Seems like the quality of youtube suggestions & shorts have been spammed by bots & other people hacking the system. Why is Google not doing anything about this?
Because they don't care? They're an ad company and seem more interested in their bottom line than what users feel about their services or having a consistent portfolio. I think right now they're trying to ensure tik-tok doesn't eat their lunch by promoting shorts, whilst also still trying to get youtube to make a profit.
I can't think of a single google service they offer that I really like, they all kind of suck in a variety of interesting ways.
Their search has got pretty bad I've noticed. They've changed it to start showing random shit you might want to watch instead of the thing you actually searched for after the first 10 or so videos. They seem to repeat videos they think you ought to watch quite often in search results as well.
I've noticed this with Google, too. Particularly when searching for things in the past, it's like they adamantly don't want 3+ months ago to exist. I now have to archive news articles and the like because I know that I'm going to have an extremely hard time finding them later.
If search works too good you are gone too quickly. Amazon figured this out A LOOOONG time ago. If Google makes you rephrase your search 10 times that 10x ads they can show you. If they take those opportunities to also drive you to crap sites that waste time but are heavily monetized by Google ads then that's even more for them. It's no different than grocery stores putting the most commonly purchased items all the way in the back. Want to run in and get milk? Maybe, we have 6 gallons that expire in the next 5 minutes up front, but if you want more you gotta walk past chips, beer, frozen pizzas and a wall of cheese.
It's definitely an accelerating trend though, online search is getting so much worse and even fast food menus are insane now. You need to the app to see anything other than the most profitable combos in many cases.
They were really good when the kiosks were new, just like Google was.
I guess PMs hunting local revenue growth but macro loss by spamming upsell and making what you want hard to find is a common problem with these luser uncentric systems.
Bad search that tries hard not to actually show you search results is another one of those dark trends I see everywhere.
Have you seen Twitter search lately? The search tab in the app doesn't even have a text field visible by default. It's all just unrelated popular garbage. You have to swipe down to reveal the text field where you can enter your search term. Then you get more unrelated garbage in the "top" result tab and you need to go to one of the other tabs to actually see what you were searching for.
Search on the iOS app store is awful too. You type in the exact name of the app you are looking for and have to scroll through 10-15 vaguely related results before you get to the one you actually want.
Google Play app store is similar IME; also, it doesn't even let you sort by ratings, like, isn't that the very first thing people want out of a curated store?
It's like Amazon's search, it's ridiculous how bad it is.
A quick glance at these shows Western Capitalism fails to optimise the market and instead optimises profit.
Google's shopping search is definitely not designed to help one shop.
The most irritating thing about App Store search is that the text field doesn’t get focus by default. I hope it’s an unintentional mistake but as it’s never been fixed I have my doubts…
Search on windows is uniquely terrible. Oh, you wanted to launch that app? Let me open Edge with a bing search for that app. I especially love it when I'm trying to launch stellarium and it only suggests "stellarium 200%" unless I delete the "m" from stellarium and then it'll suggest "stellarium", "stellarium 200%" and "stellarium (OpenGL)". Anything else and the only result is "stellarium 200%"
It's total garbage. It's unreliable, sometimes typing out the full name of the app (which kinda defeats the purpose) is the only way to get the app to show in the search results, sometimes NOT typing the full name is the only way to get it to show. Sometimes you get an app, sometimes you get an unrelated app (type is prusa for prusa slicer and you get printers), often times you'll get a random log file with a similar name, or a bing search you certainly don't want.
Doesn't the Windows - R shortcut work anymore? This always worked much better than just opening the start menu and typing because it only looks for apps and doesn't try to 'help' you with other random searches. But I don't use Windows so much lately so it could be they removed that also. They seem to do that with everything that's useful.
Ah that's true but I always type the executable name. E.g. regedit, gpedit, lusrmgr... And it does have a command history that serves as autocomplete as far as I remember, you just have to have used it before.
Spotlight on Mac is indeed far superior. And so is the text launch widget thingy on KDE which I use now.
App stores are rent-seeking middle men. They provide no value over a simple Google search. In fact they seem deliberately worse, given that you almost always get the correct results at the top. Ironic that this applies to Google's Android app store as well. Their only purpose is to extract cash and control what you run on your own devices without providing value.
