Personally, the majority of my Home page are videos from my subscribed channels. I get the occasional suggestions for related content from other channels, but I'd say 8/10 times the suggestions are good ones for me.

My typical usage is:

* Go to Home page * Add highly relevant videos to my Watch Later playlist * View the videos from Watch Later, like/dislike as appropriate * Rinse and repeat

I'm trying to give Shorts a shot. I particularly like them for viewing podcast shorts, but I've noticed the suggestions are taking a longer time to give me 'relevant' videos. Some of the Shorts are totally random, while others are from my Subscribed channels. I make sure to like/dislike as appropriate, and I've noticed a slight improvement in a week's time.

There is one primary reason why I don’t watch shorts, you cannot adjust speed of them (I watch most YT at 2.5x speed).

On desktop you can use a script that redirects you to normal video UI instead of the shorts one and you can change the speed there: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/439993-youtube-shorts-redi...

Thanks, I knew there had to be a solution, once short content opened in normal player for me, I just didn't find it worth to look for it.

How can you block Shorts using uBO? Tried a few methods but none of them worked!

Try this:

https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts

Yes, you probably are one of a tiny group.

Youtube power is in its recommendation engine. I discovered amazing content through this engine. You say you come to watch what you want, but how do you initially fill the "subscription" page without exploring first?

There can be various levels of exploring. Maybe visiting the home page only once a month. But the distribution capabilities are what makes Youtube what it is.

agree. a lot of people I've known who say "there is nothing good on YouTube" either ignore or outright block recommended videos from showing up. there are centuries of videos worth watching on YouTube, and the more you tell YouTube what you like (by watching) the better it gets at recommending things you like.

When I check my recommended feed it's all stuff very closely related stuff to my subscriptions and recent views, and some useless shorts. It's just an echo chamber at this point.

If I'm looking for potentially interesting content outside my core subscription views, I'm better served by turning on FM radio.

I actually want it to stop “recommending” and be a year 200x youtube when you could randomly stumble upon something interesting and follow it. Today’s youtube really feels like a chamber, a very secure one.

it's not an echo chamber unless you tell it to be.

all those videos in your watch history? others have watched those videos, too. youtube will recommend videos that those others have watched and that you have not.

the narrower the focus of your viewed videos, the narrower the focus of the recommendations will be.

I deleted my youtube account last month and started new one because it stuck in a loop of feeding me bs I don’t like. I don’t know where do you find good recommendations there, for me it’s still the same bs. Maybe I am too picky, maybe you just like what it recommends, but I don’t. I guess if an engine makes enough users happy, it may be called good, but not for the other 5%.

For example I watched and subscribed to PBS ST to kick start. It instantly flooded my feed with low-quality sci-pop with “pro voice actors” voices and stupid sensational topics like “shocking alien planet” or “will our sun explode tomorrow? Emoji emoji emoji”. No astrophysics was recommended yet. Yesterday I searched for and binge-watched about hyena clan relationships, today it recommended me two quran surahs for good sleep, few colorful open-mouth-sensation morons (not sure which topic they were trying to “wow”) and a very badly compiled drama about different snow leopards chasing goats. And that’s while I’m holding my finger on “not interested” trigger for weeks.

What am I doing wrong?

I don't think you are doing anything wrong, YouTube is showing you videos that others who have watched what you've watched also watched.

if there is anything you started to watch, but didn't like, clean that stuff from your watch history.

click the "Like" button on any videos you like a lot, and favorite the very best.

sometimes YouTube's skull is very thick, but it will get a bead on you fairly soon if you do what you can to tell it what you like and don't like. that's been my experience, anyway.

Does it really use watch history? I mean when it’s off, it still collects it, just doesn’t show it to me/publicly. I know that because sometimes people watched videos at my work pc and after that I had to clean up this mess.

I tried to turn it on for a while and it didn’t make any difference. Same for likes/dislikes. The only effective methods are channel-wise, i.e. “subscribe” and “don’t recommend channel”, but then the feed becomes 90% of videos I have watched or new videos (from these channels) in which I mostly have no interest in. Other 10% are irrelevant to me.

Anyway, I’ll try to follow your advice (thanks!) with more active liking etc for a while, but my hopes are weak atm.

