[lordentropy]

For me, it seems like youtube's recommendation system mostly gets stuck in the local optimum. Once you watch a video from a particular channel, it'll keep on recommending the videos from the same channel for months. Soon, the recommendation just consists of stuff from the channels that have you already viewed. You rarely see new types of recommendations.

[city41]

I am a huge YouTube addict and get sucked into it a lot. I used to discover all kinds of great channels and really enjoyed it. But lately I have noticed I'm not really finding much and the amount of watching I am doing has gone down a lot. Not sure if they changed the algorithm, or if I've just seen everything I like. I have definitely noticed YouTube is recommending me more clickbaity and mainstream stuff lately.

[sen]

Same here, I'm physically disabled and YouTube is the only form of "tv" I watch, so I watch a fair chunk of it (understatement) and I've distinctly noticed a massive drop over the last... I want to say 6 months?... where I've found the recommendations to be totally useless.

Way way more recommendations for stuff I'd never consider watching, recommendations for "big" youtubers (I almost exclusively watch smaller channels based around niche hobbies), stuff like that.

I used to think their recommendation engine was amongst the best of any service I've used, now it's junk.

[throwaway316943]

It’s changed, I’m in the same boat. The only new channels I’ve found that I love are after seeing them promoted outside of YouTube. They clearly intersect with other channels I’ve subscribed to and watch regularly but were never recommended. I also notice that the recommendation queue for videos on these channels tries to steer you away to larger more mainstream channels that are only tenuously related.

[cloverich]

I wonder if the cat and mouse game of seo is being played out again in “algorithm land” and content creators have learned how to optimize their own content for promotion. I usually blame just the algorithm but maybe i’ve been oversimplifying a larger problem.

[pixl97]

It seems to be and a few content creators I watch have documented the process. I believe the spiffing brit and another v named science based channel showed how that swapping the title of the video many times as a kind of A/B test can increase your views by millions.

[lawl]

One of the reasons I never logged in on youtube back when I watched it a lot. Every few weeks when the recommendations were stuck, I'd just wipe cookies and get new stuff.

[JohnFen]

That mirrors my experience, too.

In fact, I rarely find YouTube's recommendations to be useful. Occasionally, yes, but typically I just get that "more of the same" problem.

However, that may be explained by how I use YouTube. The article is pretty vague and hand-wavy about how the recommendations really work, but it's possible that the fact that I don't drive my YouTube viewing from the recommended videos list makes the video recommendations worse for me.

[laurent92]

I often search for “scientific documentary” or “variety” but the algo clearly doesn’t want me to discover new things, and doesn’t seem to include those searches to build the suggestions. It keeps repeating the 8 usual channels I’m bored of watching.

[derefr]

Bizarrely, I find the opposite. I follow a lot of channels. (More than a thousand, I think.) Among those, some of them I watch every time I see them, while others I hardly ever engage with. But it's always the followed channels I hardly ever engage with that show up in my Recommended feed; while the followed channels that I consistently engage with are nowhere to be seen. (Not just in Recommended; they fail to show up anywhere in all the front-page carousel categories, or any of the sub-category carousel categories, on the TV version of the app, which is the main way I interact with the site.)

Instead, I have to explicitly go into "Subscriptions", and hope that it was posted recently-enough for the channel to show up in the 6-or-so sorted-by-recency channels at the very top, rather than in the alphabetized list (since there are so many channels in that alphabetical list, that finding anything marked as new in that list is basically impractical.)

[type0]

Their recommendation system is broken. Sometimes recommendations are completely unrelated, sometimes the same videos get recommended in every page for several days. Videos are usually tagged (there are browser extensions to view tags on videos), so recommendation can't even match the tags to view stuff in a similar ballpark. They demonetize and downplay recommendations for decent channels because they are deemed to geeky or are not posting videos frequently enough, I'm not at all pleased how Youtube gets more and more rotten.

[emilitt]

I found the PocketTube YouTube extension very useful for organizing my subscriptions into categories for easy searching. I had the same issue though I'm not sure I'm past a thousand subs yet - probably only about a hundred in total.

