usually right before the punch line/the laughing, but the developers do not care at all that after the commercial ends and are resuming a second or two after the punch line. Not only is the timing ruined but you often miss the joke entirely. They have not figured out what to do with DJ sets so they just randomly interrupt in the middle of songs. I had ad breaks 3 times within 10 minutes of a 60 minute set today before I switched to AirPlaying my computer with AdNauseum installed.
Anything I think I might want to watch ever again is immediately added to a playlist for yt-dlp. It makes the content watchable again and protects against channels that will delete content so they can add it back later for increased later views or because of fake DMCA takedowns.
When there are extensions that actively fight profiling like Ad Nauseum they've abused their dominant position in developing a web browsers to block the extension on Chrome.
But when you don't have an easy ability to block ads like casting to a TV on their app on Roku and Apple TV or when using an iOS device they aggressively push the ads. On Android where there is an ability to block ads, they aggressively pursue apps like Vanced.
In 2017, Youtube altered search results following the mass shooting at the Las Vegas nightclub "to quell the spread of conspiracy theories". [1]
It wasn't their first time changing the algorithms, but since then, they've applied measures of varying degrees of severity following similar domestic and certain politically sensitive events, like the attack on the Google campus.
In 2018, "YouTube announces sweeping changes to the way it handles breaking news. News videos will now be ranked based on what YouTube deems to be "authoritative." [2]
In 2019, Youtube search again went on lockdown following the act of domestic terrorism on mosques in Cristchurch, disabling the ability to filter by recent across the entire site. [3] This one lasted for weeks and the original function was never fully restored.
Youtube has taken a more active approach to content curation, suppression, and promotion since the Trump presidency, and it's made it a worse resource for academic and informational searches. Once relatively neutral, they've begun to exert a more overt regulation of customers' interactions with content, going so far as qualifying certain media as aligning with certain viewpoints or not, disclosing affiliations with certain groups or political bodies, and minimizing the ability to specifically or organically locate certain non-promoted content.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/10/05/youtube-alter...
[2] https://mashable.com/article/youtube-announces-changes-break...
[3] https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-restricting-search-newzeal...
Are you the creator of Blockbattle.net? You seem to be the creator of this subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/a:t5_2sezu/)? I remember playing it a couple years ago but it seems to have been taken down. Have you thought about open-sourcing it potentially? I've been wanting to re-create it for a while but really like to keep to original aesthetic, so having access to the CSS and game-logic would be great so I could faithfully re-create it. You can contact me at benjamin@bartels.dev
If you want entertainment that is not funded by ads, why not subscribe to YouTube Premium? "YouTube and YouTube Music ad-free, offline, and in the background"
They are all scammy with some sort of gimmick to keep your eyes peeled past the skip ad button, usually some sort of claim to subvert the “system”.
This plays well to a poorly-educated population (which may be the crowd stuck on their phone during the daytime), but comes off slimy to any savvy consumer.
It's certainly unwatchable with the ads, as I was reminded when I actually opened up the YouTube app on my TV instead of just mirroring my laptop's screen. Not gonna do that again.
This has been and always will be the problem with having a "Youtube career". You are completely at the behest of a monolith company run by automated bots that can demonetize you on a robotic whim.
Doesn’t matter if your video gets monetized if a company has loaned/gifted you a product and paid you to make a video featuring it.
I've switched to using Yewtu.be, it's a proxy where you can have subscriptions and, for instance, only see new content, chronologically, from your subscriptions. Does make it a bit harder to find new stuff, but at least no spam.
And the search seems less spammy too, not sure.
To anyone complaining about ads, FFS, just pay the money for the subscription. Life is too short. I haven't seen an ad for years.
I have noticed significantly less interesting content on YouTube over the past 2 years, but I attribute most of it to a lack of small creators on the platform now. It takes a ton of time and effort to even make a good 10 minute video. This is a big time commitment on top of your other job, family, etc.