As is often forgotten on HN, a company is nothing but a bunch of people, each with their own incentives and political dominions to defend.
We like to think of a company as one entity and assign to it some sort of anthropomorphic aspect, but that's just a dumbed-down simplification our minds like to make to make dealing with the world easier.
Especially for a company as large as Google, were political infighting between product verticals are a documented problem.
In that regard, it is not ironic at all, there is no such thing as consistency in such a large human organization. Hell, even the army is not capable of doing this properly.
Interesting since they are managed by the same company. But I'm not even sure Google is the best search engine for Youtube or video content in general.
Yes. God help you if you're looking for a video not made by a popular youtuber. Saw an amazing fried chicken recipe ten years ago and think you can just scroll the results until you see it? Ha, fat chance. You've got about five results and then nothing but whatever horseshit is trendy today.
Add it to a playlist (or bookmark it). I don't trust the videos to still be up when I might be interested in them so I've become a little bit of a data hoarder.
Yes, it only takes one scroll through your "Liked" videos and noticing how many are gone to become an archivist. The Youtube folder on my media drive is quite large.
Recipes are particularly hopeless. There's a highly formulaic style of recipe video that caught on a year or two ago. Videos built on this formula usually have a title like "I have never eaten such delicious $X", usually with a thumbnail of a liquid being poured over some food, and frequently describe nonsensical or terrible recipes. These videos are useless for actual cooking advice, but somehow get a ton of engagement anyway -- I often get them as recommendations despite not even being interested in cooking videos.
> the thing you actually searched for after the first 10 or so videos.
Isn't that a good thing? If you searched for something and the first 10 results aren't a match, why not introduce you to other things (one can experiment with finding how closely related those additional recommendations are, or based on other things you recently enjoyed, etc.)?
Not an expert on this, but I get the feeling they're trying to dissuade people from discovering videos with lower view counts in search results, since these videos are less likely to be cached at the CDN nodes and are more expensive to serve, i.e. budget cuts, like everything else
Suggestion: Have an AI or text analyzer assign a grade level to all documentaries and talks. I say this after wasting some time tonight trying to find a documentary or lecture on early humans. The first 4 I tried were 6th to 8th grade level while one was in the style of Bible stories, so it was for even younger.
The nearest I can figure is home schoolers are creating these for their kids and uploading to pass them around. Their popularity appears to crowding out all the college level material.
I can't help feeling this is a modern day repeat of JWZ's old aphorism on regexes, and the root cause of quite a lot of user frustration with Google products:
> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use AI." Now they have two problems.
Ahh I see what you mean, sorry HN has broken my brain a little around the word "AI". Here when it's proposed as a solution to something is often used like "unspecified magic", but the application you have in mind is quite specific and reasonable :)
YouTubers have become more professional and post a large number of videos optimized for monetization (trendy videos, videos around 10 minutes long with additional ads inserted in the video, etc.).
In addition, in order to maximize advertising revenue, YouTube tends to place more importance on new click-bait videos that have a rapid increase in views, rather than high quality videos that can be viewed over a long period of time.
That is the reason why many of those clickbait-like videos are the third one on the right side of the screen when a particular video is played.
> YouTubers have become more professional and post a large number of videos optimized for monetization (trendy videos, videos around 10 minutes long with additional ads inserted in the video, etc.).
That's how I feel about it, too. The quality of the content has gone down because of the incessant urge of popular YouTubers to produce a "clickable" stream of videos on a regular basis. In a way, it feels addictive like porn - you know what you are going to see, it's just that the reviewed product, or the shown environment is different in the new video.
Specifically, YouTube stops suggesting videos from your channel if you aren't posting weekly. They need to keep posting bad videos just to keep the revenue increasing on the good ones.
I'm personally regularly suggested videos from content creators with infrequent posting schedules. Heck, I fairly frequently get suggested a video from a creator who hasn't posted a video in more than a year.
ikr? just because a few got bored doesn't mean it's what everyone else if feeling. if anything, i'm addicted more than ever and i hate it. my productivity has exponentially gotten worse in the last 10 years of using youtube.
