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Comment by altmanaltman | Hacker News Reader

I remember videos with titles like "OPENAI CHANGED STUDYING COMPLETELY WITH THIS ONE SUPER UPDATE!" and obnoxious thumbnails on youtube when it was first launched. I guess studying changed it.

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Use DeArrow, it allows you to avoid most of that clickbait farming.

https://dearrow.ajay.app/

You have these grifter videos for everything, from OpenAI features to hot takes on the strait of Hormuz. These are best ignored entirely.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44725764

Also discussed on HN. Yeah I can ignore them, but a lot of people watch those videos and fall for the grift (going by their views) and that's sad. It personally annoys me also when yt recommends them to me because it thinks I'm interested in software

I make sure to hit not interested the second I see anything I very much don't want pop up in me feed. I don't want mine to drift towards the average feed of the lowest effort, sensationalist garbage.

Does this work? I've been doing that for some weeks now, nothing has changed about my home page.

It is more important to scrub your history and upvote.

You can use ublock to remove the sidebar completely

Unhook also does this (among other YouTube clean-ups)

In case you start watching such a video (and maybe in general), it’s probably more effective to downvote it and remove it from your watch history. And when you use “not interested”, there are two “tell us why” follow-up options “already watched” and “don’t like”. Selecting the latter may be necessary for “not interested” to have a stronger effect.

I don’t know if YouTube Premium makes a difference, but I don’t see highly clickbaity thumbnails very often.

It seems to help. But it's just one factor. I also have a lot of subscriptions to help guide the algorithm. And it seems most heavily weighted on things you've recently watched, so if you ever leave youtube playing while you're not actually watching it, you might need to manually remove videos from your watch history that don't align with what you want to see suggested.

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