10 years ago there were no professional outfits on YouTube. Then everyone started to "grow up". About 5 years ago people started seeing there was money to be made on YouTube, so a ton of new creators joined the platform and there was tons of content. Fast forward to now and creators have realized it's actually very hard to live off YouTube, so a lot of them have moved on.
If all they want to do is show off their project they now turn to Instagram and/or TikTok. If all you are after is likes (and don't care about monetization) it is actually way easier on those platforms (due to their discovery engines) with a fraction of the production time.
I think YouTube knows this (hence shorts). The general rule of thought around YouTube now is to grow your brand using shorts and then monetize it using long form videos. So unless a creator has a large enough following to support their work making long form videos (over 90s) there is really no incentive anymore.
Does it?! I know some creators (MKBHD) obsess over cinematic videos and insanely expensive equipment to film in 8K and whatever ... but I kinda don't care and I think most people don't. I'm certainly among the millions of people who enjoy penguinz0's shittily produced one-take rants about as much.
I don't disagree that making a good video depending on the subject takes a lot of planning, writing, setup, multiple takes and editing - but that's not new.
In fact it seems like smaller creators are still very much around - they're just drowned out by the bigger ones being heavily promoted.
And I agree shorts suck, but IMO that's because they suck as a format; the content of the shorts that are recommended to me are at least relevant.
Probably because engagement and ad metrics are fine. What’s not relevant for you might result in people spending mindless hours in the app.
And part of it is just spammers learning to hack the recommendation system that already existed. And without the negative feedback of downvotes, people watch spam content for long enough that the spam content gets recommended to others.
Shorts hasn't been around for very long, so it kind of always was terrible.
I just waiting for some channels to start using alternative platforms and start consuming them there.
I use a combination of Remove YouTube Suggestions[1] and prefacing “intitle:” before any YouTube search to avoid weird matches that point me to irrelevant content.
I think it’s ridiculous that I need to constantly click “show less like this” and exert so much effort to train YouTube. I also hate how they’ll insert random unrelated videos “For Me” or “Watch it Again” in my search results. It’s all designed to keep me on the site and distracted… better to avoid it entirely.
[1] https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions
- recommendation bar on the right
- comments
- videos recommended at the end of the video by youtube
Plus I subscribe only through rss feeds. This way, I left just with the content and completely isolated from the toxicity that is the recommendation system.
It doesn’t give a shit about UX, but generating piles of data for PhDs to generate statistics from.
Sundar bailed on the moonshots, but it’s hiring culture was already established and he’s not been able to turn the focus to interesting things relying on statisticians and leetcoders seeking the so called prestige of churning out nothing.
It’s funny how big corps LARP changing our world but the careless resource waste, rent seeking, gaming agency through corporate propaganda all smell like traditional political correctness to me.
This only takes a couple minutes every few days, but it really keeps my recommendations accurate. Every week or so, I go through my watch history and delete videos I accidentally clicked on, or videos I hated so much that they shouldn't be used to generate further recommendations. Pruning your watch history has a particularly powerful effect that I think people miss out on.
Also, I try not to be let down if a particular week has no cool videos. There's no law of the universe that says that every week has to have incredible videos.
Having a cookie for work and the private stuff while not being logged in works quite well, especially for music.
Adblock removes the Add crap and another plug in keeps the playback in the background going for music.
And I blocked the Shorts block in uBlock since that is 100 percent complete garbage.
No idea what purpose this serves seems to be some low effort Tiktok clone...
Maybe someone can develop a plug-in for vertical video, gaping mouths, click bait and lists (10 YouTube recommendations that you don't care about, number 5 will annoy you) and just dowvotes that so it does not show up in the personal recommendations anymore.
Except that, the Youtube suggestions for me aren't bad. I do believe they are less good than before, because in the past I was able to find at least one new really good channel per month and now it has been a long time without one. It could also be that I found most channels that interest me, or that the pandemic did affect this quite a bit. I still get mostly good recommendations, a third are channels I already subscribe to (which is redundant on the frontpage as I go to the subscriptions pages for that) and videos I already watched, but everything else is mostly content I may be able to enjoy.
