[antioppressor]

Recommendation system is long time broken. I am subscribed to 100+ channels and check 10 channels on a weekly basis, meaning I watch all the new videos these creators make. So that means I want the new stuff from the frequented ones on my front page ASAP. Yet, it's a hit and miss. From the remaining 90 channels I never get anything recommended. Why?

If I subscribe to a new channel it gets recommended like hell, then it forgets about it.

BUT! Totally irrelevant things that I never watch, is kept on my front page for weeks. Like it wants me to check it or wants me to mute it, but fuck them I'm not giving them any more metrics. If I clear the fingerprints and block the acquiring of these metrics the front page gets filled with new, interesting content. Who the hell understands this? I have also observed that if you have an adblocker enabled it gives you trash all the time.

When the absolutely disgusting, braindead, bottomfeeding "depp vs amber" nightmare was ongoing I had to "mute" the same channels multiple times and then 55 others, because it just slams it into my face. Watch it, watch it, you must see this muck.

The topic of my fav channels represent... I get nothing relevant from them. :DDD

The shorts... was the pinnacle of YTs innovation. :DDDD

Goog is all about control now. Look innovation for somewhere else... well... if you can find any, lemme know........

You can't do shit with godzilla and now he does whatever he wants.

[dereg]

The best part of YouTube recommendations - side bar recommendations - have been broken for at least 7-9 years. I remember going on deep YouTube rabbit holes in another era, because their recommendations always pointed to new, highly related content. Then, at some point in time, YouTube switched their recommendations algorithm to direct me to a mixture of 1) videos (mostly on unrelated topics) that I've already viewed, 2) videos about topics that I've recently searched for or watched that are unrelated to the current video, 3) videos trending across all of YouTube, and etc.

There are other things that drive me nuts about YouTube's recommendations, like the fact that they will never recommend me the next part of a n-part video. If I'm watching part 2/3 of something, please show 3/3 in the side bar, YouTube!

YouTube's iterative degeneration into its current state points to the folly of A/B-maximalism. In the pursuit of getting more base hits, it seems like YouTube forgot that the goal of baseball is to win games and keep fans entertained.

YouTube has been bad for a while. I suppose that some part of that is good – YT effectively killed the addictive loops that made their website irresistible. However, there is a lot that sucks about it. The utility of YouTube has gone down. Furthermore, I think YT blew open a hole in the video space for services like TikTok to emerge. TikTok may be crack, but YouTube used to be cocaine.

[bmitc]

It's pretty clear to me that YouTube wants to steer you towards content they want you to watch and not content that you want to watch. Watching intellectual long-form content does not equal ad revenue, user "engagement", and whatever else bullshit addictive metrics they only care about.

None of these systems are for the people. It's either about YouTube's bottom dollar or some influencer's ego. It is really amazing to me when I come across old YouTube videos that are just people filming or discussing something interesting without fanfare. You can find newer people doing this these days as well, but it's hard. These types of videos are so refreshing because it's what YouTube should be about: people being creative in honest ways, people talking about or showing something they're interested in, etc.

[robotnikman]

>It is really amazing to me when I come across old YouTube videos that are just people filming or discussing something interesting without fanfare.

This so much. I feel the same way, I remember when people would just make creative videos or goofy animations.

[raarts]

> It's pretty clear to me that YouTube wants to steer you towards content _they_ want you to watch and not content that you want to watch.

This is it. Exactly.

[NCC1701DEngage]

>I remember going on deep YouTube rabbit holes in another era, because their recommendations always pointed to new, highly related content. Then, at some point in time, YouTube switched their recommendations algorithm to direct me to a mixture of 1) videos (mostly on unrelated topics) that I've already viewed, 2) videos about topics that I've recently searched for or watched that are unrelated to the current video, 3) videos trending across all of YouTube, and etc.

I've been working on a small team to tackle this problem. We have a working prototype if anyone is interested in checking it out. Look up a channel to get a list of channels in the same niche or related niches. It is specifically designed to surface smaller creators.

Here is our list for 3Blue1Brown, which seems to be popular around here:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/

The icons are crawlable links, so you can click the channels in a given list to go to the list for that channel.

We also have mapped the channels to provide a new way to explore. The map clusters similar channels so you can get a spatial sense of where your interests are and what interests and niches are very far away, ones you may not consider or even be aware exist. For the curious, here is a short blog post explaining the map and how to use it:

https://channelgalaxy.com/blog/article0/

I hope this isn't too self-promotional. I think there is a need for this kind of thing and it is hard to resist the many, many cries of frustration about user exploration on YouTube and the narrowness of their recommendations that I frequently see around here.

