* Only go on the Subscriptions page; I've never once visited the "Home" page
* Blocked the Recommended Videos sidebar using uBlock
* Use SponsorBlock
* Use uBO filters to remove Shorts from Subscriptions page
I come to watch what I want, not get all the clickbait on the side.
My typical usage is:
* Go to Home page * Add highly relevant videos to my Watch Later playlist * View the videos from Watch Later, like/dislike as appropriate * Rinse and repeat
I'm trying to give Shorts a shot. I particularly like them for viewing podcast shorts, but I've noticed the suggestions are taking a longer time to give me 'relevant' videos. Some of the Shorts are totally random, while others are from my Subscribed channels. I make sure to like/dislike as appropriate, and I've noticed a slight improvement in a week's time.
Youtube power is in its recommendation engine. I discovered amazing content through this engine. You say you come to watch what you want, but how do you initially fill the "subscription" page without exploring first?
There can be various levels of exploring. Maybe visiting the home page only once a month. But the distribution capabilities are what makes Youtube what it is.
If I'm looking for potentially interesting content outside my core subscription views, I'm better served by turning on FM radio.
all those videos in your watch history? others have watched those videos, too. youtube will recommend videos that those others have watched and that you have not.
the narrower the focus of your viewed videos, the narrower the focus of the recommendations will be.
For example I watched and subscribed to PBS ST to kick start. It instantly flooded my feed with low-quality sci-pop with “pro voice actors” voices and stupid sensational topics like “shocking alien planet” or “will our sun explode tomorrow? Emoji emoji emoji”. No astrophysics was recommended yet. Yesterday I searched for and binge-watched about hyena clan relationships, today it recommended me two quran surahs for good sleep, few colorful open-mouth-sensation morons (not sure which topic they were trying to “wow”) and a very badly compiled drama about different snow leopards chasing goats. And that’s while I’m holding my finger on “not interested” trigger for weeks.
What am I doing wrong?
if there is anything you started to watch, but didn't like, clean that stuff from your watch history.
click the "Like" button on any videos you like a lot, and favorite the very best.
sometimes YouTube's skull is very thick, but it will get a bead on you fairly soon if you do what you can to tell it what you like and don't like. that's been my experience, anyway.
I tried to turn it on for a while and it didn’t make any difference. Same for likes/dislikes. The only effective methods are channel-wise, i.e. “subscribe” and “don’t recommend channel”, but then the feed becomes 90% of videos I have watched or new videos (from these channels) in which I mostly have no interest in. Other 10% are irrelevant to me.
Anyway, I’ll try to follow your advice (thanks!) with more active liking etc for a while, but my hopes are weak atm.
I don't think it's necessarily bad to use the automated recommendations but there are certainly other ways to discover new content.
Every once in a while after scrolling for a while it gives me a "Want something new?" link and then the recommendations are fanatic but that feed has no bookmarkable URL or reliable way to get to it.
I say that because, as someone who does not sign into YouTube, I have no idea if it gets more complex.
Did you actually discover it through youtube's algorithms and discovery engine or was it linked to you by friends and you simply watched it on Youtube?
These are completely different things in this context.
> But the distribution capabilities are what makes Youtube what it is.
Hold on, I thought it was the recommendation engine? Which is it? Distribution is about economies of scale and good engineering, recommendation is about putting the user first, rather than monetization.
* Never go to https://youtube.com to find anything. Only go to YouTube when it's a known link you found on another site. I don't need recommendations or ads
* Copy the URL, paste it into yt-dlp
* Wait a few seconds for the video to download and watch it in my viewer of choice with no crap attached.
Combine this with a window manager shortcut to open the clipboard contents in mpv and the experience is pretty slick.
You can also dump the URLs in a .m3u file and watch a bunch in a row with mpv that way.
For me, it basically takes a guess what topics and themes I find interesting and pulls content around them. Automatic notifications are also pretty good.
YouTube figured out that I like interviews on a certain channel and nothing else, or Ukraine war updates from another channel but not their regular content. Probably through simple similar audience trick but solid selection nevertheless.
