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Comment by testfrequency | Hacker News Reader

YT is desperate for me to engage with rage bait news, and I’m not biting.

It’s so god damn annoying, regardless of how often I choose to ignore channels or don’t suggest feedback.

All they care about is vote time…give me content I want to view!

Also, in the evenings, my timeline gets weirdly paranoid phobia centric, like deep insecurities people live with that are triggering and keep you up late. It’s so obvious YT is doing this to try and bait me into watching these deeply emotional and personal content, and again, ignoring it and providing feedback seems to do nothing to my feed. I hate it.

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I kept having issues like this, with a different kinds of videos, until I scrubbed my history of any of the kinds of videos I did not want.

If I click on something I thought I would want to watch and it is the kind of video I do not want recommended to me I immediately delete it from my watch history, block the channel, and some times block that profile from viewing my youtube channel.

~2 years ago I never had to delete anything from my watch history and my feed/recommendations were ok, now I have to if I do not want my feed/recommendations to occasionally be flooded with something I do not want.

I watch things from unknown-to-me creators in a private window, then copy the URL over to logged in window if it's any good. Same idea, might be an easier workflow.

Absurd that we have these sorts of workarounds, but of course the view numbers are better if it keeps fishing for just the right kind of clickbait trash that you'll wolf it down endlessly.

I only use YouTube with my watch history set to off. So there is no feed, and I only see updates from channels I actually subscribed to. If I want to see some random crap I go search for it but it’s a clean slate next time I open the app. I have found this method of using YouTube to be extremely useful.

This is the way. I get plenty of feeds, recommendations etc. from others, enough to keep me busy. Follow who I want, and drop in when I see they have something new.

I transitioned to using youtube with just that left sidebar for updates from channels i subscribed to, id watch the 2-3 creators videos maybe, slowly that became 1, now its 0. I still consider watching that final creator, but if i do its gonna be because i went to youtube and wanted to type that channel into the search bar, not because of a notification.

Everyone seems to act like youtube is something we need, I just don't really agree. If i want to watch something for entertainment, there are so many amazing shows with deep stories to choose from. If i want to learn, the video medium to me is just straight up garbage. I prefer to read to learn.

Of course there are topics this doesnt totally apply to, but for my purposes, videos are almost always just a way to not only likely repeat the same things you already know for a good chunk of the video, but when you finally find the meat, its still being delivered in a slower way than it could be ingested by reading.

Do not give them the satisfaction. Dont like videos and never comment on anything. The videos are the bait. The comments sections are the trap. Use youtube as a multi-channel TV. Keep it a one-way stream of data. Give them nothing beyond the unavoidable knowledge of what you watch.

I am waiting for the day when they permanently turn off the channels rss feeds. Recently, after years of smooth sailing, they had a couple of outages, first selective, with only about 50% of my feeds effected and yesterday again with 100%, returning 404s. I am concerned given this development and alphabets apparent plan to kill as much interop as possible.

For the uninitiated, afaik, some feedreaders can auto discover the rss url when you add the channels url. Otherwise you have to manually search the channel page source for 'RSS' or 'channel_id='.

And for those that want to get the feed URL, this little Python snippet can get the feed URL from a channel's page, either from the channel's URL itself or a video or playlist page:

https://gist.github.com/Q726kbXuN/834882f59bc921a3865272a66d...

I just use two browsers. On one my recommendations are truly well curated but I can’t watch a single out of place video or my feed is corrupted. The other browser is for brain rot time and it’s the Wild West.

I used to have an account for my kids. I thought I would be smart by seeding the history with educational content. I clicked on a lot of videos, let them play etc. I was there when my kids would watch videos - and slowly but surely YouTube started recommending junk AI generated videos.

It is my opinion their algorithms are tuned to push this kind of engagement no matter what.

Turn off history. Completely disables the food. The only content you see is what you search for.

To me history is useful to continue watching or find videos I’ve already seen. Turning it off will remove a feature I actually need. They force us to see their horrible “for you” content in exchange - so shameful.

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