[JohnFen]

> Instead, I have to explicitly go into "Subscriptions"

This is how I've always used YouTube, and it wasn't that long ago that I learned most people don't do it that way. My usual pattern is to go to the subscriptions tab and scroll down to where the last video I viewed was, then start watching from there up towards the top of the list.

It would be really handy if the YouTube app had some way of making that easier.

[spike021]

I've noticed this too. Occasionally I'll look up a how-to/DIY thing, watch one video for it, and then all my recommendations (even the ones on the front page) revolve around that topic. But it's not like I have a consistent interest in it, it was a one-off.

[lelandfe]

I can be pretty confident that once I've finished a video, that very same video will be on my YouTube homepage for weeks. It's useless.

At this moment, my homepage's first 10 videos include 7 that I've already watched.

[munificent]

> that very same video will be on my YouTube homepage for weeks.

I just right-click those videos and tell YouTube I'm not interested in it. That helps keep my homepage fresh while still being pretty good about recommending stuff I like.

One thing I think must be deeply challenging about recommendation on YouTube is that many videos like DIY informative stuff only warrant being watched once. But music, DJ mixes, livestreams, etc. I will watch over and over. So the signal "did I watch this" might mean "definitely do not show it again" for some videos and "definite do show it again" for others. It's probably hard for the system to distinguish those.

[gxqoz]

Maybe they're being fooled by toddlers who love rewatching the same video over and over again.

[ysavir]

Not even that, I bet. I've heard a lot about how YT is used for music by many people (myself included, sometimes), and recommending the song you just listened again probably has a good click rate.

[munificent]

Yeah, I have definitely watched the same DJ set dozens of times for some particularly good ones.

[8note]

Or people who are asleep and not switching away from auto-plays of the same video

[eropple]

It's worse when it's decided that yeah, you are interested in that thing. My interests bounce between woodworking, homebrew vehicles, and strategy video games. The YT algorithm gets itself totally snarled when I watch a video from one side of that fence and assumes that that's all I want to see now. Watch a SuperfastMatt vehicle about the Jag he's retrofitting with the guts of a Tesla? Obviously you want seven more videos from his channel that you've already watched. And I like his channel! Not enough to watch the same seven videos again, though.

It also seems to have some classification issues, too. It lumps a lot of stuff into "DIY", and woodworking is part of it--but so is a lot of stuff that more fits under "construction" or "carpentry". No shade thrown, that stuff can be interesting too, but there's a large gulf between "crotchety woodworking dork going on about tablesaw safety" and "refinishing a backyard shed with glamour shots of a Home Depot sponsored miter saw set to bouncy stock music" that the algorithm does not seem to grok. Maybe it wants me to hatewatch that stuff, I dunno.

[tsumnia]

Most systems have this issue. I've described it as a 'fear of recommending something you hate'. They know you watched X video from Y channel, so there is a good chance you'd like Z video that has a similar fanbase or content.

However, it becomes this echo chamber of only recommending the same content over and over again because they don't want to suggest something you don't like. That's because to their metrics, you don't watch it all, you don't see the ads, and then you "potentially" leave their platform because there's "nothing you like on it".

[dvlsg]

YouTube still recommends stuff I hate all the time, despite me explicitly trying to tell the system I'm not interested.

To pick an example, my YouTube recommended section is full of videos of people reacting to the things I actually like to watch. I don't want to watch people reacting to the things I like. I just want to watch the things I like. I try to tell YouTube that by saying "Not Interested" to all of the reaction videos, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

[kikokikokiko]

I use uBlock to stop this type of shenaningans. I set filters for specific channels or "channel networks", for instance if I don't want to see any Vice related video show up in my recomendations, i.e. "Vice Fightland", "Vice bla bla bla" etc, I set a rule such as:

www.youtube.com###dismissible:has-text(/Vice/)

This way, any channel that has the word Vice in it will never show up to me in recommendations, be it on the main page or the sidebar. This "has-text" regex is really useful, not just on Youtube. I use it a lot, all over the internet. In your case, switch "Vice" with "react" and I believe you'll get rid of 99% of these videos showing up on your feed.

[ewen-lbh]

It'll also get you rid of 99% of React.js tutorials.

A has-text condition always has this risk of matching too much.

[tsumnia]

Those types of videos still tick the box of "relevant" to current recommendation algorithms though. I sort of mean that algorithms won't branch into unfamiliar territory. So, as an example, I've never looked up "underwater basket weaving"[1] or getting into to. So from the algorithm's perspective, there is an element of uncertainty with recommending it, because it doesn't know if I'll like it, be ambivalent, or strongly dislike it. Then, it compares that rating to other content on the platform, like your reaction videos, and even though they may be disliked, if they are favorable to others in your focus group, they'd still have a higher rating than uncertainty.

The issue is that we don't really have a good method for measuring uncertain interests and since most algorithms have an underlining "make the company money", we don't get anything beyond the same ol' same ol' recommendations.

[1] Underwater Basket Weaving is a placeholder for anything - yoga, video games, cooking, politics, essentially anything you are currently NOT getting presented.

[dkdk8283]

I loathe videos on trending with the exception of some science content. I say “not interested” all the time but the third recommendation is always some bs I have zero interest in.

[crmd]

It seems to me that YouTube is doing complex bucket testing with the recommendation algorithm. Some days, my recommendation list is full of obscure-but-relevant-to-my interests content that would require legitimate ML to populate, and then the next day my feed is basically

  SELECT DISTINCT videos.* 
  FROM videos, followers 
  WHERE videos.creator=followers.creator
  AND followers.user = $ME

[8note]

I occasionally get the whole front page as a list of old videos from the same channel. All of their videos Ina row for a few seconds of infinite scroll, then it jumps to another one, but, it won't show a new video from channels I'm subscribed to so I have to go poll for them

[cronix]

Visit in incognito mode and don't sign in. Brand new, fresh youtube, ready to be corrupted again.

[notJim]

I've found YouTube's defaults for a lightly-used profile (my work Google account) tend to be like Charlie Kirk/Ben Shapiro owning the libs type garbage.

[Applejinx]

Pretty sure that comes and goes.

Comes, because statistically those youtubers are able to latch on to some viewers and this drives engagement. I believe some of that has been pay-to-win stuff, where the youtubers actively advertised and paid directly for engagement. Some of those folks are subsidized by outsiders.

Goes, because YouTube knows from studying its own business that they're capable of driving more engagement by turning people into video-obsessed alt-right Nazis. And if it's too obvious, they'll be called on it, or actively punished as a platform over essentially selling themselves out as a propaganda bullhorn to whoever's able to pay.

That being the alt-right Nazis, and those who fund them.

So it goes back and forth. YouTube doesn't always do this. It does as much of this as it possibly can, but is systemically aware that running with it causes other problems, and dials it back to stay out of trouble (and because some of the people minding the algorithms are not, themselves, alt-right Nazis).

YouTube always wants to find an algorithmic answer for everything, and is not afraid to go meta and look at larger contexts for what they do. It's a google thing. So they want, and don't want, the 'own the libs' paid-for content. It's both simple capitalism, and looking at it on a larger systemic level where there are risks to allowing their ad buys to stoke outright revolution of the country YouTube is based in.

[dkdk8283]

You should stop using the word nazi. It’s disrespectful to those who lost loved ones in the holocaust.

Separately there is nothing wrong with people who have opinions different from yours.

[type0]

Incognito mode doesn't make their recommendation system any better, but at least it doesn't get stuck on some stupid subject because their bs algorithm deemed it important to show the same stuff several days in a row.

[dredmorbius]

What this does is to tune the recommendations for that session to what you view for that session.

If you blindly follow some pratfalls or kittens video, you'll get served up junk. If you happen to be researching some specific topic (how-tos, explainers, academics, technical topics being among my favourites), you'll tend to find you're getting recommendations that follow from that initial topic.

I still treat recommendations quite warily, but at least the ones that come up in such sessions are somewhat better than standard fare.

(I never use YT whilst authenticated / logged in.)

[int_19h]

I watch YouTube from Roku sometimes without signing in, but it still seems to somehow - by IP, presumably? - pick up related topics from searches on other devices (that are signed in).

[blondin]

incognito mode has been the best thing for me lately! it has become my normal browser mode.

[coredog64]

Something we’ve noticed in our house is that if YT can’t figure out who is watching, it just uses the IP address. So I get recommendations based on what my kids watch, and my wife gets random recommendations for stuff based on what I watch.

I’ve tried the “Don’t recommend this” trick, but because the kids are subbed (or otherwise watch it), it still keeps coming back.

[throaway46546]

Mine is extra annoying. It will keep recommending videos I have already watched. If I go to my subscriptions there are new videos from the same channel, but on my recommended tab it keeps showing the same months/years old already watched video. I'm not sure how that is supposed to drive engagement.

[therealdrag0]

It’s the worst on “Shorts”. There’s no way to pic topics and I’ll often get stuck flipping through the same 3 channel videos. For a while I thought “oh it’s in beta must not be much content.” Then after a while something I did made it recommend other channels and now I’m stuck in another set of 3-4 Short channels :/

[merth]

I made a mistake of trying some jazz 5 years ago, now my feed cursed. 99% of suggested videos are not clicked yet youtube insist of showing same stuff for years.

[jimmaswell]

Have you tried clicking "not interested" on the videos?

[merth]

yeah, didn't make a dent. cant click thousands videos one by one. you show a video 5 times and if I never click, youtube should get the hint.

[jimmaswell]

that's weird, it's always worked ok for me. I'd file a bug report at this point.

[lucb1e]

The recommendations are better if you browse logged-out. More diverse, recommending things to satisfy curiosity about related topics rather than the same monotonous stuff you already know about.

We hypothesized this might be because you're less likely to be hooked yet, so it wants you to really get the good stuff and hope that you then want to subscribe to or comment on something? And once you're signed up, you might stay on the site longer if you need to keep looking for stuff you like and generate more ad impressions.

I should really do a comparison logged-out vs. logged-in because I could swear those ads are different amounts and durations. Also it's percentage-wise about as much as the free legacy TV channels, except of course YT doesn't need to pay the production company -- ShadyVPN already takes care of that.

[dariusj18]

Yeah, I binged the lockpicking lawyer one day, now that's all it suggests.

[Too]

That channel is cursed. I've reset my history with new incognito profile several times and regardless of what else i watch it always comes back. Seems like everybody else has seen them also. He must be lock-picking the algorithm by creating such big amount of videos and all within that 2-3min sweet spot of attention-grab.

[allenu]

I see this a lot nowadays. It just keeps recycling the same things and feels stale.

I remember about a year ago, it got into a weird state where I watched an old Cat Power music video, then every time I looked at recommendations on other videos it was recommending it, again and again... I'd watch the video again to hopefully make it go away, and it would still keep recommending it. It was very strange. I ended up just choosing "Don't recommend this" on it.

[phantom784]

I've thought about making several accounts, and watching different kinds of content on different accounts, so that each would have recommendations for whatever topic I'm in the mood for at that time.

Of course, that'd be a pain to manage, so I haven't gotten around to it.

[stevofolife]

I think old school recommendations behave that way. You will need to introduce reinforcement learning into your reco in order to explore and exploit.

[thejackgoode]

I stopped liking and interacting with niche stuff because of this, I don’t want it to interfere with my normal patterns. Sounds quite bad, I know.

[emkoemko]

yea for regular stuff but some categories YouTube will push what it wants you to watch not what you want to.. like independent news channels, on the right it will was want to play next a CNN,MSNBC or other corporate news channel. This was not the case a few years ago, now they say that they do this on purpose to give "credible" sources more views...

[smegger001]

urrgh this reminded me of the several months that the only thing YouTube wanted me to watch was WH40K videos. To make it stop I had to go through and delete every WH40K video i ever watched from my watch history then mark all on my home page as 'never recommend again' for a couple weeks.

[bluedino]

I rarely see things I was 'in to' just a few weeks ago. Weird thing is I don't miss them.

[vannevar]

For all the sophistication claimed in the article, it feels like my recommendations could just as accurately be driven by simple keywords. I wonder how often, if ever, they compare their current solution to much simpler algorithms?