It's still better than when it was constantly recommending the daily wire.
https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
Because that's definitely not a default. I've never seen YouTube recommend one of those in my life.
the real problem is that youtube has decided to just put normal recommendations on the search result page in the place where search results should go. I use the extension 'unhook' with the setting 'Hide Inapt Search Results' to remove that misfeature.
this feature was presumably somebody's baby and I'd really like to read their writeup where they unironically exalt its virtues so I can try to gauge how far up their ass their head is.
Increased engagement by putting content after search box.
Reduced search box to such the number that 99.7% searches still can accomplish successfully.
Significantly reduced DB load.
New incentive for the AI team to keep pacing its algo towards AI-only search.
Please no... Facebook is already doing this in marketplace and it's beyond awful. Like "search for an oscilloscope and get a vibrator" level of awful.
Aside, I find it really disheartening how quickly people on this site of all sites are to conclude "I don't see that, so you're holding it wrong". The most likely explaination is these results are some experimental feature run amok. You should know that companies like Google run all kinds of AB tests on the unwitting public, so one person not seeing something should never be taken as proof that another person is imagining it! This kind of "I'm not seeing it so you must be doing something wrong" comment is effectively gas-lighting when it comes from people who work in or near the industry and should know better.
It's possibly coincidence, of course, but why wouldn't YouTube use the same profile data as everyone else?
Though I've had them come up on facebook too, which is why I'm erring on it being someone more actively engaged coming from my main IP address (home has had the same /29 for the last 10+ years). Unless youtube and facebook are fairly directly sharing information, I thought it more likely that someone has interacted with such content in both places than both algorithms making an obscure link. Of course, it could be that there is a cross-over, and it is a strong enough signal that both sets of data miners have picked up on it.
Edit: too early in the morning and my mind is refusing to switch tracks… Thinking about it, liking certain horror/scifi films is a potential link. Maybe people more heavily into body-horror than I are generally fascinated by real aspects of bodily function too.
It feels accurate. My middle-aged sister definitely does.
I think YouTube has just put me in a gender/age/location bucket and figures other people in the same bucket like that thing.
(But actually, who the fuck is watching this shit.)
Edit: plus if this was history pollution then this gross shit would show up on the home page or else where. It is exclusively in the "you might also like" shit that youtube hides in the search results.
yt will also throw 'random' things into your feed.
Also I have seen just hovering over a video on desktop counting as 'viewed' in my history. So you may have inadvertently 'looked'.
Use the do not recommend feature. That seems to calm it down.
I also have a second account for watching more technical videos and that leaks into my main account suggestions.
Poison YouTube recommendations at the nearest Starbucks! (Actually a marketing hack - encourage followers to log out and watch a channel's YouTube videos on public WiFi.)
YT algo is so messed up and it seems the more they try to shape the content people view, the easier it gets for bad actors to exploit the algo.
Shorts are the absolute worst for it and it's why I mostly stick to my subs page over the home page.
I turn this "feature" off every time I open it, it tells me it has saved that configuration, but that is not the case. like other poster commented, review your view history and delete anything you do not want to see or clear it out entirely. There is also option to "don't recommend channel" ([3x ...] beside the video)
This doesn't exist for search results, only for the feed
If not, it may be worth a try. They seem to do a lot to steer Youtube's recommender away from the more gamy regions of its latent space; for example, something like a year ago I saw recommended such a video, immediately reported it for "violent or repulsive content", and thus far haven't seen another. The same has been true for the occasional weirdo along the stripe of modern Russell Brand.
To be clear, I don't think the report was acted upon by Youtube, but I do think the signal inherent in the action must be accounted for in its recommendation model.
Also to be clear, this is no defense of Youtube. It's pretty trash these days, and even the most innocuous recommendations I get have very little to do with anything I'm actually interested in, but this does seem to keep it from getting the idea I might want to see incels and gore.
For me these "you also might like" sections in search results are 50 woodworking and 50 gross out garbage.
It happens all the time and I got hit with the warts and pimples a few months back, just a counter point, I watch YT daily.
It's mostly shorts where you will see it
Depresses me that this channel has over 100k subscribers...
But I've never been recommended gross-out stuff. I have history enabled because otherwise all I get recommended is videos I've already seen.
One thing I would recommend is disabling autoplay. I found recommendations improved markedly when the only videos I even start watching are ones I decided to. And sometimes with autoplay on I'd pass out in front of the TV and wake up to some wild shit, and get stranger recommendations because of it. But still not getting a bunch of gore or gross stuff.
I've once tuned into my Chromecast to find my tablet had been autoplaying for a week and was in the middle of a long streak of middle-eastern folk music with guys playing the flute and dancing in a tent. Thankfully, the tablet has its own YT account, so my main never gut spammed with the corresponding recommendations.
I am very liberal with the thumbs-down button on anything I don't like. I'm also using YouTube premium, although I doubt that would significantly affect the quality of recs, and the recs were fine before I upgraded.
Maybe that says a lot about the type of person that will actually watch a short?
Like literally, my screen only had pictures of multimeters.
For good measure I repeated the search in my main Youtube account. Same thing.
It's likely some coincidence of my previous viewing history, though how woodworking, small engine repair and distributed systems pointed to grossout videos I have no idea. I've heard of at least a dozen other people that this happens to so far across a wide range of viewing habits.
Lots of sponsored ads, but they are all multimeter-related.
So if YouTube is tracking me across incognito mode, then they aren't doing a very good job there.
No need to be rude about it.
Anyways, for me, I just loathe how the whole site is designed in general. Opening YouTube today on a modern browser is slower than opening it on IE6 back then and the whole site relies on a JavaScript framework even though frontends like Invidious, Piped, and YT2009 (and possibly even more) show that you don't need JavaScript or have to make the entire site rely on it just to view content.
This is true for so many things on computers these days: websites, various software, etc.
For me, enabling more adblock volunteer maintained filters, custom element filters, and parameter removals took it away, at costs of YouTube showing me ever niche-er and increasingly monotonic selections.
Even after doing the "never recommend me this channel" thing it keeps recommending me this Jordan Peterson-type shit about "leftist woke idiots getting owned".
Plus, no matter how many times I tap "Not interested" on the Shorts section every week it's back.
This happened to me a few times. Thankfully, clearing cookies is an easy fix for me since I don't use an account; people who do may have to spend some time sanitizing their view history. I now avoid all content that has even a whiff of content that might be automatically classified as political advocacy. I still watch occasional FW videos, although not the ones where I think he'll discuss firearm laws, and InRange is out because Karl too frequently discusses the law and political landscape w.r.t. online privacy/etc. Since reaching the above conclusion and making these changes, my front page has been clear of anything with even a suggestion of partisan politics. It's all machine and mechanism videos, the way I like it.
(Except for the occasional grossout pimple video in the search results, but that's another story...)
I honestly wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if in the near future we have sociologists who pin the catastrophic political divides we now experience down to, at least in part, the fact that so many massive institutions in our society at this particular moment are finding the absolute most ridiculous people and giving them the largest megaphone in the history of our species to scream into because it makes them money.
The other day I was looking for recipes and I had to see disgusting video thumbnails of faces full of zits interspersed with thumbnails of the food I wanted to cook.
There's a ublock origin filter here that hides suggested videos and other crap from the search results page https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube...