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Comment by LocalH | Hacker News Reader

I don't want any algorithms, AI or human, curating my default feed. I want my feed to be a chronologically-ordered listing of the content creators I choose to follow and like. If I want to explore the algorithm, that should still be possible, but it shouldn't be the default.

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That's what the subscriptions feed is. But in practice (when one subscribes to a lot of creators) it isn't always useful.

I've found that creators and channels I've subscribed to don't always appear in the subscriptions feed. Thankfully, YouTube still posts an RSS feed for every channel, and following a bunch of them in my reader app reliably captures all the output. I'll dip in and out, only watching what I want, and it's harder to do that when a chunk of the feed is silently hidden from view.

There is an additional setting for notifications. Click on the little bell to the side of the channel name, and make sure to select to get all the notifications, otherwise they might get hidden.

You say that, but then you probably won’t like it when it happens. Some creators post way more than others. Low frequency posters tend to get swept away by the current.

Some of my favourite YouTube channels post very infrequently (one video every few months) whereas others post every single day. The YouTube algorithm seems to know this and pins the low frequency guys’ new videos right to the top when they come out.

>You say that, but then you probably won’t like it when it happens. Some creators post way more than others.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a "discover" type of feed. I'm just saying it shouldn't be the forced default

I’m talking about creators I subscribe to. I don’t want the most prolific creators to dominate over the ones who post rarely among my subscriptions. I subscribe to creators to bookmark them and keep an eye on them, not to let them open their floodgates into my feed.

This, exactly. I find there's an inverse relationship between posting frequency and video quality. Channels like hyperspace pirate (DIY science/chemistry/physics) may post several times in a week if they are super into a project, then go 2 months without a new video. Those channels post videos that I will more reliably watch, since they don't post filler. Whereas one of the few video game channels I subscribe to (manyatruenerd) posts basically every day. Some of the videos are good, but there's a lot of filler. And that's unavoidable when trying to work to a schedule like that. I spent a few months trying to push a commit to my hobby project every day to see that green github history, and a lot of that stuff ended up being worse quality.

It's a tricky balance, since I don't necessarily want just a feed of my subscriptions, it really depends on what type of content I want to watch/engage with. There's a ton of time where I just want background noise while I work on something, that's where the previously mentioned video game channel and similar content are what I want. Whereas there's certain content (like hyperspace pirate or applied science) where if they post a video I don't watch until I can actually give it my full attention. I have my complaints with YouTube, but out of the main social media sites it seems to do the best job with being able to present an algorithmic feed that is actually useful. I tried TikTok for a few weeks, and as much as people were talking their algorithm up I just couldn't reliably signal what videos I actually wanted to watch. There's some very good content there, but for me at least I spent more time struggling against the algorithm since it kept trying to show videos I just don't care about.

And TikTok is leagues better than Instagram or Facebook. There are a few communities that I have to engage with in those sites, since that's just where the people involved are posting. But goddamn are the algorithmic feeds on both just a dumpster fire. The only content I have engaged with on Facebook for 5+ years is RC vehicle related, mainly the local racing club and other groups. And yet my Facebook feed is all political or Ai rage bait, they dint even show posts from my high-school friends. I see it every time I log in, and haven't clicked on any of the suggested posts I years. It's frustrating, since I'm providing them with tons of signal on what content I actually want to see, and that content is on their site. Meta just does such a poor job of allowing you to curate your feed that I gave up on their sites years ago. I wouldn't mind being able to see my old friends posts (although most of them also don't post anymore due to these issues) or at least see content related to my interests. I might spend more time in the site if that were the cadlse, instead I log on for 10 minutes once a week to see when the next race is scheduled.

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