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Comment by gherkinnn | Hacker News Reader

YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed.

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.

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> YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed.

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.

Interesting how our experiences differ. It is true that I always watch videos that aren’t immediately related to what I want in my feed incognito.

Fuck these non-deterministic algorithms and the feeds they fill.

You can go to your history and remove videos. While I harbor no delusion that YouTube as a whole forgets that you've watched it as a result, I can vouch for the fact it does seem to mean the recommendation algorithm won't see it anymore.

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.

> YT on a clean slate is horrendous

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 ...

> It makes me worry about the future of humanity

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 worry for teenagers just as I do for the adults if we don't curb everything stealing our sleep and concentration. I don't think it's the same old "young people are lazy" trope, it's significant.

> I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies

I have seen what facebook feeds boomers - it too is abhorrent.

Hey, maybe in the future you'll inherit your parents' recommendations. If you're lucky and your parents and grandparents made good choices, you'll have a pleasant experience that makes it easy to make good choices, and if they didn't, your digital life will be terrible from the start. We'll talk about recommendation mobility as the easy of adapting to a user, regardless of their ancestors.

> Oh and now I get 2 ads every single video, its barely worth it ...

Do yourself a favor and get an ad blocker. YouTube is barely usable without one at this point.

I can refresh the home page a hundred times in a row and the exact same videos in the exact same order get displayed. It never used to be like this. I have no idea what the hell is going on at YouTube head office.

I work in a different part of Google... But getting the same result when refreshing page sounds like getting served from a cache, which doesn't sound that weird. Isn't there a button to show something else?

Other than navigating to say the “Subscriptions” page where you’re just given a different set of videos, there’s no other way of changing what you get on the home page. If the home page is caching it’s doing it too very aggressively - it never used to be like this and I’ve seen it across multiple devices.

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 get recommended the same videos for months. Sometimes they even show old recommendations from a year back.

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.

That's a good thing in my book, that's a feature.

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.

I don’t think you’re understanding what I’m saying. As a YouTube user I don’t want the same 20 videos displayed on the home screen ALL day. If If I haven’t watched them by then I clearly don’t want to.

No wonder I didn't understand, no time frame was mentioned. I think I understood your message and I think it is a good feature on a shorter time scale.

So, your mind wandered to giving up peanut butter? For me it'd be something like... Uh, Tomatoes. I had to really think about it, but yeah, I'd give up tomatoes to not live in that world, which is saying something because tomatoes in one form or another tend to help keep my morale up through many, many meatless days.

Onions, however, I can’t give up. What is life without onions? One sssniperwolf vid per large onion is fair.

Man, I hadn't thought of onions. They go well with tomatoes. Layers, donkeh.

True. I have a hard time coming up with a dish that doesn't work (or is improved) by onions, and how many dishes would completely suck without them.

I deleted my youtube/google account and started using RSS feeds instead.

The only sane way to consume YouTube these days.

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.

Youtube is also basically unwatchable without both adblock and sponsorblock. At this point most videos are are at least 1/3rd clipped by the latter.

I subscribe to YouTube Premium to skip all interstitial ads. It’s absolutely worth it to me. I like to think I’m helping someone at G make the business case for subscription-based, ad-free products and services.

Sponsor segments are easily skippable with a few fast-forward fingertaps, or right-arrow taps on a keyboard.

Why manually scrub through videos when there's a tool to do it automatically for you and re-cut the video into a seamless block of content?

Every browser plug-in is an additional exploit vector. Never know when the plug-in author might sell out or get hacked. When that happens you’re one auto-update away from catastrophe. I also enjoy the more creative sponsor segments, like Internet Historian’s.

If this is a concern it is supported in yt-dlp and mpv.

Has anyone found a reliable way to block the ads on Android TV that isn't "root your TV and install and use this weird App you get from this website here"? Would a Pi-Hole work long-term?

Yes. SmartTubeNext: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext. I use it with a FireTV stick since it's much easier than hacking my Samsung TV. It supports SponsorBlock too. It lacks some YT features but if you just want to browse and watch videos it works wonderfully.

Why not just use the subscriptions tab and ignore the home page?

For what it's worth, can't organize that subscriptions tab by any meaningful way. At least none that I know of.

This is only the case if you subscribe to channels that churn out content on a daily or weekly basis and have no interest in finding tangential content by new creators. I've given up on using YouTube for discovery, I have to actively fight the search in order to find anything remotely useful and the main feed is just the same crap repeated over and over again no matter how many I mark as not interested. Whatever happened to it several years ago has completely lobotomized the recommendation engine, it's just trash now. I'm hopeful that content creators will continue to trend towards uploading to multiple video platforms so I can find new stuff.

I've been using the same google account for so many years and still every damn Youtube video I get 2-3 ads for Tiktok.

How does the algorithm not get that I have probably watched 10,000 ads for Tiktok, I am not installing that shit! Stop trying!

Tiktok must have ad budget to blow regardless of individualized conversion rate considerations. Google's algorithm is happy to oblige.

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