My explore tab has been pretty fine. I adblocked the sidebar, though, so not sure the quality of those.
Seems like as long as I keep consistent theming of likes, it's good. If you get too wide in breadth then it quickly goes downhill, so I use Freetube to watch certain genres (coding videos, etc.)
Hard to get any data to back / contradict such claims.
The algo changes all the time, and takes every info google knows about into account. For all we know, you just happen to have visited some site associated with "low quality content".
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "videos froms bots and other people hacking the system" ? Obvious spam as in "this new pill is making my manhood great again" ? More political content ? Foreign langage content ?
Tiktok-like things ?
For info, I'm finding that more and more of the interesting YouTube channels I'm following are also on nebula - maybe it's worth checking if you want something where the volume of video allows a purely chronological feed to be manageable.
Lots of interesting YouTubers have been demonetized for dubious reasons and have simply stopped using the platform.
This has been and always will be the problem with having a "Youtube career". You are completely at the behest of a monolith company run by automated bots that can demonetize you on a robotic whim.
Aggressively clicking the drop-down and "Not interested"or "Don't recommend channel" on bad recommendations has significantly improved my YouTube suggestions.
also, it feels like this stops working after a while. I sure as hell remember doing this to as much sports content as I possibly could, and it worked for a while, but now it's coming back.
YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed.
Though there is a growing number of anecdotes surrounding (niche|not palatable to SV) channels who’s subscribers don’t get notified despite the bell thing being on, new videos no longer in feeds, and even people getting unsubscribed for no apparent reason.
This is a problem, as I’d sooner give up peanut butter than only be served videos with open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails.
I subscribe to YouTube Premium to skip all interstitial ads. It’s absolutely worth it to me. I like to think I’m helping someone at G make the business case for subscription-based, ad-free products and services.
Sponsor segments are easily skippable with a few fast-forward fingertaps, or right-arrow taps on a keyboard.
Every browser plug-in is an additional exploit vector. Never know when the plug-in author might sell out or get hacked. When that happens you’re one auto-update away from catastrophe. I also enjoy the more creative sponsor segments, like Internet Historian’s.
Has anyone found a reliable way to block the ads on Android TV that isn't "root your TV and install and use this weird App you get from this website here"? Would a Pi-Hole work long-term?
Yes. SmartTubeNext: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext. I use it with a FireTV stick since it's much easier than hacking my Samsung TV. It supports SponsorBlock too. It lacks some YT features but if you just want to browse and watch videos it works wonderfully.
So, your mind wandered to giving up peanut butter? For me it'd be something like... Uh, Tomatoes. I had to really think about it, but yeah, I'd give up tomatoes to not live in that world, which is saying something because tomatoes in one form or another tend to help keep my morale up through many, many meatless days.
I can refresh the home page a hundred times in a row and the exact same videos in the exact same order get displayed. It never used to be like this. I have no idea what the hell is going on at YouTube head office.
I work in a different part of Google... But getting the same result when refreshing page sounds like getting served from a cache, which doesn't sound that weird. Isn't there a button to show something else?
Other than navigating to say the “Subscriptions” page where you’re just given a different set of videos, there’s no other way of changing what you get on the home page. If the home page is caching it’s doing it too very aggressively - it never used to be like this and I’ve seen it across multiple devices.
The home page used to be a way to find new videos but now you just have to wait a few hours and try again.
I get recommended the same videos for months. Sometimes they even show old recommendations from a year back.
I'm thinking recommendations can be significantly increased by using a ruby gem because what they have now, certainly more complicated and convoluted, isn't working at all.
Recommendations are made, and they are random in some sense.
But an interface needs a certain persistence to be user friendly. Too annoying to glance something, try to go back, and it's gone. Some persistence creates an environment that is a bit more spatial and nicer to my brain.
I don’t think you’re understanding what I’m saying. As a YouTube user I don’t want the same 20 videos displayed on the home screen ALL day. If If I haven’t watched them by then I clearly don’t want to.
No wonder I didn't understand, no time frame was mentioned. I think I understood your message and I think it is a good feature on a shorter time scale.
