The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse
evilgeniuslabs.ca
evilgeniuslabs.ca
It's so frustrating that their interface is so very bad for discovery and exploration.
Either it appeals to my interests or it doesn't. Why should I care if a million other people get it recommended as well?
And even if that were the case, again, so what? If Youtube makes good non-mainstream music more popular, that's still a good thing. That's exactly what one should want a recommendation algorithm to do.
I'm trying to see the problem here and I can't.
As a lifelong musician, I find it to be a great resource for discovery. I really lean into curating what I do and don’t want to see and it delivers amazing results frequently.
It’s also a nice counterpoint to recs I get from other sources: streaming services, friends, strangers, and good ‘ol fashioned digging.
These exist. They should be discoverable. They used to be. But in 2026 the search results skew towards dubious influencers and AI schlock.
It misses the point. The video that is most valuable to me isn’t necessarily popular, is not the authors real job, but they actually know what they’re doing and explain it well.
You wouldn’t even need a full UI, just a big curated directory of useful stuff.
This is one of the things a comprehensive interoperability mandate could enable.
Require monopolistic companies that have a frontend/backend architecture to publish the interface docs and to not obstruct third party commercial alt backends/frontends.
Its a bit like carving up monopolistic firms along the joints (interfaces) defined by the software architecture, and team structure. Just less extreme; the firm isnt actually split, it's just required to allow "fair competition by third party architecture components"
This would really improve googles software, we might get e2ee google keep or gmail with pgp.
(I have not worked out the details of this, it might not be feasible)
No.
Fix the goddamn video search in the first place, I don't want to talk to some asshole chatbot to find a video.
Then the cards between videos telling me about YouTube Playables.
Goddamnit, this is a video site, not a goddamn game site.
Interestingly, tragically, YouTube seems to have gotten the message that I like long form informational videos, and serves me ones with intriguing titles that are clearly written, illustrated, and read by AI. I seem to be training it to deceive me, which is not a good thing. In fact, I had trained it so well to push my psychological buttons that I recently had to leave entirely, which is surely not what anyone wants.
Easier said than done, obviously, but the point is that the worthwhile web isn't so big anymore.
It’s incredible how too much money corrupts everything it touches.
I sometimes imagine gathering up some number of like-minded electrical and software engineers, and founding some sort of monastary in which everyone was fed and taken care of and built the best technology they could, as a gift to humanity. I do wonder if the day's robber barons would find a way to shut us down, of course, but I still remember a bright and optimistic time when technology was made to serve people, not to oppress them, and it seems to me like a bright expression of human spirit that oughtn't to have been sold.
If I were a vampire I'd have no problem spending a few decades studying the Torah o learning Sanskrit but as it is one has to efficiently manage one's time.
I've given up on trying to use youtube's interface and now just rely on recommendations + rss (via freshrss) or tubearchivist to keep me up to date and organize the videos.
And then youtube has the gall to suggest that if I want useful links there, I should turn on browsing history. You don't need history to suggest related videos!
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Google ads went though a similar decline ten or twenty years ago. Google Adwords used to be related to the page they were showing on, and not based on your behaviour.
Running with the c compiler example why not go the forge hosting the project, look at the contributors and forks, scrape all their socials and download their profiles/videos.
If you log in, you get the personalised funnel.
If you don't log in, you get a blank page and a search box.
That's evil.
It's tantamount to censorship, of the worst kind, deliberately sending all viewers directly to their own personal echo chambers without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
As a random example: I now get only Australian news channels recommended to me. I have to go to heroic lengths to see the BBC or any US source, let alone something more out there like Al Jazeera.
This makes it easy to somewhat steer the algorithm, I just open and scrub through a few videos of the same "kind" that I'm interested in and this then makes the youtube homepage a bit wieldy. This still populates unrelated videos but at a lower rate.
No. It is the normalization of evil.
> without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
This is the point. The point of circus, is not to stimulate your intellect, but to keep your intellect busy. Different opinions are dangerous.
Regardless of what content I start with I get lots of shorts with women in seductive poses and minimal clothing with pure click-bait titles. Once in a while if I start with a comedian then I might see a short suggested to me of a comedian but with cringy music added to what they are saying so I am not falling for that a second time.
Basically the main page is useless to me. I just rely on really old bookmarks which means I will rarely ever see new channels unless one of the people I already watch talks about them and maybe that's good enough. Thankfully some of the people I watch are also on Rumble.