The newest videos from my favorite channels are always listed first, and then it's a smattering of older popular ones from the topics and channels I watch the most, and a handful of things "adjacent" to those that are sometimes not for me but sometimes become my new favorite rabbit hole, so I'm very thankful they're there. (For me it's a lot of educational content like architecture tours and urban engineering and how-it's-made, plus content from certain comedians and sketch comedy groups.)
I know there's supposed to be a bunch of clickbait garbage on YouTube but I just wouldn't know, because I literally never see it.
(Plus there are new tabs at the top that actually list the topics it's learned I like, so if I want to see 20 architecture videos instead of just 2, it's a single tap to filter. It's remarkably clever.)
Just sort by view count for any common english word and filter out the music videos.
Well, even including music videos there appear to be several dozen or hundred accounts dedicated to reposting the exact same Indian music videos, film trailers, clips, etc...
Not even small variations of the same content, the exact same video.
Some of the accounts look like plausible media distributors/producers in India but quite a large fraction seem to be bots or individuals spamming.
But considering there are literally thousands of such videos with millions of views each, this could not possibly have escaped the attention of youtube engineers.
Though maybe there is a fix in the pipeline?
I can't really visualize what you're describing, though a sibling reply says there's "literally thousands of such videos with millions of views each" so there must be a lot of these out there. Do you get these recommended to you, or how are you searching them up?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...
I feel that describes my YouTube preferences: I'd prefer to see amazingly intelligent/engaging content on any topic than just average content on topics I'm ostensibly very interested in.
Totally random I know.
"So both “Bernoulli” and “Newton” are correct. Integrating the effects of either the pressure or the velocity determines the aerodynamic force on an object."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLtdr2qSB8H...
My take away is that everyone is probably interested in everything, only we let the messenger kill the message. By let, we seem to have a messed up pathology where we think they are the same, so much so that it is a huge cognitive flaw, easily used for sabotage.
(But, please, stop with the YouTube Shorts, I'm just not that into you.)
Unfortunately they still clog up the Subscriptions feed.
https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts
It works very nicely without adding additional browser plugins.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...
But I do miss out on in-depth knowledge of a library or language that way. But there is no value in gaining said in-depth knowledge when the stack & libraries I work with changes every couple of months or years.
These days that isn't a good use of paper books. There is rarely any reason to start with any one construct, and if you are not a novice programmer you know there must be something that does what you need and don't want the book to assume you understand the syntax of the while loop when you look up the do-while loop.
Of course, it's probably not great in the long term since shorts viewers and longform content viewers are not the same and your CTR can be destroyed thanks to shorts subs not watching your longer videos, but the easy views and subs are still enticing nonetheless.
I know it’s possible to change the URL manually, but I’ve seen it not work, depending on the type of client that views the video - YouTube should allow the viewer to switch off shorts even for a specific video
They do have the "New to You" category on the home page now which you might find useful.
I keep getting recommended the same damn set to videos which I've passed over a hundred times. Not sure why the "algorithm" is getting so much love, it's got some attributes that are pretty clearly crap.
One of things I found the coolest, was when I am watching a video, and if the video mentions for example some event that happened a while ago or a person being referenced, I would immediately search for that, and I would see it already recommended on the search bar.
Maybe lots of others have also done the same, and it recorded that as a meaningful suggestion. Or maybe it's standard ML techniques, or the new Transformer models diffused across Googles products I'm not sure but was noticing this even around 3 years ago.
how the algo can be so good, and so bad, at the same time boggles my mind
the repetition just feels so unnecessary in many cases -- I know there's so much more content out there that is not a huge leap from what I watch regularly but the recommendation engine makes it broadly inaccessible
one related symptom of this - i think - is when you watch one or two videos on one new thing and then get drowned in videos about that thing at the expense of everything else
I want to watch one video without it contributing to my history, and now I'm subjected to ads again. No thanks.
Whereas twitter for me is much more nuanced, and I'm constantly being exposed to the fringes of my interests which helps me organically grow my feed.
The only complaint I have is what human behaviour forces even the intelligent creators to do: have a title card with an excited looking person.
Just to add my anecdata to the mix, I'm waist deep in logging-in to gmail and workplace apps, etc, but to compensate have abandoned android for iPhone, and I never use google search, and while I watch plenty on youtube, it's never required me to log in so I've never logged in, I don't even have any idea how much it "integrates" with other google logins or not at all. Am I missing out on something, is there some benefit to logging in?