I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies. Teenagers are stupid. Always were, always will be. I know I was.
I worry for teenagers just as I do for the adults if we don't curb everything stealing our sleep and concentration. I don't think it's the same old "young people are lazy" trope, it's significant.
Hey, maybe in the future you'll inherit your parents' recommendations. If you're lucky and your parents and grandparents made good choices, you'll have a pleasant experience that makes it easy to make good choices, and if they didn't, your digital life will be terrible from the start. We'll talk about recommendation mobility as the easy of adapting to a user, regardless of their ancestors.
> YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed.
This used to be the case, but starting a month or two ago I get lots of completely and utterly irrelevant recommendations for things like soccer, hip-hop, "vlog" twats, and other "popular" content that I have absolutely zero interest in and that I can guarantee are 100% unrelated to any of my previous history.
I also started getting a lot of "recommendations" for things I've ... already seen. That started a bit earlier, maybe about half a year ago.
So now it's about a third forced stupid stuff, about a third things I've already seen, and maybe a third that's useful. I've been flagging things as "not interested" quite aggressively in the hopes it would improve, but I've seen no difference. I think they just changed the way recommendations work to always fairly aggressively mix in "popular content". If I wanted to watch random mindless nonsense then I would turn on my TV: I use YouTube to avoid all of that.
YouTube is slowly turning into a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser; I think very soon it will start offering me a cup of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
You can go to your history and remove videos. While I harbor no delusion that YouTube as a whole forgets that you've watched it as a result, I can vouch for the fact it does seem to mean the recommendation algorithm won't see it anymore.
I'm not immune to the occasional "cute pet" video, but the problem is the attraction basin of that is in the algorithm is so strong that if you show the slightest inclination towards it with so much as a single video view, it will instantly turn half your feed into "cute pet" videos. (There are many other such attraction basins.) Removing the view from your history fixes that problem.
It is still possible to keep the brow-level of your YouTube feed above "low". I've successfully been recommended some math videos in the past few days from channels I've not already heard of (might as well signal boost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vxW42R47bc , a nice crunchy analysis of a solution to a math problem covered on Numberphile that was unsolved at the time but surprisingly has a reasonably accessible solution). But it takes deliberate maintenance.
This is only the case if you subscribe to channels that churn out content on a daily or weekly basis and have no interest in finding tangential content by new creators. I've given up on using YouTube for discovery, I have to actively fight the search in order to find anything remotely useful and the main feed is just the same crap repeated over and over again no matter how many I mark as not interested. Whatever happened to it several years ago has completely lobotomized the recommendation engine, it's just trash now. I'm hopeful that content creators will continue to trend towards uploading to multiple video platforms so I can find new stuff.
Odysee is going from strength to strength. It's quite solid now as a platform; just needs more content creators. As YouTube continues to ban creators for any and no reason at all, they'll find their way to these competing platforms. Rumble is also pretty good but I've noticed it tends to attract more right wing American creators. That's fine if that's what you're into but I am not American and prefer a wider range of content. I also like that Odysee is built on a decentralised platform: LBRY. Even if the Odysee begins censoring discussion on their hosted frontpage, LBRY can continue to serve literally anything.
I had never heard of this before, and it seems to be a shallow clone of YouTube with (surprise!) crypto grafted on. The videos all seem to be copied from YouTube, and the first "Top featured" video had racked up all of 188 views in the past week.
I'm not sure why it would be surprising or bad that creators upload to YouTube and alternative platforms. I don't like exclusivity and I'm glad that that doesn't appear to be a major strategy for any of them. As for engagement, what I understand you to be arguing is that because Odysee doesn't have the same userbase as YouTube, it is bad? Can you see why this argument would invalidate anyone trying to compete with any incumbent in any market?
My comment was really to reinforce that the platform is competitive now. As I said, it just needs more content creators.
At some point during Covid they seemed to just decide they wanted to abuse users and its been a steady decline since.
My largest use cases were watching DJ sets, music videos, stand up comedians, instructional videos, and life of (random career) videos
Music videos have multiple ads before and after now. The music videos are still watchable but it sucks to put youtube on at a party now.
