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by derefr 1732 days ago
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.)
3 comments
type0 1732 days ago
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.
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emilitt 1732 days ago
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.
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JohnFen 1732 days ago
> 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.

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