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Ask HN: Have YouTube's recommendations gotten worse?

7 points by omgmajk ↗ HN
I watch a lot of YouTube. Most days a few hours, so they have a lot of data on what I watch. My google account is ancient, It's been with me since the start of gmail and became a YT account when they took over. Lately the recommendations that I get are a lot more repetitive than they used to be. I get recommended the same videos over and over, sometimes I even get recommended things I would never have seen in my feed years ago - things that are of no interest that used to be outside of my bubble for the longest time. I also see tons of videos that I know that I have watched being marked as un-watched and recommended again and again. I don't know if this is imagined of if their algorithms have become terrible lately. Anyone else have this feeling?

6 comments

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lakotasapa
Absolutely horrendous. My kid likes Starfishes. It goes from pretty starfish living to starfish being ripped apart in a span of few videos. I wasn't paying attention when I started one video from him then in a span of 10mins he is now scarred for life. Absolutely no YouTube for kids and for me, I download what I want to watch bc I tend to watch them again but hate their recommendations. Their Algo is simply the worst...WORST.
omgmajk
I don't know what happened to it, it used to be pretty good but these days I feel like my feed is ruined.
superyesh
Absolutely spot on! Glad to see I am not the only one pondering about it. It has gotten so bad that I try to log out or use incognito to find new stuff. Tiktok on the other hand is amazing at surfacing stuff that I am actually find interesting.

Personally I think YouTube is only showing me what it knows for sure I am interested in vs TikTok actually trying to explore and exploit what I might be interested in.

omgmajk
Youtube is showing me a lot of stuff I don't want to see. I frequent a bunch of genres, mostly tech and games. But I got a lot of recommendations for things like fashion and influencer type channels, which I find really weird because I always take "do not recommend channel" or "I don't want to see this" - yet I still get them.