Cheers!

[ravenstine]

> There are other things that drive me nuts about YouTube's recommendations, like the fact that they will never recommend me the next part of a n-part video. If I'm watching part 2/3 of something, please show 3/3 in the side bar, YouTube!

It used to do that, though! They should at least allow it up to a limit or something rather than making it just that stupid.

My other biggest complaint really is the recommendation system in general. It's so bad that I can guarantee you that I can fall asleep to something innocuous like Spongebob Squarepants and in the morning I'll wake up and it's playing Jordan Peterson. EVERY. STINKING. TIME. It was like that before with Lex Fridman, and I totally had to unsubscribe and unlike a lot of Lex content before it would stop autoplaying it. I can't keep playing that game, but at least I can tolerate Peterson's voice more than Lex's.

Funny thing is I was never crazy about either one. They clearly profiled me as being the kind of person who watches that stuff. No, surely the fact I watch a lot of videos about theme park rides can't mean I want to see similar content. Obviously, I want to watch Jordan Peterson!!! :D /s

Without the market dominance, YouTube would be marginally better than its competitors.

[mixmastamyk]

Do you really let yt auto-play all night while you sleep?

[bitxbitxbitcoin]

The x/n videos are mostly - not all obviously but mostly - pirated copyrighted content in shortened clips, reversed or mirrored, shrunk, made more high pitch, or something to beat the algorithm. I agree it would be nice but I see why they broke that functionality.

[sharikous]

Still, the title can easily be an indicator.

[oceanplexian]

I'm surprised you guys still get recommendations.

YouTube disabled my entire feed a few weeks ago (https://i.imgur.com/Q78FqLQ.png) and is bullying with a big prompt to turn on tracking to restore it. What's funny is that recommendations have worked perfectly well for the last few years with history turned off (Just show me the stuff I subscribed to) but now I have to click on each subscription one-by-one to see content. Good riddance since I've pretty much stopped using Youtube at this point.

[danaris]

I fairly reliably get the next part of a multi-part series provided they're in a playlist (even if I'm not looking at them in the playlist).

[JasserInicide]

I actually think the sidebar recommendations for a given video (at least for music) are still quite good. It's only when it starts taking into account your watch history does it start to get muddied up very fast. I wonder if there's an addon/userscript plugin that can wipe cookies upon every page refresh for a "pure" YouTube experience every time.

[andrepd]

Same experience! I watch on NewPipe and the recommendations are very good: videos related to the video I'm watching. I open a video “How jet engines work” and the recommendations are more “engineering visualisation”-type videos, I open a lecture by Yanis Varoufakis and the recommendations are more lectures and debates on economics, I open a CCC talk on the Amiga and the recommendations are more excellent CCC talks. But the key is: not being logged in, or the “enhanced recommendations” (ironically the value-add part, supposedly) fuck everything up.

[von_lohengramm]

When it comes to music, it usually takes up to 5 songs on autoplay before YouTube will get in a rut and replay the same exact sequence of 8 songs. Every. Time. Forever. It's not that I dislike those songs, but I think I'm starting to at this rate.

[petra]

How can Youtubd's recommendations can be so terrible compared to Spotify???

I don't get it.

[helsinkiandrew]

If you know what you want to watch why rely on Google recommending it to you? I only visit my subscriptions page:

https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

I don't have notifications on and when I visit YouTube I'll check to see what videos I want to watch since I last visited. I usually check the up next to see if anything similar/interesting is recommended and very rarely go to the home page to get recommendations.

[throw0101a]

> I only visit my subscriptions page: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

Reminder that you don't have to have an account to subscribe:

* https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=THE_CHAN...

* https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=YOURPLA...

(Though an 'official' subscription with-in the system may help the creator.)

[antioppressor]

Because I want new and fresh content from the topics I frequently watch. I want to be entertained, stimulated in various, unexpected ways. YT is sitting atop a goldmine and they offer only morsels.

[mcv]

I'm not subscribed to a lot of channels, and mostly relied on recommendations, which served me reasonably well for a time, but over time I noticed that some of my interests completely vanished, while others keep repeating old stuff I've already seen. And even channels I'm subscribed to, the recommendations are often old stuff and not the most recent.

But click one recommendation outside my interests just to check it out, and that's going to dominate for the next couple of weeks even if I decide I don't like it. Maybe I should downvote that more aggressively.

