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>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!