Life of videos from channels worth watching have started to turn off ads in place of putting in their own sponsored content. Annoying but similar to TV commercials of the past and are always skippable.
But they have started destroying all of the other content I enjoyed. Instructional videos are overly long with the interrupting ads to the point of questioning whether the visual information with more time but easier understanding vs the extra reading becomes a serious contemplation.
But comedies and extended DJ sets are unwatchable. The ML "predicts" natural breaks in language to insert ads into. When it comes to comedies its usually right before the punch line/the laughing, but the developers do not care at all that after the commercial ends and are resuming a second or two after the punch line. Not only is the timing ruined but you often miss the joke entirely. They have not figured out what to do with DJ sets so they just randomly interrupt in the middle of songs. I had ad breaks 3 times within 10 minutes of a 60 minute set today before I switched to AirPlaying my computer with AdNauseum installed.
Anything I think I might want to watch ever again is immediately added to a playlist for yt-dlp. It makes the content watchable again and protects against channels that will delete content so they can add it back later for increased later views or because of fake DMCA takedowns.
Google has seemed to have taken the line of pretending to not care about ad blocking web extensions in favor of aggressively making sure the mobile and casting experience has them.
When there are extensions that actively fight profiling like Ad Nauseum they've abused their dominant position in developing a web browsers to block the extension on Chrome.
But when you don't have an easy ability to block ads like casting to a TV on their app on Roku and Apple TV or when using an iOS device they aggressively push the ads. On Android where there is an ability to block ads, they aggressively pursue apps like Vanced.
Your timeframe is right, but it's not just about ads.
In 2017, Youtube altered search results following the mass shooting at the Las Vegas nightclub "to quell the spread of conspiracy theories". [1]
It wasn't their first time changing the algorithms, but since then, they've applied measures of varying degrees of severity following similar domestic and certain politically sensitive events, like the attack on the Google campus.
In 2018, "YouTube announces sweeping changes to the way it handles breaking news. News videos will now be ranked based on what YouTube deems to be "authoritative." [2]
In 2019, Youtube search again went on lockdown following the act of domestic terrorism on mosques in Cristchurch, disabling the ability to filter by recent across the entire site. [3] This one lasted for weeks and the original function was never fully restored.
Youtube has taken a more active approach to content curation, suppression, and promotion since the Trump presidency, and it's made it a worse resource for academic and informational searches. Once relatively neutral, they've begun to exert a more overt regulation of customers' interactions with content, going so far as qualifying certain media as aligning with certain viewpoints or not, disclosing affiliations with certain groups or political bodies, and minimizing the ability to specifically or organically locate certain non-promoted content.
Are you the creator of Blockbattle.net? You seem to be the creator of this subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/a:t5_2sezu/)? I remember playing it a couple years ago but it seems to have been taken down. Have you thought about open-sourcing it potentially? I've been wanting to re-create it for a while but really like to keep to original aesthetic, so having access to the CSS and game-logic would be great so I could faithfully re-create it.
You can contact me at benjamin@bartels.dev
> Music videos have multiple ads before and after now. The music videos are still watchable but it sucks to put youtube on at a party now.
If you want entertainment that is not funded by ads, why not subscribe to YouTube Premium? "YouTube and YouTube Music ad-free, offline, and in the background"
I keep reading they are an ad company and that’s fair except they are doing a really bad job. I keep seeing the same ad over and over and over again. Those are annoying loud ads that are more region than preference based. You don’t need some personalized ad system to find out what kind of ad a person watching a video game video would be interested.
Skipping a video to look for a certain scene will trigger double ads and sometimes you will see another set of ads a few seconds later.
If a video is less than 3 minutes long and it starts with unskipable 12 seconds ad followed by another one I don’t even bother.
My general experience with the platform is brands advertising on YouTube gives me repulse instead of wanting to buy something.
I can't say I love it when I view one video about some random topic (or worse, my son does - we watch a lot on the living room TV), and then I'm spammed for the next month with related videos. You can tell when the server process is run, as it'll be a day or so later and suddenly everything recommended to me is about (just checked) Chess, for example. Just because I checked out a couple chess videos does not now mean I need 500 Magnus Carlsen clips recommended to me. It's insane.
