On the mobile app, they show "pill buttons" for your detected interests across the top and you can click on them to filter those topics specifically. So they have put some nominal work into supporting orthogonal interests.

The problem for me is that it just doesn't work very well. First, it's hidden deeply in the UI. Second, the topics are self-detected (poorly) and you have no way to edit them. Third, they seem to act as simple filters of your feed, not a way to access different subsets of content.

I'm sure the root of the problem is that lots of smart people at YouTube probably understand this frustration and want to make this better, but building filtering tools doesn't improve overall user engagement metrics and doesn't get anyone promoted, so no one does. But what does improve overall engagement? Recommending streamer bro meme videos in the chance that a kid might get hooked and watch thousands more of them.

Those also exist in the web app but suffer from the same issues you report.

The 1% smartest people in the userbase, who often are also relative ad resistant, aren't an audience YouTube (or any other large publisher) is going to cater to with active effort. At best they'll tolerate it benignly or as a reputation booster.

Agreed, it seems most of these changes to the recommendation system are for the masses who don't really care or just let autoplay choose everything for them, and not the kind of people who browse HN

It's a problem with evidence based product design. It's in almost all big products nowadays. The way Google axes products, the way Netflix axes series, the way Facebook populates the timeline. They're throwing away the intrinsic value of the product, for positive graphics in their monthly user engagement presentations.

Facebook's user engagement is probably higher than it ever was. I have a friend who's one of those conspiracy nuts and he's on there all day everyday posting dozens of media links to questionable content. His behaviour is their dream. At the same time almost none of my "normal" friends or family are still there. But they never had much engagement anyway even at the peak they maybe checked Facebook once a day for a couple minutes and maybe post something once per month.

Probably these platforms are all approximating the optimal amount of crappiness they need to be maximally profitable.

I've never owned an iPhone, but Apple's approach is the long term one, where they come up with a product that they believe in and they think the customer should use, regardless of whether they actually want. It let's them always carefully control the quality and resists the temptation to make a quick extra buck. In the end it makes them basically unbeatable, where Facebook has to buy competitors to remain relevant.

> Facebook's user engagement is probably higher than it ever was. I have a friend who's one of those conspiracy nuts and he's on there all day everyday posting dozens of media links to questionable content. His behaviour is their dream. At the same time almost none of my "normal" friends or family are still there.

This matches my experience, the family members still very active are all politically involved, posting rants from either side of the spectrum. The conspiracy stuff is unhinged and getting worse.

Apple's model leads to computer with keyboards whose keys fall off, because they design for surface-lecel appeal and disregard customer desires for the product.

No, but every hardware manufacturer, big or small, will have design or production problems from time to time...

> I genuinely don’t understand why Google got it right with Circles

Do you mean on google plus? (Or did that feature make it to other parts of the gooverse?)

The feature on Plus that I desperately wanted was "squares", or facets of your online presence that people could individually subscribe to. Just for instance, if Noam Chomsky had been an active poster on all kinds of topics on Plus, I would not subscribe to his updates because I only care about his work in linguistics, not any of his political activism.

But, the way all the current social properties are set up, the poster either has to have multiple accounts and log in / log out or keep separate browser profiles etc, or just posts everything under one account.

It could be better. It could be pretty seamless: allow the author to tag the post with a click or two just before posting, encourage them to tag posts that aren't tagged before posting, learn what tags they use most and analyze the content of each post to prominently feature in the UI the tags that look like they apply. Allow subscribers to subscribe to author+tag pairs instead of just authors. Done.

Twitter and Instagram allow you switch between multiple accounts without entering the password again. So it's not hard to post and browser about different interest using different accounts

Maybe it's finding some connection like math<->rap-focused music theory (lots of triplets)<->rap. I like an eclectic timeline, and YouTube could be optimizing for that, but I can see how it would be annoying if you don't dig that.

The problem is more fundamental:

Those are all things I like, but I don’t want most of them most of the time — and YouTube gives me no way to signal what state I’m in. And because it shoves them all in a large pile, I get very few if any recommendations related to what Im looking for right now.

People are faceted, but YouTube fails to design UX to accommodate that reality — instead trying to be everything at once and so failing to be anything, ever.

I don't know about in the apps, but the web page has a row of tags above the videos that let you filter by topic. They're personalized, so you might have tags for those topics.

You might try the PocketTube extension to categorize your subscriptions:

https://yousub.info/