[ChrisRR]

If you're not looking for recommendations and just your subscriptions, then you should be checking the subscriptions tab, not the home page. You'll always have all uploads from subscribed channels listed there

[jfoster]

Shouldn't they be able to detect your preferred behaviour and put that on the homepage? They seem to be focused so much on creating magical AI that they're missing some fundamental easy stuff.

[Tarq0n]

That's not what the recommendations are for. There's a separate page that list all posts by your subscriptions in chronological order, you can find it in the sidebar, IMO it's the only way to use YouTube.

[antioppressor]

Which is also nonfunctional, useless, not for human consumption. You can't filter those in any way. It looks like a relic from the 90s :DDD. Anything else you want to add?

[dwild]

> You can't filter those in any way.

You can easily filter it, by unsubscribing to content you don't actually want. If you watch so little content of a channel that it annoys you to see it on the subscriptions pages, then you shouldn't be subscribed to them.

I can't see how adding a filter system would be less annoying at that point, you would take more time by selecting some filter than just ignoring that specific content. Out of my 352 subscriptions, I got 22 videos yesterday, quite fast to skip them.

[antioppressor]

If you allow several hundred subscriptions, then make sure you can filter through various ways too. So easy. There are channels who create good content, but on rare occasions. So if you unsubscribe you have to manually view their channel.

[ncr100]

I suspect YouTube is weighting incorrectly. I miss Human Curation of content.

I am looking for other sources.

It's annoying, more often than joyful, to use YouTube for me. It feels like a half-baked project. I miss Human Curation.

My story: paying long-term YT user (no ads), watched many multi-hour "calm stream / quiet cafe" videos, Recommended list became 75% polluted w/these and un-cleanable regardless of many "Don't Like" actions by me, nuked history, still seeing some.

[josemando]

> If I clear the fingerprints and block the acquiring of these metrics

Honesty question here, but how do you do that?

[eks391]

I'm not sure what he means by 'clearing' his fingerprint, but if you visit EFF[0], you can check if your fingerprint is at least random. I've only been able to achieve a random fingerprint on Brave browser. Even clearing all cookies/cache on your browser will not reset the fingerprint. To prevent metric collection, you can't be logged in and you need your browser settings set to block cookies for YouTube. [0] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

[andsoitis]

It sounds like you find near-zero value from YouTube, so you might as well stop using it?

[antioppressor]

I find value, but at what cost? When you are info hungry you don't like your precious time being wasted bc of inefficient systems hindering your work. Do I have to write API helper scripts and scrapers in 2022 for a top10 visited internet site?

BUT, BUT, BUT THE PINNACLE OF INNOVATION IS YOUTUBE/GOOGLE, RIGHT?

And they host these nice and trendy videos about how advanced they are, and how you should do your coding, how you should organize your work, your life, your team, whatever. And the terrible libraries... gimme a fn break. Too bad for the end consumer, it's all about pain.

I mean even porn sites have finer grained control on content filtering than YT :DDD. I'm wondering why they are not opening their code base and let the coding done by individuals, OF COURSE, FOR FREE! ha ha ha

[aninteger]

Maybe near-zero but not zero. They said that they watch content from 10 (out of the 100) creators they are subscribed to.

I'm in a similar position. I'm subscribed to 78 channels but typically will only watch content from a fraction of these due to preferences on quality and time (some creators have good content but end up putting up an hour video, which I am less likely to view).

[kazinator]

> I'm subscribed to 78 channels but typically will only watch content from a fraction of these

Statement indistinguishable from classic cable TV user.

[antioppressor]

^^^ mil has arrived :D

[metadat]

I have stopped.

[shrx]

What's worse, the "not interested" button is broken. I get a couple of music albums recommended fairly often and I click on "not interested" every time I see them, only to have them pop up again a few days later.

[lsaferite]

Do you also get an endless stream of shuffle dance shorts being shoved down your throat? I think I made the mistake of clicking on one months and months ago and now YT won't stop trying to force feed me those shorts. They are 100% not like anything I watch on a regular basis. So Bad.

Edit: For clarity, I had no idea WTF a shuffle dance was and curiosity got the better of me. Super great way to make me NOT curious about my non-core interests.

[snarf21]

Or it is working exactly as intended. We forget sometimes that we have misaligned incentives: We want the most interesting content and Google wants the most ad $$$.

[rasz]

> on my front page

dont, bookmark https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions