I am genuinely watching less YouTube because it's showing me less things I actually want to watch.
But they did make a UI change in the android app that I didn't notice until very recently that I'm sure made me miss quite a few videos I would have wanted to watch. The list now has options, and doesn't default to showing videos from your subscribed channels in chronological order. Instead, it's some weirdo order that Google has decided is what you really want to watch, and that omits things. You have to tap on the "videos" tab to get the chronological list now.
It took too long for me to notice this, and it certainly meant I didn't watch videos I would otherwise have watched.
All of the services with news feeds inevitably change from timelines sorted newest to oldest, to engagement algorithms full of random garbage.
Now you get every video without even having to open youtube.com
I'm also watching less of even the subscriptions due to the ads being so long I can make a cup of tea before they've finished, but worse they're also dispersed throughout the content and not just at the beginning.
A significant fraction of the ads are for one specific service I am not able to use anyway, so those advert buyers are wasting money to annoy me so hard and so often that I use YouTube less.
Instead I get even more silly stuff. Like one youtuber I'm subscribed to had an old video about anodes in water heaters. Hadn't heard about that (I've been sheltered) so viewed it. For a week after I had like 10 water heater anode videos in my recommendation list. Also more clickbait stuff, which I strongly dislike.
The “subscription” tab is the best way though.
They may weasel you into activating it via some other route that states in the fine print that they need to activate your watch history to provide [random almost unrelated feature].
Yeah, that's my bad. I can't handle being alone with my thoughts so I need constant background noise.
Sometimes. Not always. It depends on the video and my mood.
I saw a couple of videos from a Chinese travel blogger and now I’m getting Chinese military parades, speeches by Fidel Castro and shorts with “tough guy moments” by Putin.
It’s not ideological, you can watch a bench press video next and then it’s all Joe Rogan and “feminist put in her place”.
It’s like it is programmed to give you the twisted monkey paw version of anything you wish for.
I use freetube app. It let you subscribe to channels and then show you these channel’s latest videos.
Extremely simple, no « recommendations » (I’m old enough to know what I want), and you cut back on Google ever going algorithm change.
The subscriptions page also does this.
That's not really the point of recommendations though. You don't know whether you want things you don't yet know about, and that's what recommendations solve for.
Why would you want an algorithm to feed what you should watch, like if you were soullessly ‘consuming’ video ? This is saddening.
As soon as I'm watching content in other languages, the recommendation engine has absolutely no clue what to suggest.
(I have most watch history and personalisation turned off.)
I'd switch to grayjay, but I like a lot of the other revanced features, like automatically skipping over "like and subscribe" reminders.
* A social graph is built from various sources <-- this is where I wonder what the sources are, what is extracted?
* If I'm connected to Bob, I will see content related to his interests : It appears that the system tries to pick video channels related to me, but the video selection is skewed towards Bob's topics. It seems that Bob's topic embeddings are mapped to the text embeddings of video thumbnails (same for the video titles but with less weight). Since the context is small, sometimes it's off.
* If you refresh the page, it may return to your original recommendations, unless new data from external sources is fed into the algorithm. What's scare me: I wonder if the feed is in near real time. If this is the case, that's explain why my recommendation are as usual and sometimes completely off track for me but related to some people I know.
* It might buffer some topics : if you connect again with Bob but there are no new topics, it gives back the old topic related to Bob.
Once again, this is a pill of a lot of gueses.
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I really wish to go back to the previous algorithm which one of the reason I subscribed to YT premium, now it's just a minefield.
Whatever YouTube did in the last two months needs to be rolled back.