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Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

What Youtube pushes vs what I watch are so completely different that I am shocked. I almost exclusively watch geology, space, tech and cooking and it pushes at me (quick check of the home page): disgusting cow medical procedures, random sexual videos, celebrity/influencer junk. Oh, wait, there is a geology thing....and it is a junk sci/scare video that has no actual geology related content. Yeah. Their algorithm is clearly working well. I would go to other platforms but there isn't one. I have started donating on patreon and watching there where practical (even though it is still yt serving it up) but that doesn't easily allow me to discover new things. The real challenge here is finding new things. When search is so completely broken, how do you find valid new things to watch?

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Out of curiosity, do you have watch history enabled/disabled?

I found the feed with it enabled is much better than disabled and I have it finetuned to be more in line with the niches I care about.

I am also very proactive with marking channels or content I don't prefer with the "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel" as well as going through and pruning any content I don't want from my watch history directly.

It's not perfect but it's orders of magnitude better than my logged out or watch history disabled account (though not sure if they have since updated it to not show anything at all)

It’s sad that we replaced manual curation with recommendation algorithms because they were doing the hard job of surfacing relevant content for us and the end result is that you’re spending more effort and intellectual energy into steering the algorithms in the right direction than we ever did before

Manual curation would be waste of time. Why should I spend hours looking through slop when I can get algorithm do it reasonably well.

Youtube actually works reasonably well, as long as you remove from history content you disliked, use do not recommend channel and possibly not interested option. It might not be highest of quality, but at least content stream then is passable.

It's the same with financial content.

I follow N YouTubers who produce genuinely useful and insightful videos on the state of the market and personal finance etc, but the algorithm just recommends people with stock tips and scaremongering junk

Can't say I relate. I think their recommendation engine got worse this year and their search sucks, but I only ever get recommendations for things I normally watch or have watched recently. If anything, its gotten too strict and never branches out anymore and just keeps recommending things ive already watched.

Not only that but also the same short videos keep repeating. I have tons of great suggestions from Youtube on the main feed from creators I like, yet the Shorts feed is almost 90% garbage and AI slop.

It's deliberate, I'm sure. People say they want the vegetables, but then go on to watch hours of fast food / Shorts. Clearly the algorithm knows.

Probably there not enough content. Just the same repackaged in human or machine produced slop.

People are addicted to YouTube but I think the key to the healthy watching habits would be restricting the screen time.

Someone knowing about things he's interested in has few problems separating the new and informative content and if he had, say, two hours a week for watching he'd probably enjoy what he sees.

Two hours is just an estimate I came up with, it can be an two hours a month or hour a day. The important thing is that YT just doesn't create enough real new information and after that it is just slop and brain rot, regardless of your habits and filters.

do you have an account about which "you care somehow", like banning/disabling specific channels explicitly? Ive found out: If I tell youtube what I want by sometimes thumb-up/down and explicitly clicking on "no more vids from this channel", then the results a) much better and most of the trash is removed.

Though, new AI-slop channels popup some days - esp. new/fresh channels, but these you can ban anyway since most new channels are AI slop. or "XY ... official" or "XY .. best of" or "XY .. clips" or "XY... fails"

I honestly haven't tried putting effort into the platform for a while now. I have very targeted things I watch (links to the channels) and go direct instead of navigating the homepage at all. I think my upper confidence bound on the value of the YT homepage and improving it is pretty low so it will be a while until I give it a try again.

Do you a favour an try it :-)

If you somehow curate your YT account, the shit wont show up anymore (only new shit not banned already) and you will see one thing: A curated youtube feed is actually rather empty :-D

On some days, I really have to actually look precisely if there is something new at all: Im a subscriber of 30-35 technical/business channels - its very rare that i could "spend a whole day watching YT", because there is just not enough new stuff.

Before curating my account, I also had the impression that "its endless and not any sort of structure" - but it has.

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