[Corrado]

I have to agree about the recommendation engine. I know there is a lot of interesting new content that I might be interested in uploaded every day, but for some reason it's recommending years old videos that I've already watched AND voted on. WTF?!

[_b4ut]

Yes! I am regularly in the mood to watch something on YouTube - mostly new documentaries on societal/political subjects. But I just can't find anything relevant. Also the search function is critically handicapped. It's really frustrating. They are not increasing my time on YouTube, they reduce it.

[Larrikin]

The recommendation engine was intentionally crippled because it was radicalizing people who were into conspiracy theories, militias, terroristic acts, etc. It sucks but I assume there's some work being done to get a new engine out without sending people down a rabbit hole.

[2pEXgD0fZ5cF]

For that I actually have a nice observation: I always clear my cookies and website data on browser quit, and never login into Youtube. Which means I get a pretty vanilla "recommendation" experience, additional tracking attempts from Google put aside.

Visiting youtube, I could swear that the recommendations Youtube is trying to shove my way only change after several weeks or sometimes even months, it is always the same 8 videos on top of the front page for very long periods.

It starts to get somewhat relevant after I watch something, but then it looks like their recommendation engine does nothing more than "Recommend to user x the n most popular videos of roughly the same category as the last video user x watched" with a little bit of shuffling 1-3 videos from a larger set between those, sometimes, and that appears to be it.

[rv-de]

I don't believe that. They could have restricted this to problematic videos which promote conspiracy theories and their likes.