My main complaint about youtube is that it used to be fun and quirky and have lots of "raw" content, and now everything is overproduced, festooned with graphics and clickbait. So many channels I would like to blacklist but nothing like that is possible. Technologically it works well, and I know there's content out there that I'll like, but unless I have a link to it or know exactly what to search for, it's very hard to find things. If there are channels I like and watch regularly, I sure don't need the algorithm showing them to me, but any sort of "maybe you'd like this too" seems totally broken, or at least completely lowest common denominator.
Then again, I do have 10 hour a day watch time average, my data is vast, but highly skewed
I would say it makes all the difference.
I agree with the minor caveat that I'd like a "broaden" button and a "change theme" menu.
My search algorithm presents me with content that I find quite enjoyable, but I'd like to be exposed to a little more stuff that's outside of my bubble.
It knows what I like based on what I've watched, but it doesn't know me and therefore can't infer stuff I don't know but would enjoy if I was exposed to it.
I resonate with the "a bit too good", so much so that I exclusively use YouTube in incognito mode because the recommendation algorithm is too addictive, and the content that it causes me to consume doesn't really do anything but waste my time in the long run.
I also second the "horrors that lie beyond", the stuff that regularly surfaces on the default YouTube home page would suffice as an excuse for aliens to blow up our planet and put a freeway through it.
I actively use the 'not interested' every time the recommendation algorithm tries to show me something where I don't already know what it is. I pretty much only want to see recommended videos I've already watched :)
It takes some patience to get this going, but it seems to work. Any time I see anything novel, it will get excited for a while until I settle it down and tell it I hate all its ideas. Usually I don't have to tell it never to show channels, though if it's obvious enough I will. Eventually it's back to old faves again :)
If you’re on Mac, try enabling iCloud Private Relay in settings.
YouTube is my preferred app to watch videos by a mile, I never ever will change it for Netflix, HBO, TikTok, etc.
Overall I think Youtube IS a jewel of the Internet. The amount of astoundingly interesting, informative, entertaining, educational, insightful, important or just plain COOL content that has appeared over the time it has been up is phenomenal, and it is like a Library of Alexandria of our time.
My big fear is that someday, Youtube will no longer be profitable. And then, like so many other beloved services, it will send out an e-mail saying it's been a great X years, blah blah blah, we'll be shutting down in a few months, bye.
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/creator-dashboard
Still it will be interesting to see how many hundreds/thousands of mom & pop careers will be built off Twitter now.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-share-ad-revenue-...
It apparently hasn't fully rolled out yet so the docs are confusing. They claimed it has started on Feb for Blue subscribers but that may change.
Why do you think it's profitable? It makes for a decent chunk of Alphabet's income, but they don't break down costs so we have no way of knowing exactly how much it costs to store and seemlessly deliver zettabytes of video.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-youtube-thumb...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
All it does is show the same few videos from the same few popular creators in the same few advertiser-friendly categories it binned me into. None of them actually interest me, but it just doesn't catch on.
I don't know anyone with similar setup though.
Another, non-algorithm related complaint is that it’s difficult to watch a channel from oldest to newest, that is, keeping track of up to where you’ve already watched within the channel’s history, in order to pick up where you last stopped, in particular for channels with hundreds of videos.
Invidious with an account has been has been very useful for this. In the channel's pages, it shows what videos have been watched, up to which point.
Absolutely. Furthermore Youtube is surprisingly bad at syncing progress within a single video. I often switch from iPad to desktop and back, and there's a lot of overlap between where I left off and where Youtube decides to continue, which forces me to manually seek forward. At the very least Youtube should save my play position whenever I hit pause but apparently it doesn't.
I make a conscious effort to avoid watching 'dumb' tiktok-ey content as much as possible. Not because I would think watching it from time to time is inherently bad, but because I believe I would be prone to watching more and more of it and it would absolutely flood my recomendations. It's addictive. For this reason I also never watch shorts on my account.
If I really want to watch something from these categories, I do so without being logged in.
* There's no option to regulate how many times it recommends a video I have already watched. Ideally I'd like this to be arbitrarily close to zero. * The recommendations are much, much, much too biased on recently watched videos.
Try watching the old videos of a channel you just discovered, that's 20 clicks and a lot of waiting just to get to the bottom of that endless scroll list. There is no user visible tracking of what you watched, no way to bookmark the end of that list and really nothing you can do than give up.
