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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

> I'll come out and say that I am a full blown Youtube addict.

I was a YouTube addict until I think late last year. Something changed in the recommendation algorithm and my recommendations became so bad that these days I can hardly find anything interesting to watch on the front page. I dig things out from my subscriptions.

I still pay for YouTube and consider it money well spent, it is a great source of information.

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Try going through your watch history and deleting stuff that isn't relevant to your current interests. My experience is that the recommendations are keyed very heavily (entirely?) off your watch history so, unlike most apps, you actually have quite precise control over what it recommends.

I'm really diligent about whenever I watch something that I don't want YouTube throwing more of at me, to just immediately delete it from my history. For example, if someone on Reddit mentions some funny dumb video, I'll watch it, but then delete it because I really don't want YouTube suggesting schlock to me.

This is absolutely the biggest factor. I can forget to delete a single short clip a friend sends me from the watch history and still instantly know it the next time I browse the site because all of the sudden 1/3 of my recommendations are Lego videos or something equally as random.

I prune my watch history regularly, but something really changed late last year. The algorithm became like "oh, you've watched a single video about X, how about I show you these 89 other videos about X for the next week or so".

Yes I have observed this as well. It happens if I watch one off sports highlights on Youtube.

Most recently I watched a highlight video of Australia vs West Indies test cricket series my home page was endless cricket videos.

A few weeks before that I watched highlights from World Cup Asian qualifiers, for a week or so endless soccer videos.

> oh, you've watched a single video about X, how about I show you these 89 other videos about X for the next week or so

Just because I look up one video of “how to replace a toilet seat” doesn’t mean I am a connoisseur of toilets.

The other problem I run into is that no matter what I’m watching, I’m two autoplay videos away from Joe Rogan (and other right wing personas). Who knew something as innocent as listening about the economy of Iceland can be two videos away from why the Superman movie is too woke.

I use the "dont recommend channel" option or "I don't like the video" liberally

I use my phone and Firefox Focus for looking up random videos on YouTube because of this.

I have taken this to an extreme, I suppose. I sequestered my Google Account entirely to a Firefox container on my PCs and pretty much the YouTube app and only the YouTube app on my phone. Most random videos I watch in Discord embeds and mobile Safari/Firefox views that are never logged in to my Google Account.

My YouTube ads (and Recaptcha experiences) have gotten terrible because Google seems to punish you more the less data you feed them, but for the most part I feel like I have control of the data that I do feed them (some of which is intentionally misleading because they have no right to know and I hate targeted ads; I love Spanish language ads, for instance, though my level of Spanish comprehension is stuck somewhere around first year of high school courses).

I like camping and knitting, so I watch a lot of those. YouTube is generally pretty good at understanding my interests, but every now and then it sees those and thinks "Doomsday prepper tradwife" and throws some of that nonsense my way and I have to remind it to not recommend any of that stuff.

Pro tip: You can turn off your watch history entirely, and then you won't get recommendations (or shorts) on the YouTube home page (both on the web and mobile). I've found this to be the best way to use YouTube. No more "feed." Sadly, there seems to be no way to block recommendations that appear next to a playing video.

I actually really love the recommendations I get from YouTube.

My watch history is basically entirely my hobbies and interests and thus YouTube suggests more stuff related to those. A lot of it is channels I'm already subscribed to, but it does a good job of surfacing new channels that I wouldn't otherwise know about it.

I can't put my finger on it, but it also seems to prefer doing that for some topics than others. Some videos will have the effect you describe, while others will basically just disappear the whole topic after you watch the video. So far it feels like it prioritizes spamming you with videos on the same topic when the 'seed' video is shorter, more sensational and has some other elements of making the video more 'addictive'. Like it's trying to push you towards Shorts.

The algorithms on most social media networks are dying. I think partially they can't account for all user interests and under-researched concepts/topics. So over-use of recommendation systems has the effect of alienating a large number of users.

That is a interesting theory. When the users could select who to follow it was easier to get into your niche.

The algorithms are way to primitive / stupid. When I watch just one video which explains rowing to show it to a visiting friend, my stream gets flooded with rowing videos afterwards.

When I watch a video describing a new lens for a Canon or Fuji system, I get flooded with videos for Nikon or Sony stuff later on. When I choose "not interested" I only get two options a) I watched this already (which YT should know obviously, as I'm a subscriber, or b) I don't like it. A useful option like "I don't have Nikon/Sony stuff" or something more specific like that isn't available.

Amazon for example uses an equally bad algorithm, it seems to be "industry standard" ...or even worse, because the don't need to offer me another fridge or washing machine once I ordered one. Idiocracy, sigh.

I am so glad I burned my feed addiction on crappy ranked motivational poster meme feeds 2012 something when the feeds still were bad.

It is something that would bring me down otherwise. Just like I never dared to even try WoW.

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