My recommendations have become such an echo chamber that it actively pushes me away from using YT. It's frustrating scrolling through rows and rows of the same rehashed content from mostly the same network of creators. I wish I could turn the dial down on similar content and ratchet up interesting but unrelated content.

I use Youtube as more of a delivery channel than a platform, kind of like podcasts. I listen to a fair number of podcasts and to be honest I have no idea where I found most of them, I guess word of mouth? Or maybe linked from some article I read a long time ago? It definitely wasn't from any recommendations engine, although my podcast app does have a "Browse" section that I've never used.

I don't think it's necessarily bad to use the automated recommendations but there are certainly other ways to discover new content.

The recommendations for me are trash. They are 50% videos that I have watched and 40% videos that I have had recommended and scrolled past before. Most of the 10% of new stuff is just clickbait trash.

Every once in a while after scrolling for a while it gives me a "Want something new?" link and then the recommendations are fanatic but that feed has no bookmarkable URL or reliable way to get to it.

Is the recommendation engine more than just "Currently watching X - people who watch X usually watch Y next"?

I say that because, as someone who does not sign into YouTube, I have no idea if it gets more complex.

There's a tag system and data metrics matching system. Based on your comments, watch history, audience crossover between channels, watch time, and subscriptions, and data collected from your Google account (searches, apps opened in Android, etc.) it will generate a list of tags that are visible at the top of the home page. For example, some of my current ones are Electrical Engineering, History, Film Criticisms, and Scientific Explanations. The tags are constantly changing based on the factors mentioned above.

> I discovered amazing content through this engine

Did you actually discover it through youtube's algorithms and discovery engine or was it linked to you by friends and you simply watched it on Youtube?

These are completely different things in this context.

> But the distribution capabilities are what makes Youtube what it is.

Hold on, I thought it was the recommendation engine? Which is it? Distribution is about economies of scale and good engineering, recommendation is about putting the user first, rather than monetization.

I use SponsorBlock and uBlock quite heavily but you're missing out on Home. The recommendations are surprisingly good.

For me, it basically takes a guess what topics and themes I find interesting and pulls content around them. Automatic notifications are also pretty good.

YouTube figured out that I like interviews on a certain channel and nothing else, or Ukraine war updates from another channel but not their regular content. Probably through simple similar audience trick but solid selection nevertheless.

For whatever reason, it cannot apply this knowledge to shorts which are dreadfully bad.

I find the recommendations genuinely horrible. I only get channels like real life lore, Adam Something etc, with sometimes very shallow takes at politics. And after marking those channels with "I don't want to see this", I get their hundreds of copycats.

I mostly watch channels like Aswath Damodaran, mCoding, etc., which are not related to the contents of the mentioned channels at all, yet their recommendation engine still shows me all this stuff.

Talking with friends: some report most recommendations align with their interests, even those that are surprising because they haven't expressed interest in that category (hadn't yet watched or liked a video in the theme). However like you other friends report routinely aweful recommendations across the board. My experience is in the middle somewhere.

I wish there were a way to see how it places you in various demographics, with a corresponding 'slider' to move yourself in/out of topics.

Most or my recommendation are OK, but after 10 or so, Youtube starts recommending MMA videos, football, the latest K-Pop song, "I am pregnant!" trending crap. None of it is relevant, I keep telling it I am not interested yet Youtube keeps recommending trending topics.

It just doesn't bloody care.

I added another reminder on my todo list to get rid of Premium and go rogue. My biggest issue is watching it on Android TV and the iPad, I will need a good adblocking setup, no way in hell I will watch ads.

> Ukraine war updates from another channel but not their regular content

Speaking of search and YouTube UI… are you talking about that veteran guy who occasionally does coverage on Ukraine but keeps a level head. He will often point out why it is important to think about why your enemy is doing what it is doing. And he uses some open source map to show what is going on?

…and the rest of his content seems to be reviews of military related things, or something else that has nothing to do with Ukraine?

Cause yeah I’m subscribed to that guy, I think… but I totally forget what his channel is and don’t seem to be getting any recommendations for his videos anymore.

Was it something like S2underground? I noticed he dropped off the edge of the map in the last 2 months or so, as well.

It's a Polish travel channel "Podróże bez paszportu" which has taken up these updates after the war turned hot again so probably not the one you're thinking of.

