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Comment by Sakos | Hacker News Reader

Oh, that reminds me. How long has Youtube's search been so utterly useless and downright terrible? Whatever I enter, it interrupts the search results with recommendations THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH MY QUERY every 5 results. What the fuck, Google. Are you doing this on purpose? Did somebody piss in your cereal and you decided to collectively punish all of us? If that's not the case, who's responsible so I can go over to him and piss in his cereal?

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Disclaimer: this is just my opinion, I have no idea what the actual reason is.

I think the problem is not malice nor stupidity.

Most youtube users are non-technical/layman people who don't really know what they want. They type "fun cat videos" or "minecraft" or whatever and want suggestions of popular things to see.

The technical people who know what they want are the minority so it's not profitable to create a separate search mode just for them, because they are tech-literate enough to figure out the idiosyncrasies.

True, it's not malice or stupidity, it's just "making money".

I feel like most major media companies (and this probably generalizes somehow to a larger subset of capitalist enterprises) go through a lifecycle that starts with fulfilling real demand and ends with increasingly desperate attempts to generate fake demand. The exact mechanisms and motivations seem to vary (e.g. TV networks deciding which shows are worthy of "prime time" vs. YouTube trying to goose its engagement metrics), but the overall arc is strikingly similar.

NSFL example when I tried to search for "reply girl" videos because I wanted to know what they were: (seriously NSFW and definitely not appropriate for HN) https://i.imgur.com/gaOSfbd.png

Google. I want compensation for emotional damage. What is this crap? Those aren't even the worst recommendations in those results. IT GETS WORSE.

BUT HOW ELSE WILL YOU KNOW WHAT "PEOPLE ALSO WATCHED"?

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