[luffapi]

I have the opposite problem with YT, I’d really like for it to offer me great suggestions so I could sit back for hours and watch, instead of having to actively search for new content. The problem is the recommendations are really narrow. Want to watch a video on how to make cheese? I hope you like being recommended every video from that channel and every other cheese making video for the next 30 days. I feel like it doesn’t look holistically at my viewing habits to provide something that fits me.

Maybe I watch stuff like that mixed with Australia nature docs and C++ videos. What do other people that watch those things watch that I’d find novel. They should also try to get rid of repetition, especially in music recommendations.

Does anyone know if there are alternatives to the native YT recs that operate over YT content?

[46756e]

I feel this. I feel like a decade ago, video suggestions where based on what you were currently watching and you could find tiny channels and new content easily.

Nowadays the suggestions are basically 1/2 videos I have seen and 1/2 videos that are either big youtubers or I have subscribed to.

No going down the rabbit hole to find new stuff unless you search yourself.

[robotnikman]

Yep, I miss the days when it would just recommend similar videos. Was so much easier to find new stuff and hidden gems

[tut-urut-utut]

Google YouTube recommendations are simplistic, to the point of being unusable.

What I would really like to see is a YouTube video collection powered by the TikTok recommendation algorithm.

TikTok video proposals are much more adaptive and much more nuanced. There I found out some content through recommendations that I would never search for, but truly liked it.

Of course, not sure how that would work with longer videos, but I can suppose at least for music length it would be good enough, and for longer videos it may need more time to train the engine before starting to recommend.

[willmadden]

My problem with youtube isn't their recommendation algorithm, it's that they ban and censor so much of the content I want to watch. Youtube and the major social media outlets have turned into broadcast TV over the last five years. I use it for "how to" videos, and that's about it. I find a higher concentration of interesting/intellectual content on other platforms.

[HWR_14]

Other than their overzealous enforcement of copyright (and, via ContentID, more expansive than copyright rights), I'm not really aware of anything valuable being banned or censored. But maybe I'm ignorant.

[willmadden]

1) Countless medical doctors and researchers discussing COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics like Ivermectin have been banned and censored. This includes world famous, Nobel Prize winning researchers.

Here are some dead links:

1) Discussing Ivermectin (proven by dozens of double blind randomized trials to be 85% effective at treating COVID: https://youtu.be/f0FmjsWwFXs

2) Interview with Dr. Malone, the guy who invented mRNA vaccines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_NNTVJzqtY

3) A US Senator gets canceled: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/youtube-suspe...

4) Half of this guy's videos are canceled: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAWCKUrmvK5F_ynBY_CMlIA

5) I'll stop here.

Here's a good video on the censorship of COVID on youtube and others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COyQVUhtMDQ

That's just COVID. They suspend anything that isn't mainstream politics. It's Orwellian, and normies have no idea.

[blackbrokkoli]

Pardon me if that sounds rude, but it is unfathomable to me why anyone would attempt to watch scientific/or medical discussion on YouTube (or any social media, for that matter).

My alarm bells start ringing if I read a paper and the authors are overly committed to pointing out the prestige of the institutions or seem to optimize for citations. What possible use could you get out of the discussion of "science" on a platform where flashiness of the thumbnail, shortness of message and flamebait are directly related to your income?

[willmadden]

These videos weren't appeals to authority or optimized for citations. They were scientific discussions of therapeutics for COVID as well as the mRNA therapies and what's wrong with the current approaches.

Youtube targeting content based on income and being "flashy" doesn't make their egregious censorship of inconvenient information on their platform OK.

[riggsdk]

I also have this issue with Spotify. I barely know the names of the bands/groups/dj's I listen to. I tend to have both a broad and narrow music taste at the same time. When I like one song from a band I rarely like their other stuff - but Spotify keeps suggesting it to me.

[BrandoElFollito]

I noticed that the suggestions for novelties improve once I scroll very far in the suggestions, and then watch one or two videos of what I would like to have as a suggestion.

This is purely empirical but seems to work more or less in my case.