> amazon still make recommendations to me based on a purchase in 1998. yes, Jeff, i still want to buy wrestling VHS tapes...

It’s funny you mention that.

For many years I would get recommendations for Latino lgbt books. Weird as it’s not really my topic. I found a way to look at how they generate recommendations, and it turns out that I bought a book about a gay Chicano growing up for a college class in 1998 or something.

Can you share what you found out?

He found out he bought a book about “chicanos” which I assume is slang for a gay or lesbian Latino/Latina person which the user takes as confirmation that the purchase they made in 1998 is the explanation for why they are receiving recommendations for Hispanic LGBT literature now in 2021.

I don’t think the user meant to imply they had gained any special insight into the algorithm other then personal confirmation that purchase as far back as 1998 are still being incorporated.

Chicano means a Mexican-American with political overtones.

It's frustrating that nowadays YouTube seems like it can only keep 3 or 4 types of videos that you like in its head. I feel like I'm watching the same thing over and over whenever I click on recommendations. I totally agree with you.

Exactly! Sometimes my recommendations are good, with long form tech and history content I actually want to watch. But click on one Top Gear clip and that's all out the window, and I have to actively recall what these channels were called and try to build them back into my recs.

There was a time a couple years ago I watched one episode of Arthur for nostalgia purposes and it completely obliterated my recommendations. I scrolled for hundreds of videos and didn't see a single non-arthur one. It took months for the site to become usable again.

i find NewPipe subscription groups are a better way to keep up with creators i care about.

I hope you never make the mistake of clicking on a clip from The Office!

I continually get suggested videos that are all already watched. I can't think of the last time I've gotten video suggestions that don't already have a red line at the bottom. At least it has stopped queueing up the same 3 videogame walkthrough videos I always click out of the minute they start.

About half of the videos Youtube throws at me are ones I've already watched. While I will occasionally rewatch something, it's nowhere near half the time. I thought that it was because I use Youtube without being logged in, but I guess not?

I keep youtube logged in on all of my devices. I suspect it's just the algorithm being stupid.

The fewer categories they use, the less manpower and computer power they spend on classifying and censoring content. They serve millions upon millions of queries a day with millisecond response times, and they don't get paid for providing value to you, so that's what we get. I hate what the internet is these days.

Click the three dots and then either "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel".

Seems to work reasonably well for me.

What if it's from a channel I like but don't want to watch that one video...will clicking on this reduce suggestions from this channel, will it do nothing, will it unsubscribe me from that channel(as has happened in the past), ...?

Nobody knows, I only know I don't want to play this game.

The best way of not playing this game is to, well... not play it. Why should you pay any attention to what YouTube "suggests" you should watch? I just treat YouTube as a service that hosts videos, with a mediocre search feature, and I have no interest in what it thinks I should watch.

If a real human mentions a video that piques my interest, I may watch it. If I'm interested in finding a video on a particular topic, or a specific scene from this-or-that film or TV show, I will search for it myself. If am interested enough in a certain producer's content, I may "subscribe" to them, but I will be the judge if I want to watch the latest video they uploaded.

Not playing is even worse, I used to live near a less financially developed area of the city and youtube would promote dreadful videos either musically or societally if not logged in.

I did it for a couple of weeks to see what was being promoted by youtube algorithms in terms of content and ads to the more financially challenged parts of the society. Gangsta and sexually inuendo videos in neighbourhoods that although poor do not have a crime problem and young people don't dress like that. But it seems the algo is working on it. Note: This is in a European country

> Why should you pay any attention to what YouTube "suggests" you should watch?

There is one advantage: some obscure music videos. There are some rare pearls with the comments section almost exclusively thanking YT algorithm for taking them there. Happened to me so many times that I have a separate browser instance and a Google account for YT and I'm very careful what I click when I use it.

Yes 100%. I have to plug this channel that came up like that a few months ago. It has a lot of obscure rock and a lot of it is really good!

https://www.youtube.com/c/TerminalPassage/videos

I didn't even know there was a Jazz/Fusion rock scene in Japan in the 70's for instance. I never would have heard of this band without YouTube suggestions but really enjoying their work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20eVtt1VJyg

This brings us right back to square one: are the benefits of the recommending algorithms worth the downside? We can make that choice.