To anyone complaining about ads, FFS, just pay the money for the subscription. Life is too short. I haven't seen an ad for years.
Search is censored in a commercial and politically correct way. Started to happen in early 2020, to fight "conspiracy" COVID theories, which after a year become somewhat legitimate questions (still unanswered).
Search is censored again now because "Russian propaganda".
Tell me what you want, but the reality is that we are all doomed to follow politically correct decisions of the elitist's agenda. This is the future which we will live from now on.
Internet is tied to the masses. Internet is the "reality" for many people. It is like a TV Programming in the 60-70. I don't like Telegram, but I have a complete picture of the events because of the countless channels, which give a completely chaotic and hard to control information bits.
In a way, Russia has no serious investment in the tech and "information narrative" machine.
Some people still believe that Ukraine (which before this, everyone agreed upon "is the most corrupt country in European continent") is winning on the battlefield.
I am amazed how easy it was for everyone to accept cancelling not Putin's regime, but everything Russia related. From food to classical music. And I am ashamed of the Western media, which has conformed to political correctness and sensationalism. There is no investigative journalism. Under the old "Cold War" narrative, we again find ourselves in a pit of disinformation. And the big tech companies are the main outlet for this dystopian future in which people must conform and obey the new Gods without the option of questioning the powers that be.
Why not optimize for profit in the meantime? It is only logical.
Rant/Ends
Use RSS and VPN to optimize your UX when using YouTube. Search YouTube outside Google ecosystem.
To add to the timeline, the recommendations got weird a few months after Trump was elected. During that time it seemed like everyone was blaming YouTube and Facebook for "radicalizing" half the US population. Their response was to heavily bias against recommending small channels. The "scandal" around ads showing up on inappropriate content made it worse. The weird kids videos fiasco strained it even further. I think COVID was the final straw that resulted in them pushing for complete commercial capture. It's probably the death knell for YouTube since other video platforms have started to take in creators and consumers repulsed by the drek being force fed by the new algorithm.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadI can't think of a single google service they offer that I really like, they all kind of suck in a variety of interesting ways.
Significant downgrade on what it used to be.
It's definitely an accelerating trend though, online search is getting so much worse and even fast food menus are insane now. You need to the app to see anything other than the most profitable combos in many cases.
They were really good when the kiosks were new, just like Google was.
I guess PMs hunting local revenue growth but macro loss by spamming upsell and making what you want hard to find is a common problem with these luser uncentric systems.
I’ve started keeping a log of every interesting article I find since I know I won’t be able to find it earlier.
I’m also seeing a trend where they try and answer question and will pull from any source. The answer often being wildly wrong.
Saw one of “people also ask” where the source was some dudes fanfiction so the suggested question and answer were complete non sense.
Have you seen Twitter search lately? The search tab in the app doesn't even have a text field visible by default. It's all just unrelated popular garbage. You have to swipe down to reveal the text field where you can enter your search term. Then you get more unrelated garbage in the "top" result tab and you need to go to one of the other tabs to actually see what you were searching for.
It's like Amazon's search, it's ridiculous how bad it is.
A quick glance at these shows Western Capitalism fails to optimise the market and instead optimises profit.
Google's shopping search is definitely not designed to help one shop.
It's total garbage. It's unreliable, sometimes typing out the full name of the app (which kinda defeats the purpose) is the only way to get the app to show in the search results, sometimes NOT typing the full name is the only way to get it to show. Sometimes you get an app, sometimes you get an unrelated app (type is prusa for prusa slicer and you get printers), often times you'll get a random log file with a similar name, or a bing search you certainly don't want.
Hot garbage.
If only it worked like command+space on mac.
Spotlight on Mac is indeed far superior. And so is the text launch widget thingy on KDE which I use now.
YT search was never good (that I can recall).
When I want to find content on YT, I use Google search with a site restrict [1].
Infinitely better.
I invite you all to do the same and forget the YT search box.
[1] something like : life of Albert Einstein site:youtube.com
We like to think of a company as one entity and assign to it some sort of anthropomorphic aspect, but that's just a dumbed-down simplification our minds like to make to make dealing with the world easier.
