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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a rather biased and rosy view of what I'd consider almost a dark pattern... using personalized recommendations to artificially drive engagement numbers and ad views, at the expense of user agency.

For example, the finding that users primarily went to the home page to search led not to better searching but to distracting them with algorithmic suggestions on the home page instead.

Like with most things Google, YouTube users aren't users, but products :/

Meanwhile the signals that I purposely provide, like my likes. dislikes, and subscriptions, are downplayed. I wish I could get a clutter free home screen with just a big search bar and my latest subs, but no...

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Many years ago, I changed my YouTube bookmark to go directly to the subs page. Can recommend.

Try turning off your watch history and you'll get a clutter free home page. It doesn't include the things you subscribe to but it's better than being served shorts and garbage.

But still you get stupid mrbeast stuff. No idea how YouTube thinks it's useful to anybody.

I never get Mr beast stuff unless I watch them and even then it's only temporary. I aggressively garden my recommendation though.

It's on homepage when I open the site in a private window

Instead of trying to fix the homepage, for the last 10 or so years I have been going straight to my subscriptions. Combine that with uBlock and one of the countless extensions that hide the sidebar and comment section, and Youtube is as bearable as it will get.

I don't wanna do that, because I frequently use my watch history to go back to videos I watched previously.

What I want is a personalized experience, yes, but based on the signals I explicitly choose to send, especially my likes, dislikes, and subs. But their recommendation system frequently mixes in other crap way too often, probably in an effort to keep up with TikTok or whatever the kids use these days. Instead, I wish I could customize the specific categories I'm interested in or not, and for the algorithm to respect my wishes. It won't do that, of course.

These days I just go to the subs list and manually see what's changed, but it's a pain in the ass. I also have a Nebula sub that I try to use instead (but its software isn't as good, especially for subtitles).

There are Firefox/Chrome add-ons that do this, but of course this doesn't help you if you're on your phone. I finally nixed everything but the search bar from the homepage in the hopes of avoiding game spoilers in rec thumbnails.

Firefox mobile on Android has add-ons. With the EU ruling perhaps they'll port that capability to iOS. So there is hope.

Heard of TikTok?

Sadly, yeah :( Still haven't tried it, though!

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