The same way blogs died long ago, remember all the craze about having a blog, affiliate links, earn a living blabla
People jumped in.. and so advertisers.. and so 'they killed Kenny"
Imagine YT videos without ads (ok, buy a premium but.. the trash is still there just wihout ads), so it's not a solution, not anymore.
I just stopped watching YT, I just try to find articles and read them, using adblockers and imagine what: I disabled all images in Firefox, too much distraction.
Personal complaint: the latest youtube android app no longer allows sorting a channel's videos by date ascending. UGH. Sometimes I want to watch the oldest ones!
However, the quality of the educational videos is just getting better and better imo. Also I never look at my subscriptions anymore just my mainpage.
But Youtube is absolutely intending to replace broadcast television. So they want everyone talking about the same stuff, they want endless passive engagement, etc.
I never visit the homepage, I just have a bookmark https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s with the shortcut `yt` and search for what I want directly.
Imagine a restaurant that starts removing anything from the menu that a customer complains about. You eventually end up with nothing but bland glop.
As it is right now, the recommendation engine is just not optimised for people like us here. I think most people engage with extremely similar or constantly nostalgic content, or current pop culture
On my desktop it shows me action sports and high energy stuff. While in bed on my phone it's mostly science and documentaries and historical boxing fights. It doesn't ever recommend me anything mainstream.
Sometimes YT treats me on some really good gems as well.
The biggest problem is, the first 1-2 rows are mostly videos I haven't clicked on. Have to scroll more down to get to the good stuff.
The nearest I can figure is home schoolers are creating these for their kids and uploading to pass them around. Their popularity appears to crowding out all the college level material.
> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use AI." Now they have two problems.
It's almost a zen meditation at this point
But if you must have a platform, there are several alternatives to youtube: peertube, odysee, lbry, ipfs, (legal) torrents, internet archive, oldskool p2p tech, ...
There's also alternative interfaces to youtube (e.g. youtube-dl, newpipe libretube), though that's a suboptimal solution to the larger problem.
I'm baffled by tech companies taking highly complex recommendation engines with tons of tunable parameters and exposing literally 0 of them to the user. I don't want to see the same things all the time. And I especially don't want to keep seeing that one video all the time!
As the hacks get more open , Youtube needs to include more granular details from user perspective. Like community subscribers, comments, retention cohorts for the channel etc.
Also, feel that youtube is pushing monetization a lot.I am seeing every creator putting 3-4 ads in good videos.
This is good for me, I waste less time there, but I miss the good suggestions...
Obviously, it sin't solely google's fault. They are exploited by content creators (and i will count geekforgeeks and other copycats as content creator there) and with the space those takes, it is now way harder to do an accurate selection.
Searching for something on YouTube does not work as expected at all. At some point they started deleting older videos with not that many views, and I remember at one time that I tried to access a video through a bookmark because it would not appear in the search results, that I was asked to state if this video should be removed or kept.
It didn't get deleted thankfully, however I could not find it easily again via the search results because of all the crap recommendations.
What I have found that makes the search work again is the Unhook extension [1,2]. By applying a few tweaks, YouTube has become usable again, as it removes most of the unrelated recommendations.
As mentioned in other comments, uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock are a requirement if one values their time. There are more efficient ways to support creators instead of watching random annoying ads and sponsor segments.
1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom... 2. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
But YouTube is also giving more room to spammers, they make more money when you have to watch 3 videos than when you watch 1. Unfortunately there's a big lack of ethics in the tech community.
People making content to scratch their own itch have moved on to TikTok or Instagram. They're the "cool" platforms to be on now, and the production requirements are way less.
In both cases, isn't the driving force ultimately that of seeking relevance, attention, and/or popularity?
The algo changes all the time, and takes every info google knows about into account. For all we know, you just happen to have visited some site associated with "low quality content".
