Youtube toxicity is real for me. No matter what I downvote, the same kinds of radicalizing videos make their way through. Either the algorithm is broken or people are trying to break it. I’m glad I’m not a kid in 2025.
Unfortunately, this does not turn off the suggestions that come with the playing video. Not sure if there is a way to turn them off, but if there is, I'm hoping someone will reply here to demonstrate it.
It's too bad you have to jump through hoops just to avoid toxic, ragebait and other content that YouTube desperately wants you to watch.
You might even want to build an AI to optimize your watch history :)
(then there are the paid recommendation slots — those were fairly obvious when I had my bubble over in some other script, but latin-character vids were always pushed in the same placings)
The whole point of turning off recommendations and suggestions is to browse the web deliberately, without algorithms pushing things at you. I consider "discovery" to be an anti-feature that I don't want.
I don't have that problem. I think it is because I subscribed to a bunch of nerd channels and those have more influence that watching a few seconds of a random video in the recommender they have.
you will see nothing but jordan peterson, preger u, etc. clips for ~2 weeks in your feed.
at this point i don't even attempt to test the waters or do some sort of good-faith attempt to understand the ideology / hear what they have to say, since it will, immediately and aggressively start spamming me with hard right content for months.
Someone I know posted a link on Facebook to a YouTube video of Dave Grohl inviting a kid from the audience onstage to play guitar at a concert. I watched it.
I had no idea who Dave Grohl was. I saw from the video that his band is the Foo Fighters. I have heard of them but I'm never sought out their music or watched any videos of them. I've probably heard them in passing without knowing it. I can't name any songs of theirs and don't even know what genres of music they play. Even after watching that video I don't recognize any of the songs because the song they played with the kid was a cover of a Metallica song.
At this point everyone no doubt expects me to say how my YouTube feed was then full of Dave Grohl and/or Foo Fighter videos.
Nope. Not a one. Nor were there any of the other videos YouTube likes to recommend when they think you might be interested in a particular artist. No videos of people covering the artist on other instruments. No videos of reactors reacting to the artist. No videos analyzing the music theory of their songs. No tutorials on how to play their songs on guitar.
Nothing.
But on Google News for the next month or two pretty much everything in the section where they make recommendations based on your interests was about Dave Grohl. It mostly wasn't even stuff about his music. It was almost all celebrity gossip stuff.
How the heck did my watching a YouTube video end up having such a big influence on the Google New recommendations but have no apparent affect at all on YouTube?
I wonder if it is because I got to the YouTube video from a Facebook link? Maybe Facebook users who follow links to videos about a celebrity have a high probability of being interested in gossip about the celebrity?
Maybe I'm not interacting with it correctly. Do you watch all or most of a video then downvote to get more content like that?
Twitter algorithm is much worse for example and has bugs, you'll need to grind for some time to get rid of popular trash and politics. Any engagement with bad content will only bring you more of it in the feed, and there's tons of baits to engage with something stupid. So mute any accounts and words you don't like, click "not interested" on posts, but it's really slow to update.
I have no clue why people think Elon firing everyone at twitter was a success.