Don't like the over produced Youtube content and want something that gets to the point quicker? Well, use TikTok, since Youtube has exterminated that style of video quite successfully over the last decade with the help of their algorithm.
Meanwhile Shorts just feels utterly stupid, it's a broken interface with the ability to seek through the video removed. It's just annoying. The irony is that Youtube can display Shorts just like regular video, but you have to do some URL editing to do so. Most Shorts are just parts of full videos anyway, so there isn't even much point in having them. The should have called it YoutubeZap and just be time stamps into the interesting parts of videos that already exist on their site instead of this duplication of content.
Another big problem is how under utilized playlists are. They exist, but since you can't subscribe or pin them, you'll have forgotten that they exist by the time you open up Youtube again.
The algorithm itself also has some big problems, such as never being able to put multipart videos together properly. When you see a video marked with "Part 4", you'd think the other parts would show up, but they don't or when they do it often skips parts.
And of course the algorithm filter bubbles you to an extreme. You get exactly the recommendations for the videos you just watched. It doesn't really try to broaden your horizon. It ignores your subscriptions. And really just doesn't have a way to change directions. The only thing that worked for me was to create different browser profiles with different accounts and switch between them, that keeps recommendations for different topics apart. And whenever I click a wrong video I have to go into the history and clean it up, or the profile is turned into a mess for weeks.
As watch-time optimizer and ad delivery machine the algorithm does a good job. But it really feels like the algorithm is using you, more than the other way around.
Some of your complaints are valid (though they are mostly UX gripes), but this one I don't get.
I've done this multiple times and it's like three clicks. You click the channel's name, you click "videos", and you scroll down, that's it.
It's an infinite-scroll list, it loads in 9 or so videos at a time, than it takes a second to update your scrollbar before you can scroll down further. You can't instantly jump to the last page, load all videos at once or invert the sort order. Every time you accidentally click away from the page you have to start from scratch as it doesn't remember your position, you can't bookmark it either. Some channels have hundreds or even thousands of videos. It's impossible to access them in any timely manner with the normal YouTube interface.
It's certainly not the most convenient UX, but, you know, first world problems and everything. The greatest store of knowledge almost-instantly availalbe at our fingertips, these minor UX quips are small-potatoes IMHO.
And for sure I don't think the statement "the only way to interact is via the algorithm" is accurate, when what stands between us and finding old videos is to wait a few extra seconds. That's a really strong statement compared to the reality.
This is where locally archiving the videos you like helps.
Thankfully the AppleTV app makes this easy if you click and hold in the History view you can remove single videos after watching them (so my home is not filled with lolcats).
Like, I like Courtney Ryan but I’ll never keep a video in my watch history (only Follow), otherwise I start seeing all those Tarzan-meets-Jane podcasts etc. that the author mentions.
Mainly it seems to be about keywords so you have to kinda guess what keywords go with a video and remove it from watch history if ypu dont want the algorithm to go down that route.
It’s a shame YT doesnt have a separate history for gaming and music,along with a separate "recommened" there. I would go on binges there frequently while still being able to chill in the evening on my tv with the content I expect in the Home tab. Without this I am forced to stay away from exploring music or gaming, too much watch history maintenance.
Whatever mechanism is used to select the ads to show me seems like a stubborn practical joke - it is appalling. And I'd love to know why it likes to show me ads for commercial products (such as accountancy software) when I watch on my Apple TV but completely different nonsense on my other Apple devices.
Like a tree, where a video I watched, or one of my subscriptions, points to suggestions. To wit, often the links suggested at the end of a video are the most interesting to me.
As someone who uses YouTube to consume foreign news, I'd also love a setting that lets me see only content and recommendations in a given language.
For me, the hidden jewels on YT are philosophy and other “thoughtful” style streams, Chess, Thai Chi, some alternative news, news from foreign countries, and short sci-fi content. But, there are thousands of niches like what I follow, something for everyone.
The recommendation algorithm is not perfect for me, I need to do some work to find content, but it works well enough.
I've been referring to it as the "Youtube synchronicity algorithm". Often it suggests channels and videos that are niche-ish but hugely relevant to me personally. It's one of the few things from Google I still love.
There was a period of time semi-recently when the algorithm was better than my heuristics, too. I had associated too-good thumbnails with overproduced shallow clickbait videos churned out by content mills and "grindset" individuals. But at some point basically everybody started optimizing their titles and thumbnails and some of the stuff the algorithm was suggesting was actually good even though it looked "too flashy."