Especially for a company as large as Google, were political infighting between product verticals are a documented problem.
In that regard, it is not ironic at all, there is no such thing as consistency in such a large human organization. Hell, even the army is not capable of doing this properly.
And after I wrote that sentence I found the original video I was thinking about with a google search. Welp.
https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
Of course, the actual history search box is confusingly smaller and off to the side of the much larger search box for all of YouTube.
Isn't that a good thing? If you searched for something and the first 10 results aren't a match, why not introduce you to other things (one can experiment with finding how closely related those additional recommendations are, or based on other things you recently enjoyed, etc.)?
Because that's not what I told it to do.
The nearest I can figure is home schoolers are creating these for their kids and uploading to pass them around. Their popularity appears to crowding out all the college level material.
> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use AI." Now they have two problems.
In addition, in order to maximize advertising revenue, YouTube tends to place more importance on new click-bait videos that have a rapid increase in views, rather than high quality videos that can be viewed over a long period of time.
That is the reason why many of those clickbait-like videos are the third one on the right side of the screen when a particular video is played.
That's how I feel about it, too. The quality of the content has gone down because of the incessant urge of popular YouTubers to produce a "clickable" stream of videos on a regular basis. In a way, it feels addictive like porn - you know what you are going to see, it's just that the reviewed product, or the shown environment is different in the new video.
This sounds like TikTok, and likely trying to compete with them.
This is why we need user-controlled recommendations. I want that shit blocked.
Seems like as long as I keep consistent theming of likes, it's good. If you get too wide in breadth then it quickly goes downhill, so I use Freetube to watch certain genres (coding videos, etc.)
The algo changes all the time, and takes every info google knows about into account. For all we know, you just happen to have visited some site associated with "low quality content".
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "videos froms bots and other people hacking the system" ? Obvious spam as in "this new pill is making my manhood great again" ? More political content ? Foreign langage content ? Tiktok-like things ?
For info, I'm finding that more and more of the interesting YouTube channels I'm following are also on nebula - maybe it's worth checking if you want something where the volume of video allows a purely chronological feed to be manageable.
This has been and always will be the problem with having a "Youtube career". You are completely at the behest of a monolith company run by automated bots that can demonetize you on a robotic whim.
Doesn’t matter if your video gets monetized if a company has loaned/gifted you a product and paid you to make a video featuring it.
Maybe they didn't understand the reasons - I hate clickbait thumbnails and titles.
Though there is a growing number of anecdotes surrounding (niche|not palatable to SV) channels who’s subscribers don’t get notified despite the bell thing being on, new videos no longer in feeds, and even people getting unsubscribed for no apparent reason.
This is a problem, as I’d sooner give up peanut butter than only be served videos with open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails.
I also just manage a curated list of channels and consume via RSS, with YT perpetually blocked, short of a few re-review days per year.
Sponsor segments are easily skippable with a few fast-forward fingertaps, or right-arrow taps on a keyboard.
The home page used to be a way to find new videos but now you just have to wait a few hours and try again.
I'm thinking recommendations can be significantly increased by using a ruby gem because what they have now, certainly more complicated and convoluted, isn't working at all.
Recommendations are made, and they are random in some sense.
But an interface needs a certain persistence to be user friendly. Too annoying to glance something, try to go back, and it's gone. Some persistence creates an environment that is a bit more spatial and nicer to my brain.
It makes me worry about the future of humanity, as the clean slate is what is popular in your location.
> open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails
Dont forget to add a large amount of money to the title my $$$$250,000 computer.
But it f'ing works - I am really not sure what is wrong with people. Oh and now I get 2 ads every single video, its barely worth it ...
I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies. Teenagers are stupid. Always were, always will be. I know I was.
And yet here we are. Alive and well.
I have seen what facebook feeds boomers - it too is abhorrent.
Do yourself a favor and get an ad blocker. YouTube is barely usable without one at this point.
This used to be the case, but starting a month or two ago I get lots of completely and utterly irrelevant recommendations for things like soccer, hip-hop, "vlog" twats, and other "popular" content that I have absolutely zero interest in and that I can guarantee are 100% unrelated to any of my previous history.
