[brudgers]

[semi-speculation presented as if I actually know]

Youtube recommendations are best effort. That effort has a computational budget and a time limit. The fastest and least computationally intensive recommendation is to pull the last set of recommendations out of the on-device local cache.

The next fastest thing is to recommend whatever is cached near the edge of your internet connection whether it fits your previous viewing or not. It generally does not do this. Instead it recommends edge-cached material with cosign similarity to your preferences. However, there might not be much of that if your preference is for outlying content.

The slowest and most computationally intensive recommendation would be to compute a new tensor of your preferences and run cosign similarity across the entire vector space of Youtube. It doesn't do this for obvious reasons even though that's what we all want.

Of course, this ignores the issue of Google revenue. Advertisers targeted you, target you based on the videos you've watched. So there's that too. Google recommends videos for which it has relevant advertisers.

[grufkork]

With most sufficiently large companies it all boils down to making money (which usually is why they have been able to grow so large to begin with). It is a very fine line between making as much profit as possible from users and not exploiting them so much that they leave.

Google does not have that much interest in serving new, interesting videos over what earns the most clicks and therefore advertising. A lot of users might also be pretty fine with what is already served. Although I have seen more and more alternatives popping up, several with a monthly payment plan instead. While free content is nice, a paid plan incites different business practices than one where revenue is closely coupled with the number of clicks.

[Enginerrrd]

>Of course, this ignores the issue of Google revenue. Advertisers targeted you, target you based on the videos you've watched. So there's that too. Google recommends videos for which it has relevant advertisers.

I think this is exactly the problem.

Contrast this with the recommendations I get from my paid spotify account where I don't get ads: It's absolutely Excellent. Seriously, whoever worked on Spotify's recommender system algo deserves a huge pat on the back. They have the best recommender I've encountered anywhere on the net, and I pay a lot of attention to recommenders. It's just light years ahead of everyone else.