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Comment by hn8726 | Hacker News Reader

I have no clue how to use YouTube. It seems like as soon as it latches on 3-4 interests of mine, the entire home page is exclusively filled with videos relating to that. I can mark videos as "not interesting" but it doesn't do much. I will see exactly the same videos on the home screen, ones that I'm not interested in and don't plan on watching, for weeks or months sometimes.

I'm sure there's plenty of interesting content about topics I haven't searched for, but YouTube seems intent on not letting me out of whatever bubble it thought out for me.

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I think what you describe is what infecto was saying. You can't use YouTube to find interesting content anymore. You can only use it to find more of what you've already seen. In the past, it was better at unearthing new things.

Personally, I added uBlock filters so the home page is empty and recommended videos aren't shown. I only ever go to subscriptions now.

> I added uBlock filters so the home page is empty and recommended videos aren't shown. I only ever go to subscriptions now.

There's a setting to turn it off, no need for uBlock filters for that

It's the hammer I have and it works on those nails, hah.

Fair enough, just FYI. I couldn't be bothered to set that up on mobile personally; nice thing about the account setting is it will apply everywhere then (assuming logged in).

What setting is this? I'd love to disable the home page but I haven't seen any setting for it

Turn off your watch history.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725

Ah, I wanted a setting explicitly. I'd like to preserve my watch history, i only want to disable the home and recommendations.

It doesn't even show me more of what I've already seen, half the sidebar is videos I've already watched (or watched halfway before dropping, with a helpful indicator of my lack of progress). Like, "we see you like video X, why don't you watch video X today?" Thanks, I already have bookmarks.

Similarly, I use Unhook because it gives me fine control over what YT displays. I now find YT to be completely unusable without it.

While I do agree it has a very strong focus on suggesting more of what you've recently watched, I feel it's also managing to suggest new and interesting unrelated stuff from time to time.

Some habits I have is to subscribe to channels which I truly enjoy, instead of marking as "not interested" I select "do not suggest channel", and be cautious of click-bait titles. If I get lured in, I remove them from my history.

So for me it's mostly great, though I get your frustration as well. For example I recently watched a couple of informative videos on the LA fires as I have some relatives living in the area, and suddenly my feed is tons of that and little else.

I've found sometime in the last year or so YouTube has been suggesting random videos from very small channels much more, which I like a lot. Most of the videos are garbage, but every once in a while I'll find a gem that entertains me and my friends.

Recently I found a video of a young kid doing a taste test of a sour soda, and then demanding his dad come over from the other room to try it too. At one point the kid does a really loud burp that I found funny. Obviously not something that will do numbers, but it satisfies my people-watching itch.

While I cherish other kinds of videos, I too have noticed smaller creators getting recommended, and few large ones. Perhaps because most of the channels I subscribe to are smaller channels?

You’ll get a kick out of this if you haven’t already seen it - a collection of random slice of life videos uploaded during the time when iPhones had a built in “send to YouTube” button. So many fascinating moments that would otherwise be lost to time. https://walzr.com/IMG_0001

I too liked to prime my own algorithm but Yanis Varoufakis book Technofeudalism kind of ruined it for me. On a individual level it's nice to get good recommendations, but on a societal level I think it's starting to get a bit scary to the point of me wanting to opt out and instead curate my own feeds based on first hand sources.

Yeah I get your point, though I almost exclusively use YouTube as an alternative to TV entertainment. That is, rather than watching Mythbusters, I'm watching Numberphile, FarmCraft101 and such.

I specifically do not normally view "pure" news or similar. I might make the rare exception, like in case of the LA fire where I saw a clip from PBS. That is a very conscious choice, for reasons similar to what you express.

> It seems like as soon as it latches on 3-4 interests of mine,

Its worse than that. I thought that Youtube worked as you described, trying to find videos suited to your interests but it actually works the other way around.

Youtube has a series of rabbit holes that it knows maximise engagement, so its trying to filter you the human down one of those rabbit holes. Do you fit the mr beast ssniperwolf hole, or the jordan peterson joe rogan rabbit hole? Howabout 3 hour video essay rabbit hole, is that one your shape?

Its designing paths for engagment and filtering humans down not filtering videos for humans, its perverse and awful and it explains why the algorithm simply does not work for humans, because you are not the target audience, you are the data being sorted.

The homescreen recommendations seems to aggressively prioritize what you last searched for.

I missed the end of the recent Australia vs India cricket series so I searched for highlights from the final day of play. Since then for the past 2 weeks my homescreen has been an endless stream of cricket related videos. For some reason it has a particular focus on podcasts related to cricket.

Podcasts are popular enough high engagement content. Here engagement is mostly watch time. As such algo pushes those videos that have been recently watched a lot. Recently being popular is also other mechanic that seems very common.

I made the mistake of clicking on a Jordan Peterson video several years back. I'd never heard of him before and the title seemed interesting, so I clicked. 15 seconds in my charlatan detector went off, so I exited the video. For the next couple weeks I was playing wack-a-mole with a never-ending supply of manoshpere and right wing nonsense. Easy to see how so many people get sucked into sphere of influence.

One of the best things I've learned is that you can go into your watch history and remove something and that seems to work pretty well to fixing the algorithm after clicking on something and realizing it's garbage.

Don't use the homepage, use the subscriptions page

When you turn off search history, it makes the homepage useless and the subscriptions page becomes unavoidably the next step.

Discovery of content happens in the sidebar from videos I enjoy now, and only when I'm in the mood to discover something.

I've come accustomed to deleting cookies on browser close. The first ~10 or so YouTube page requests, the sidebar of recommended videos is pretty good. After that, as you said, it gets way too muddled. I think a good plugin for YouTube would be to always delete cookies before opening a video so that you're getting as close to a pure vanilla recommended feed as possible.

Usually the better content is down the page a bit on the YouTube home page. I use this CSS snippet to hide the first 12 videos from my home page.

    [page-subtype="home"] #contents > ytd-rich-item-renderer:nth-child(-n + 12) {
      display: none;
    }

You have to block entire channels. I've blocked all the major news networks, all the major content farms, and all the major "garbage" snack size content channels. There's hundreds of blocked channels on my account.

It's _almost_ like the old youtube.

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