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Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Discovery is a big problem with youtube. There seems to be a pattern. Like I've been researching hardware designs for real time image processing lately. Over time the same search terms reveal more and more relevant links. Overall youtube search is completely useless.

And one wrong click and you're inundated with garbage. Same for all social media really. At least hn doesn't have a per user "feed" (yet).

One thing I've noticed about goodreads is there are two distinct types of users. One type gives thoughtful reviews that are all text. The other type give shallow vapid reviews replete with emojis and memes and usually end with "didn't finish the book".

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I've had a similar problem with YouTube. What helped me was a) disabling the history; b) heavily curating my subscriptions. I only try to consume content that comes from either my specific searches (e.g. "how to change oil in a motorcycle") or from the channels I follow. You still get occasionally sucked into "recommended" videos, but it is much better than having to rely on the front page of my account feeding all kinds of garbage.

I strongly recommend RYS: <https://lawrencehook.com/rys/>

You can achieve close to the same thing using uBlock element zapper, without installing extra plugins. I use the same trick for SO ('Hot Network Questions' darkpattern) and other sites.

Well, yes, but only assuming that YouTube does not change anything. If they do, then your uBlock rules won’t work, but RYS will presumably be updated to still work.

Using the "Not Interested", and "Don't recommend this channel" options on recommendations you don't like does seem to help a fair bit too.

>Agreed. Discovery is a big problem with youtube.

As well as with their parent Google. Did you know the minus sign is meaningless in the search now? Man, Google search is so useless now I'd actually pay a monthly fee (up to $10) for them to give me a bloody regex based search.

You might like Kagi in that case. I've not really used them, but they have a lot of customisation options and they charge for their product.

Kagi does not have regex but it does have some basic booleans, wildcard, and most important, exact word searching that actually has an effect: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html#se...

(Not affiliated with them except as a very happy customer.)

I was surprised to hear that the minus was meaningless, but turns out that no, it does still work

I tried multiple times and it hasn't worked for me in years. I tried again now and it seems it "sometimes" works. Specifically it seems that it works for some keywords and not others.

Please pay Kagi then, it would be a better world online and offline if we started rewarding the good-faith actors for once. That you're already willing to cough up for it is encouraging, just take that last step. Their browser is sick too (Orion) if you're of the Apple persuasion.

I pay for kagi and think it's great. Their browser has been too buggy for everyday use but I try it occasionally to see progress.

>Discovery is a big problem with youtube

youtube is for long-shot the best discovery(maybe tiktok) is not uncommon now that you get high quality videos for channel whith sigle video and dont show trash content from known creators,the new problem is maybe that the high quality content require high quality teams means more money and more pressure to monetize but youtube video quality is leagues ahead from what it was 10 years ago, now you have science, philosophy, history content than produce consistent research by various people content, such as Asianometry.

use instagram reel or twitter and most content is trash, the latter rquiring you to follow the correct people, thats virality. discovery is hard that why you use more netlfix than hbomax, tiktok than instagram

ML-powered discovery based on shared activity, I believe, without significant randomness mixed in, tends to get trapped inside local maxima.

I am reminded of Pandora stations that eventually loop and play the same 15 songs over and over again. Same problem today in other systems, though.

I tried to navigate youtube search by simply sorting by view count, since I figure that's at least moderately more difficult to game, and not subject to the algorithim.

But it turns out that for more general search terms youtube will simply not show lots of high view count videos, and which ones specifically can change with each search. (It does always does show a large amount of music videos, Indian media, disturbingly repetitive gaming/meme stuff, children's videos, etc...)

So even a ranked list of which video has the most views apparently is algorithmic to some extent.

> view count ... not subject to the algorithim

That would seem like a way to deliberately cream off the most algorithmically pushed videos!

I wonder what might be a good anti-algorithm indicator - maybe a mismatch between two metrics that normally correlate with highly pushed content. View count over time might be interesting. Big spikes might be bad sign indicating external push. Playlist inclusion might be good to pick up on some human curation. Some measurement of link sharing on other social sites might be helpful... like what google used to do. Sigh.

Well that's of course the case but I meant it in the sense of algorithms used to pick what shows up on my screen as opposed to others entering the same search query.

Ideally there would be such a facility to allow for the removal of at least one layer of algorithmic suggestions.

PageRank for videos is a neat idea though, maybe call it VideoRank?

Youtube recommendations are really good if you exercise self-control over what you watch, conscious of your view history shaping your recommendations. Never click on any video that uses a clickbait thumbnail or title, even if it seems relevant to your interests. The algo will pick up that you enjoy clickbait slop and give you more of that. Ideally, don't even use an account in the first place; use a browser cookie with no account, and delete that browser cookie to start over if your recommendations ever stray too far from your desires. Seed the recommendation system by searching for specific videos that are relevant to your interests. And again, never click on crap, even out of momentary curiosity.

Learn to recognize signals for slop. Slick well-produced video channels with multiple people working for them will tend to become slop even if they don't start that way; having a cameraman/producer/editor on payroll pressures a channel to perform well to pay for those people, so such channels will tend to pump out shallow content to keep revenue steady if not growing. As soon as a one-man channel hires a cameraman, that's usually a good time to tap out. Particularly if the host is chummy friends with the cameraman; the pressure to perform by compromising quality will be greater when the channel creator is paying his friends to help. This is why I had to stop watching NileBlue; as soon as he got a chummy cameraman his video quality took a steep nose dive with sensational gimmicks taking precedence over substance.

> Learn to recognize signals for slop. Slick well-produced video channels with multiple people working for them will tend to become slop

Right. I really wish there was some “average joe” filter. The noise/signal ratio would surely still be high, but a hell of a lot more manageable than the inauthentic and affiliate nonsense that gets gamed for the algorithm.

Obviously anecdotal but my favorite review videos all r ones by someone recording off their laptop, all with a noticeable noise floor. It’s unfortunate that the very well produced vids seem to be negatively correlated with quality of substance, so I’ll keep sticking with my annoying noise floor videos

I've gone so far as to only go to YT with a browser that clears everything on close. I don't log in to YT, all I do is keep a local file that I use as my home page where I keep the link to the video tab of content creators I enjoy.

When you go in "fresh", the world is your oyster for approximately three videos, maybe four, then the algorithm has completely made it useless. So, I either go through a link to a creator and see what they've been up to lately or I go to a fresh YT homepage and search for what I'm looking for. The first search is probably still heavily curated, but it seems to give me more interesting options. When I find a video I like, I go to the creators page and add the link to my home page.

I don't log in mainly for privacy reasons, but it also causes me to only be able to search my particular bubble, pretty much. Going in from the outside gives me much better results, at least before I've watched too many videos in a chain. I'm a patron on patreon for a few my favorite creators, which I generally swap around every now and then for those who have Patreon accounts. I don't think I've ever bought anything from a creator's sponsor. It weirds me out that randos on the internet are now expected to be commercial shills and personal brand curators as well as video creators.

I consider the fact that people use it like TV to be a problem. YouTube (at least the way I perceived and used it) was a thing where your friends tipped you off for what to watch or look for or you needed a visual demonstration or explanation from a "real person" where it would otherwise be much harder to get up to speed by yourself. And it was a lot more of a bona fide social experience because of that (you were not NOT going to totally reminisce with your buddy that told you about it later), just not within the confines of the direct interface/site itself.

They also completely broken the search functionality. If I look for a topic I get 10 videos the algorithm decides are relevant and after that I only get random stuff.

So many times I remember to have seen a video about something and I just can't find it even with the right keywords. If I'm lucky I find it on...bing search filtered by videos.

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