True, you do have a point there. I'll admit I have discovered a few bands/musicians by just leaving YouTube on autoplay, after having searched for specific artists I already knew to concentrate while working (before lo-fi hip hop was trending!).

This is the correct answer.

Use Firefox multi-account containers and the temporary containers add-on. Now your YouTube starts fresh with every new tab. It's actually nice, it means you get to build a new set of recommendations each time you open a tab, and because YT doesn't have that much data on you yet, the recommendations are directly linked to the thing you're currently watching, similar to how it used to be before the whole tracking extravaganza.

Or use different folders of portable Chromium so you have any semblance of sandboxing + security.

Temporary Containers is a pretty amazing sandbox already, as it uses a builtin Firefox feature.

You can just have multiple profiles on chrome. One logged in and one logged out.

How Chrome and Chrome-based browsers work with profiles, and push the user to log in, I have a feeling they never fully log out and there's some kind of a supercookie hanging around. Trust issue.

More or less. Sadly, they still suggest a ton of stuff based on geolocation.

I'm in germany so i always get asinine videos recommended about what americans think about germany and what germans think about what americans think about germany

It doesn't in my experience. I've been telling it I don't want to see: news, politics, music, or reaction videos for months. It still puts them there.

Last week it decided that I wanted to see rap videos and filled my feed with them. I don't listen to rap. I've never watched a rap video. I've told it I'm not interested in every single video, but it still puts them there.

Try going through your watch history/liked videos and deleting things if it’s really bothering you, I watched a bunch of political videos a few years ago and got burnt out so I deleted every one (took a few hours) and my recommendations instantly changed

Not sure it'll do much about news videos - Google seems to force the same presumably hand-picked selection of news videos onto everyone's front page, generally covering the kind of political topics tech workers think everyone should hear about.

I’ve been trying it for a few months. I dutifully clicked away every preposterously stupid clickbait title or thumbnail and topic I didn’t care about. It had no noticeable effect.

I wish someone would make an extension that makes this a simple hover+keypress instead of multiple clicks. As it stands right now it is too much of a hassle to manually click 2 times per video. But if you do not then youtube will continue to plaster that video on your homescreen for weeks.

Doesn't work well at all. There's a popular garbage news channel here in Brazil. Every week I have to do that, it never works. I never click on the videos, so no idea why they think I'm interested.

You can block individual channels from recommendations ("Don't recommend channel").

really annoying if you mostly watch youtube from a tv (unless there's way to do that from the youtube app in e.g. amazon firetv)

YouTube's personalization recommendation is a nightmare. Just the other day, YouTube played "Billie eilish -copycat" for me literally after every other song.

I pretty much only YouTube in Incognito mode these days. Everytime I forget, YouTube manages to annoy me so much within half an hour that I switch to Incognito again.

Yes, I always hesitate to mark YT videos as unwanted because often it's from a channel I otherwise like a lot and I have no idea how YT will behave after that. Considering the site is known for even auto-cancelling subscriptions sometimes it feels like a UX minefield.

You can delete your YouTube history, which will make the recommendations usually disappear.

This will kind of clean up your current recommendations but it doesn't reset the recommendation algorithm like it used to. The algorithm still retains memory of your past behaviour.

For example if I consistently listen to 3 unrelated songs [A B C] on youtube together, the algorithm will regularly recommend them to me (because of my unique behaviour, not because they're similar). If I reset my history and then listen to song A, then B and C get immediately recommended even though they aren't similar to A and they don't exist in my listening history which means that the information about my listening/browsing habits is still there in the recommendation model.

If you turn off watch history is basically only suggests stuff based on subscriptions which is much better imo and I never need the history feature anyway.

I never log into YouTube and this still happens, it's at least in part keyed to IP address

use Invidious https://docs.invidious.io/Invidious-Instances.md

It'd be great to know what invidious is in the first place. No description of it in the docs site, and the main site is an empty placeholder. Super.

It’s better if you click that stuff, it causes the algorithm to recommend stuff you don’t care about, which means less YouTube holes to get sucked into

Isn't there a "not interested" button on YouTube? That might fix your issue.

You should use the dislike button to let the algorithm know that you didn't enjoy the video.

you can mark the recommendaitons as not interesting, likely to fix it up pretty quick.