I noticed my consumption has decased quite a bit. I would visit regularly to watch content from few channels. I would probably still visit every so often to watch the new videos. But the experience has become more deliberate and conscious. I go to YouTube because I want to go and watch something specific. Mindlessly browsing and watching additional content is harder.
This is good progress from Google to get off their platform :)
I actually like the recommendations. I usually only get content that’s relevant to my interests, and I’m always finding new channels that are interesting and worth my sub.
Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing differently from everybody else, because I never see much of the spammy/irrelevant content everyone else seems to be getting. Or maybe I’m just easy to please.
Same. I usually find something in the first 4 results that are relevant and interesting. Only thing I wish it did more is expand a bit. It heavily favors stuff related to what you’ve watched very recently. There’s some channels I love but completely forget about because I haven’t played them in a little where.
My recommendations are broken. It just repeates what I’d been watching and never nothing new. I don’t know why my algorithm is broken. I have gotten to the point of watching more movies and tv shows at this point.
I love long form comedy content but it does nothing but recommend 30 second clip content. It’s absurd. I just can’t like and interact with the videos I actually like enough.
I do a search for a specific comedian with the words “full set” in the search terms. I do the search outside of the YT app (e.g., using DDG) and watch it either on Firefox with UBO or I search for it in Newpipe. And then subscribe in Newpipe ( and in the regular YT app so they get a little engagement; I also go in and randomly like a few of their videos).
I don’t know what kind of comedy you’re into but here’s a full Matteo Lane set (I think he’s hilarious) - enjoy:
Then tell it you don’t like those channels and thumbs down the short stuff you don’t want, and thumbs up the long stuff you do.
Remove the “shorts” section entirely (I know you can with vanced, forget about vanilla) if those are the 30 sec videos you mean. I hate them and ignore them entirely. Simple.
It’s really not hard to get YouTube to be a pretty damn good recommendation engine. You just have to give it some constraints.
Do you actually tell it what you do and don’t like? If it keeps recommending a channel you don’t like, click the “no more from this channel,” or “don’t recommend things like this” or whatever those options are.
If you do that, as well as thumbs up/down, you get good recommendations. Really not very hard.
I have the same experience and I’m wondering if it’s because I’m not American?
I also have a good experience with it and am American. But I also pay for premium for my family and I wonder if it’s not pushing contentious shit to maximize watch time because they already have my money?
Same. I like the recommended stuff, it actually matches my background noise preferences and has changed over time too and landed some shots in the dark.
It has one drawback: Repetition. I watch a dumb and savage 10s clip from an old cartoon, I get 20 clips recommended. And if one was particularly popular, it recommends that one 20 times. Thing is, it switches gears fast, specially if I tell it I’m not interested. It’s the only algorithm that just seems to GET the concept of “give me DIFFERENT trash”.
I have the opposite experience. YouTube is always pushing dumbass recommendations. I only go to YouTube when someone links to a video I’m interested in, say some neat demonstration of a old analog synthesizer, and there’ll be a couple of slightly interesting suggestions on synths, I’ll click on that and then the recommendations are like “Woah!!! Check out what happens when I stick a synth cable into my butt!!!” And it’s not because I ever watch videos like that, in fact that shit is what makes me close the YouTube window and never go back until some other website links me directly to an actually good video again.
I only go to YouTube when someone links to a video I’m interested in
I wonder if this is part of the discrepancy, as I use YouTube pretty much all day long. I work from home and pretty much always put some YouTube videos on my TV while I’m working. Maybe YT just has a more robust dataset for my account to filter recommendations better.
“Woah!!! Check out what happens when I stick a synth cable into my butt!!!” And it’s not because I ever watch videos like that
You don’t gotta hide it. We’re all friends here. ;)
I’m in the same boat. The recommendations don’t bother me too much, except when it recommends me videos I’ve seen in the recent or distant past. Also, when I watch one video from someone, then come to find out they’re part of some right wing culture and end up getting recommended the right wing rabbit hole videos for a few weeks.
I never went to the homepage unless I accidentally landed there because of autofill. I normally just go straight to subscriptions. There are still recommendations under videos, so I check that out every so often, mostly because my secondary monitor is portrait and I can see them under the video
This is my standard. Subscriptions or bust.
There was a time, maybe 5+ years ago, when I’d occasionally go to YouTube’s homepage, right-click every video in the feed, and select “don’t recommend channel.” After doing that off and on for a year or so, I suddenly found myself with an empty homepage. Absolutely no videos would load, just a blank white screen with a YouTube search bar at the top. It was glorious.
That is, until Google updated YouTube and it removed all my preferences. Now I have unlimited video recommendations on my homepage and I can’t seem to make them all go away anymore. #BringBackOldYouTube
Why would I have my watch history turned off? I assumed that Google knows what I watched whether or not I tell them to keep that info available for me.
Before youtube disabled recommendation for people with watch history turned off, having watch history turned off made it so your recommendations were only based on channels you are subscribed to and possibly videos you’ve liked, commented on, …
There are some categories where I only ever search for the category, then watch a video, but never subscribe to any channel. Those videos were never recommended to me. Meanwhile on my girlfriends pc with watch history turned on, as soon as I watch a single video from a channel she’s not subscribed to similar videos appear all over the front page.
watch history is kinda important to me because sometimes I want to continue watching or rewatch a video at a later time or on my pc instead of my phone and then watch history is the only way to easily find that video
90% of my recommendations are videos I have already watched.
No. Mine decreased when ad frequency increased.