For whatever reason, it cannot apply this knowledge to shorts which are dreadfully bad.
Speaking of search and YouTube UI… are you talking about that veteran guy who occasionally does coverage on Ukraine but keeps a level head. He will often point out why it is important to think about why your enemy is doing what it is doing. And he uses some open source map to show what is going on?
…and the rest of his content seems to be reviews of military related things, or something else that has nothing to do with Ukraine?
Cause yeah I’m subscribed to that guy, I think… but I totally forget what his channel is and don’t seem to be getting any recommendations for his videos anymore.
I mostly watch channels like Aswath Damodaran, mCoding, etc., which are not related to the contents of the mentioned channels at all, yet their recommendation engine still shows me all this stuff.
I wish there were a way to see how it places you in various demographics, with a corresponding 'slider' to move yourself in/out of topics.
It just doesn't bloody care.
I added another reminder on my todo list to get rid of Premium and go rogue. My biggest issue is watching it on Android TV and the iPad, I will need a good adblocking setup, no way in hell I will watch ads.
This works OK, although it tends to promote the same things over and over, seemingly at random.
I too only do subscriptions, watch everything my subscribed channels put out by placing them in my playlists (custom watch later lists for attention spans/activies), and only find other channels through my current channels. If you don't watch everything from specific channels (some big ones really pump them out), I recommend PocketTube's Subscription manger (and playlist manager).
Youtube hates us. It takes away tools for us to watch how you and I want, and refuses to add basic tools to playlists like "removed all watched" and "sort by length". I'm subscribed "watch later" still exists. They want you to just watch "recommended" videos one after the other like tik-tok-television.
...all of which serve to remind me what a pit of suck the service is, and ensure I never subscribe.
And the cycle of life is complete.
I don't think I could use YT without SponsorBlock and uBO. The SponsorBlock outage of the last few days really made me aware how much time is wasted on those sponsored segments, intro reels, and interaction reminders.
I love it when videos have a SB "skip to highlight" timestamp -that 10 minute video of the creator rambling on and on is now a 10 second video of the slow-motion moneyshot.
I recognize that people value YouTube for it's recommendation engine. That was never the draw for me; I just want a place to watch videos from creators I like. Overall, I found the recommendations to not work for me; they were overall noisy and distracting. Someone asked me once "well how do you find new content?", which I found hilarious.
Linus' channel is particularly horrible without this.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...
I'd like to figure out how to filter Shorts from my RSS feeds, but my preferred channels almost never use them so it hasn't been a big deal. The only other annoyance is live streams, which seem to debut on my RSS feed several hours before they're actually live (with no clear information about the "live-iness" of the video).
This popup always shows up in my account no matter how many times I dismiss it. Very annoying.
Any way to remove this with uBO? I tried a few ways but it ended up not working well
I use YouTube like this! Definitely going to implement some of your suggestions.
[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...
But getting the clean google-videos layout which was just a video player and a search bar can be done entirely with ublock :D
definitely not. there are very few bots in YouTube comments these days, though there certainly are some.
there is a LOT of brown-nosing, though.
I don't watch ultra-popular stuff, so what I see is different from what you will see, necessarily.
In gameplay and game streaming videos you'll find useful tidbits and hints on how to play a game.
etc.
Pages are amazingly clean now.
When I mouseover a video with an interesting title, the preview appears.
The thumbnails are very distracting, and I found it hard to pay attention to the video playing on screen.
I don't miss the thumbnails at all, not one bit.
- search duckduckgo, go to the "videos" tab, then I end up on youtube if that's where the video is.
- go to youtube.com, use the search, pick the video.
- I don't ever like/subscribe/comment on anything.
The easiest way for me not to get consumed by trash is to proactively hide it. I leaned that I have low self control when it comes to data consumption, so I block everything I identify as dangerous.
site:youtube.com <your_searchterm>
YouTube is so much better when you remove all the little overlays and dark-patterns meant to get you to watch something else at all times.
For this I just use the web feeds. Creators are free to hop platforms and my workflow won’t need to change.