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It's pretty clear to me that YouTube wants to steer you towards content they want you to watch and not content that you want to watch. Watching intellectual long-form content does not equal ad revenue, user "engagement", and whatever else bullshit addictive metrics they only care about.

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.

>It is really amazing to me when I come across old YouTube videos that are just people filming or discussing something interesting without fanfare.

This so much. I feel the same way, I remember when people would just make creative videos or goofy animations.

> It's pretty clear to me that YouTube wants to steer you towards content _they_ want you to watch and not content that you want to watch.

This is it. Exactly.

>I remember going on deep YouTube rabbit holes in another era, because their recommendations always pointed to new, highly related content. Then, at some point in time, YouTube switched their recommendations algorithm to direct me to a mixture of 1) videos (mostly on unrelated topics) that I've already viewed, 2) videos about topics that I've recently searched for or watched that are unrelated to the current video, 3) videos trending across all of YouTube, and etc.

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!

> 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!

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.

The x/n videos are mostly - not all obviously but mostly - pirated copyrighted content in shortened clips, reversed or mirrored, shrunk, made more high pitch, or something to beat the algorithm. I agree it would be nice but I see why they broke that functionality.

Still, the title can easily be an indicator.

Do you really let yt auto-play all night while you sleep?

I'm surprised you guys still get recommendations.

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.

I fairly reliably get the next part of a multi-part series provided they're in a playlist (even if I'm not looking at them in the playlist).

I actually think the sidebar recommendations for a given video (at least for music) are still quite good. It's only when it starts taking into account your watch history does it start to get muddied up very fast. I wonder if there's an addon/userscript plugin that can wipe cookies upon every page refresh for a "pure" YouTube experience every time.

Same experience! I watch on NewPipe and the recommendations are very good: videos related to the video I'm watching. I open a video “How jet engines work” and the recommendations are more “engineering visualisation”-type videos, I open a lecture by Yanis Varoufakis and the recommendations are more lectures and debates on economics, I open a CCC talk on the Amiga and the recommendations are more excellent CCC talks. But the key is: not being logged in, or the “enhanced recommendations” (ironically the value-add part, supposedly) fuck everything up.

When it comes to music, it usually takes up to 5 songs on autoplay before YouTube will get in a rut and replay the same exact sequence of 8 songs. Every. Time. Forever. It's not that I dislike those songs, but I think I'm starting to at this rate.

How can Youtubd's recommendations can be so terrible compared to Spotify???

I don't get it.