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by jsheard 853 days ago
Don't forget the obligatory "People also watched" section jammed into the middle of the search results which deliberately shows a screen full of things you didn't search for, that are at best tenuously related. Emphasis on at best because they're often not related at all. Who wants this?
3 comments

Worse yet: there's also a "previously watched" section, which - as far as I can tell - ignores your search query entirely and just spits out a few videos from your watch history.
I'm at least spared from that because I turned off YouTubes watch history completely. I find it's better behaved that way because the related videos section just shows videos similar to the one I'm watching, rather than trying to "learn" my interests and invariably getting it completely wrong.

Amusingly if you turn off the watch history then the frontpage passive aggressively refuses to show you anything, rather than falling back to showing your subscriptions, which you still have to click through to a separate page to see.

I finally turned on the watch history because the suggestions without it were so far out. It used to be that you'd watch a video or two and then suggestions would get really good, even without history being enabled but at some point it switched to just recommending popular junk instead of trying to curate things based on the last couple of videos you'd watch.
I think it's funny how vague and redundant that label is. "People also watched this video". Yes, youtube.... it has a viewcount of 145k views, I would presume that viewcount comes from people watching it.
> Who wants this?

Who wants the “Related articles” after the first paragraph in every single news article? Who wants the endless garbage links below the “Click to expand” button? Who wants to scroll past “Top picks in your neighbourhood”, “Offers near you”, “New on Deliveroo”, “Most favourited places”, “Meal deals”, “Top rated” and “Fastest delivery” (yes, ALL 7 of them) before you even get to the actual search results on Deliveroo? I really don’t know. And it terrifies me that I don’t know.