[bdowling]

YouTube’s search is carefully optimized to keep viewers watching video after video, and ad after ad, for as long as possible. That’s why the search returns popular videos, ones that suck in viewers, rather than ones that match your search terms.

[doliveira]

I'm actually finding myself watching YouTube less and less because of this. If we were to anthropomorphize the AI, I'd say it's trying pretty desperately to bring me to a "popular cluster".

[Beltalowda]

In my experience, its significantly more aggressive at this than it used to be. The only reason I have a Google/YouTube account in the first place is so I can go to youtube.com and see a list of reasonable interesting videos to watch, based on what I watched before. But in the last few months it keeps pushing more and more "popular" content in there, which is often complete drivel IMHO. I don't even mind if YouTube would show unrelated content, as long as it's interesting, but usually it's not. The entire reason YouTube wins out over regular TV is so I can avoid this kind of stuff.

I've been flagging these things as "not interested" for months now, but it feels like fighting windmills because it has no discernible effect. The effect of all of this is that YouTube is a lot less useful to me than it used to be.

[TaylorAlexander]

I feel the same way. YouTube is by far my primary streaming platform of any kind (audio or video) and recently the algorithm’s obsession with click bait is making it way less useful to me. This is leading me to watch Nebula and listen to podcasts a lot more. A couple of months ago I noticed a rapid change in the YouTube home page results. There is a channel I watch that uploads four videos or so every day and I always watch every single one immediately. Normally when I open the home page the latest video from that channel is at the very top of the list, and I usually click on it. Then one day it just wasn’t! The channel was continuing to upload and grow in size but the algorithm decided to throw all kinds of low quality stuff at me, to the point I felt like I had been logged out even when I wasn’t. I complained to YouTube on twitter and I don’t know what happened but after about five days of this nonsense things returned to normal, but then began to slowly degrade again. It felt like I had been A/B tested for a new change which then got pulled back and made more subtle. But it is still a bad change!

I don’t know what they’re optimizing for but it certainly isn’t my enjoyment.

[jjoonathan]

Last week youtube decided to start pushing pus / pimple popping videos, and push them hard. I've never shown interest, this was purely the algorithm's idea.

Gross.

I had to install an extension to get it to stop because "Not Interested" and "Don't Recommend Channel" don't work in search results, even though they are turning search results into just another front page :/

[foerbert]

Which extension did you use for this?

I basically use YouTube only without logging in, and rely a lot on the front page for my current interests (channels I want to remember long-term go in my RSS reader). It seems like YouTube always has a channel or two it insists on pushing repeatedly no matter how often I ignore their videos.

[jjoonathan]

BlockTube. It's great! Highly recommended.

[daniel-cussen]

I don't watch interesting videos anymore.

Too interesting, too holy shit wow can't believe that, wow. Like sometimes an EE thing yes, then it makes sense, basically a guy talking about an oscilloscope or television then it's part of the show to use a television to talk about it. And only when they link to it externally.

But interesting for its own sake? Rather talk to the men on the street, those guys are interesting, have great stories.

[WASDx]

You're the exception. They naturally do A/B testing and are data-driven to optimize for said objectives.

[doliveira]

Yeah, I know, line goes up when taking the population average. Must even point in the direction of ads watchers and clickers. Taking into account the shitty videos this cost function promotes, I honestly get a little proud of this algorithm not working for me.

Would be nice for us to have a little more control and transparency over where the AI is taking us, though, specially for us YouTube Premium payers.

[hamandcheese]

I’m sure if YouTube PMs could they would mail you cocaine if it made you watch enough ads.

[danuker]

So do I. The only way I "get" content lately is to see what my subscriptions are up to. Search is effectively impossible.

They might have a minus sign somewhere it shouldn't be.

[Akronymus]

I mainly use youtube for my music playlist. Where I add songs after someone points me to it and I like it.

[chias]

You probably don't make them much money anyway.

[jjoonathan]

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

-Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

[mgdlbp]

At least the algorithm isn't totally amnesic; no other site remembers that content can have enduring relevance.