This is interesting to me- I'm curious to hear how people use it. I do one of two things:

- search duckduckgo, go to the "videos" tab, then I end up on youtube if that's where the video is.

- go to youtube.com, use the search, pick the video.

- I don't ever like/subscribe/comment on anything.

I follow a link from a local page of bookmarks I curate usually into a creators videos tab using firefox in private mode. I don't log in ever. I might click on some recommended videos in the sidebar, but a handful of videos later and the recommendations have jumped the shark and it's time to open a new window. If I happen on a new creator, I add a link to their videos tab on their main page to my list of bookmarks.

I have removed all feeds from the homepage, all recommended feeds, all comments, all video overlays with uBO. History is disabled, watch later hidden. I hardly ever use search directly on YT.

The easiest way for me not to get consumed by trash is to proactively hide it. I leaned that I have low self control when it comes to data consumption, so I block everything I identify as dangerous.

for mostly the same reasons, I tend to use `yt-dlp`; I go on a quick foray to look for what I _really_ (and rationally, not dopamine-driven) want, get them all locally (wrote a script to batch them) and then I watch without any ads and far away from temptations :)

do this instead:

site:youtube.com <your_searchterm>

or like so: !yt <your_searchterm> !gv <your_searchterm>

Thanks! I forget that's a thing, even though I have muscle memory to use the bang notation to search !npm

Same for me. In addition, I exclusively browse YouTube in a private window, so they will have a harder time trying to compile a profile of my interests.

I blocked the domain which serves thumbnail images.

Pages are amazingly clean now.

When I mouseover a video with an interesting title, the preview appears.

Seems excessive IMO. Many videos have good thumbnails, better than the titles.

I don't know how to define excessive in this case, but it made the website much more tolerable for me, and I'm grateful for being able to do it.

The thumbnails are very distracting, and I found it hard to pay attention to the video playing on screen.

I don't miss the thumbnails at all, not one bit.

Interesting idea, I will try that. I have disabled almost everything I could on YT (feeds, comments, video overlays, recommendations, history), but occasionally still encounter the horrible twisted-face-pointing-finger thumbnails.

Enhancer for Youtube lets me setup the UI the way I like it.

With this many extensions you could write your own frontend :)

Like NewPipe?

An extra shoutout to "DF Tube (Distraction Free)" extensions[0] which have some of those UI zappers pre-programmed.

I use YouTube like this! Definitely going to implement some of your suggestions.

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...

I do the same thing. I also have search/watch history turned off.

.. and in addition, why not use yt-dlp (or similar) to watch without the zillion ads and in full control of when and what you consume?

I do all of the above, except the Shorts filter because I didn't know how to do that. Would you be willing to share this?

YouTube is so much better when you remove all the little overlays and dark-patterns meant to get you to watch something else at all times.

YouTube is also unbearable without Clickbait Remover For Youtube. It changes the thumbnails to a frame from the video.

Linus' channel is particularly horrible without this.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

Ah! This is very useful. I hate those over-the-top expressions in the thumbnails.

You go to the subscriptions page? I've been subscribed to channel RSS feeds for a year or so now, never even go to YouTube to "browse" because the interface is so awful.

I'd like to figure out how to filter Shorts from my RSS feeds, but my preferred channels almost never use them so it hasn't been a big deal. The only other annoyance is live streams, which seem to debut on my RSS feed several hours before they're actually live (with no clear information about the "live-iness" of the video).

I block out all comments. Those are likely all bots or people indistinguishable from bots, I use grease monkey and a javascript script to block it out, I also use another one to be able to increase the playback speed beyond the arbitrary 2x limit.

But getting the clean google-videos layout which was just a video player and a search bar can be done entirely with ublock :D

> I block out all comments. Those are likely all bots or people indistinguishable from bots

definitely not. there are very few bots in YouTube comments these days, though there certainly are some.

there is a LOT of brown-nosing, though.

I don't watch ultra-popular stuff, so what I see is different from what you will see, necessarily.

Depends on the video. In DiabloLOL series there will always be someone breaking down all references second by second.

In gameplay and game streaming videos you'll find useful tidbits and hints on how to play a game.

etc.

You can watch all your youtubes on vlc: just press open network stream and copy paste the link. this gives you more features through vlc than you can shake a stick at...

