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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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