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "videos froms bots and other people hacking the system" ? Obvious spam as in "this new pill is making my manhood great again" ? More political content ? Foreign langage content ? Tiktok-like things ?
For info, I'm finding that more and more of the interesting YouTube channels I'm following are also on nebula - maybe it's worth checking if you want something where the volume of video allows a purely chronological feed to be manageable.
Lousy AI and the push for all content to be commercialised equals bad user experience. Same thing with Google and duckduckgo results.
I have done a lot of research in AI and it can certainly do a lot of things implicitly but some oversight and explicit user feedback is useful also.
Before then, I remember just browse YouTube in the evening after work, I would find lots of interesting content from channels I didn't follow, it was really fantastic. I still follow many of the channels I found during that time and am thankful to the YouTube algorithm for allowing me to find them.
Suddenly the quality of the recommendations dropped. It was sudden and marked.
Around that time YouTube was getting a lot of criticism for e.g. keeping people in "bubbles", and for showing people who were into right-wing content right-wing content. I mean in a way I would say that sounds like the algorithm is doing exactly what it was supposed to do, showing people content they're interested in. I can only assume they take your preferences into account a lot less now, and show much more content that they consider harmless, so they get criticised less.
This optimizes for a content creator / user behavior interaction that maximizes their utility function and not yours.
This plugin will tell you when you are watching a YT video that also exists on Odysee: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/watch-on-odys...
My comment was really to reinforce that the platform is competitive now. As I said, it just needs more content creators.
The shorts are a bit weird. It's clear that it's to counter TikTok, but it's a little weird that they are on YouTube. I get why, Google is afraid that TikTok is stealing users, and stuffing the shorts into YouTube means not having to launch an entire new platform and try to make it take off.
The recommendations on the "Shorts" is broken. I have no idea why, but tries to push four things: Two military analyses channels, which I do enjoy, so good job. The it tries to push random influencers which seems to be aimed young women. Finally YouTube have decided that what I really need is Jordan Peterson clips. That seems like a really weird mix. The first two makes complete sense, based on my history. The other two, no idea, and they even sort of goes in opposite directions.
For the normal videos, I'd say recommendations are fine. Subscriptions seems to weirdly enough not to matter much. You can subscribe to channels and YouTube will still not show you new videos from that channel. Again this might be an issue with mainly using the AppleTV app.
Search is censored in a commercial and politically correct way. Started to happen in early 2020, to fight "conspiracy" COVID theories, which after a year become somewhat legitimate questions (still unanswered).
Search is censored again now because "Russian propaganda". Tell me what you want, but the reality is that we are all doomed to follow politically correct decisions of the elitist's agenda. This is the future which we will live from now on.
Internet is tied to the masses. Internet is the "reality" for many people. It is like a TV Programming in the 60-70. I don't like Telegram, but I have a complete picture of the events because of the countless channels, which give a completely chaotic and hard to control information bits. In a way, Russia has no serious investment in the tech and "information narrative" machine.
Some people still believe that Ukraine (which before this, everyone agreed upon "is the most corrupt country in European continent") is winning on the battlefield.
I am amazed how easy it was for everyone to accept cancelling not Putin's regime, but everything Russia related. From food to classical music. And I am ashamed of the Western media, which has conformed to political correctness and sensationalism. There is no investigative journalism. Under the old "Cold War" narrative, we again find ourselves in a pit of disinformation. And the big tech companies are the main outlet for this dystopian future in which people must conform and obey the new Gods without the option of questioning the powers that be.
Why not optimize for profit in the meantime? It is only logical.
Rant/Ends
Use RSS and VPN to optimize your UX when using YouTube. Search YouTube outside Google ecosystem.
Seems like as long as I keep consistent theming of likes, it's good. If you get too wide in breadth then it quickly goes downhill, so I use Freetube to watch certain genres (coding videos, etc.)
The question I have is: let's say "we" collectively decide to "move on" from YouTube -- what could possibly replace it?