My only interaction with youtube is clicking on a link from another site, or searching for something on google and clicking on the link from their. I never navigate within youtube, nor click on any other videos.

Don't forget dismissing the ads, and then the login nag, and then ad to subscribe, so the video is actually visible.

...all of which serve to remind me what a pit of suck the service is, and ensure I never subscribe.

And the cycle of life is complete.

I'm the other way round: I _do_ use the recommendation engine, but I click "not interested" on anything that isn't a music video and make sure to only have music videos in my likes. Oh and of course adblock. Newpipe for mobile.

This works OK, although it tends to promote the same things over and over, seemingly at random.

"Try YouTube TV. "

This popup always shows up in my account no matter how many times I dismiss it. Very annoying.

Any way to remove this with uBO? I tried a few ways but it ended up not working well

Did they ever fix the problem that prevented having both a YouTube Premium and YouTube TV subscription on the same account?

Related: what I've been doing with the incessant "we need your consent" popups on incognito tabs is to write a tampermonkey script that on page load searches and auto-clicks the refuse / dismiss button, the same approach might work for your issue? Crazy this is the sort of nonsense we have to resort to in order to make Google products usable...

> Only go on the Subscriptions page

For this I just use the web feeds. Creators are free to hop platforms and my workflow won’t need to change.

It might be because I've got a large and diverse enough set of channel subscriptions, but the Home page is surprisingly good at recommending good quality new channels and videos.

I don't think I could use YT without SponsorBlock and uBO. The SponsorBlock outage of the last few days really made me aware how much time is wasted on those sponsored segments, intro reels, and interaction reminders.

I love it when videos have a SB "skip to highlight" timestamp -that 10 minute video of the creator rambling on and on is now a 10 second video of the slow-motion moneyshot.

Nope! I did almost exactly what you described before ejecting altogether and consuming my subscriptions via RSS + a static site I generate hourly (linked in a top-level comment).

I recognize that people value YouTube for it's recommendation engine. That was never the draw for me; I just want a place to watch videos from creators I like. Overall, I found the recommendations to not work for me; they were overall noisy and distracting. Someone asked me once "well how do you find new content?", which I found hilarious.

I use it like this:

* Never go to https://youtube.com to find anything. Only go to YouTube when it's a known link you found on another site. I don't need recommendations or ads

* Copy the URL, paste it into yt-dlp

* Wait a few seconds for the video to download and watch it in my viewer of choice with no crap attached.

To add to this, you can directly play stuff in mpv if yt-dlp is installed and in your PATH.

Combine this with a window manager shortcut to open the clipboard contents in mpv and the experience is pretty slick.

You can also dump the URLs in a .m3u file and watch a bunch in a row with mpv that way.

I'm not as extreme, but >90% of my YouTube watching is via the channel RSS feeds (which I get sent to my email and filtered into "Videos" and "Videos Background" folders). Then 10% of the time if I am out of subscribed videos and want to see something new I scroll the homepage. I find that I rarely appreciate the recommendations below the videos but sometimes the homepage is ok.

This is exactly how I browse as well. I have uBlock hiding all links that could possibly lead me to the home page, as well the sidebar, and post video recommendations. The only content I consume is from the 'Subscriptions' page.

I also usually watch from subscriptions (I am subscribed to 100s of channels). But I do like the home page and recommendations for discovering new channels! In my experience it actually captures what I like to watch a lot (perhaps because I subscribe to a lot of stuff and like many videos).

I don't. I'm so off the chart in personality trait openness I have to see new stuff all the time. And not just any new stuff. It's annoying.

Set aside the custom uBO filters and add "Remove Youtube Suggestions" to your arsenal. You can block a huge array of UI elements.

I too only do subscriptions, watch everything my subscribed channels put out by placing them in my playlists (custom watch later lists for attention spans/activies), and only find other channels through my current channels. If you don't watch everything from specific channels (some big ones really pump them out), I recommend PocketTube's Subscription manger (and playlist manager).

Youtube hates us. It takes away tools for us to watch how you and I want, and refuses to add basic tools to playlists like "removed all watched" and "sort by length". I'm subscribed "watch later" still exists. They want you to just watch "recommended" videos one after the other like tik-tok-television.

The problem I have is that I dont have a Google account. So I basically can't even use the website except through the recommender.