I also started getting a lot of "recommendations" for things I've ... already seen. That started a bit earlier, maybe about half a year ago.
So now it's about a third forced stupid stuff, about a third things I've already seen, and maybe a third that's useful. I've been flagging things as "not interested" quite aggressively in the hopes it would improve, but I've seen no difference. I think they just changed the way recommendations work to always fairly aggressively mix in "popular content". If I wanted to watch random mindless nonsense then I would turn on my TV: I use YouTube to avoid all of that.
YouTube is slowly turning into a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser; I think very soon it will start offering me a cup of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Fuck these non-deterministic algorithms and the feeds they fill.
I'm not immune to the occasional "cute pet" video, but the problem is the attraction basin of that is in the algorithm is so strong that if you show the slightest inclination towards it with so much as a single video view, it will instantly turn half your feed into "cute pet" videos. (There are many other such attraction basins.) Removing the view from your history fixes that problem.
It is still possible to keep the brow-level of your YouTube feed above "low". I've successfully been recommended some math videos in the past few days from channels I've not already heard of (might as well signal boost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vxW42R47bc , a nice crunchy analysis of a solution to a math problem covered on Numberphile that was unsolved at the time but surprisingly has a reasonably accessible solution). But it takes deliberate maintenance.
How does the algorithm not get that I have probably watched 10,000 ads for Tiktok, I am not installing that shit! Stop trying!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBRY
This plugin will tell you when you are watching a YT video that also exists on Odysee: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/watch-on-odys...
My comment was really to reinforce that the platform is competitive now. As I said, it just needs more content creators.
The obvious answer is "because they've measured how much money they make, and found lower quality feeds result in higher revenue."
That might be counter-intuitive, but the other options like "the devs can't fix it", or "they don't know it's bad", etc are much less likely.
My largest use cases were watching DJ sets, music videos, stand up comedians, instructional videos, and life of (random career) videos
Music videos have multiple ads before and after now. The music videos are still watchable but it sucks to put youtube on at a party now.
Life of videos from channels worth watching have started to turn off ads in place of putting in their own sponsored content. Annoying but similar to TV commercials of the past and are always skippable.
But they have started destroying all of the other content I enjoyed. Instructional videos are overly long with the interrupting ads to the point of questioning whether the visual information with more time but easier understanding vs the extra reading becomes a serious contemplation.
But comedies and extended DJ sets are unwatchable. The ML "predicts" natural breaks in language to insert ads into. When it comes to comedies its usually right before the punch line/the laughing, but the developers do not care at all that after the commercial ends and are resuming a second or two after the punch line. Not only is the timing ruined but you often miss the joke entirely. They have not figured out what to do with DJ sets so they just randomly interrupt in the middle of songs. I had ad breaks 3 times within 10 minutes of a 60 minute set today before I switched to AirPlaying my computer with AdNauseum installed.
Anything I think I might want to watch ever again is immediately added to a playlist for yt-dlp. It makes the content watchable again and protects against channels that will delete content so they can add it back later for increased later views or because of fake DMCA takedowns.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
When there are extensions that actively fight profiling like Ad Nauseum they've abused their dominant position in developing a web browsers to block the extension on Chrome.
But when you don't have an easy ability to block ads like casting to a TV on their app on Roku and Apple TV or when using an iOS device they aggressively push the ads. On Android where there is an ability to block ads, they aggressively pursue apps like Vanced.
In 2017, Youtube altered search results following the mass shooting at the Las Vegas nightclub "to quell the spread of conspiracy theories". [1]
It wasn't their first time changing the algorithms, but since then, they've applied measures of varying degrees of severity following similar domestic and certain politically sensitive events, like the attack on the Google campus.
In 2018, "YouTube announces sweeping changes to the way it handles breaking news. News videos will now be ranked based on what YouTube deems to be "authoritative." [2]
In 2019, Youtube search again went on lockdown following the act of domestic terrorism on mosques in Cristchurch, disabling the ability to filter by recent across the entire site. [3] This one lasted for weeks and the original function was never fully restored.
Youtube has taken a more active approach to content curation, suppression, and promotion since the Trump presidency, and it's made it a worse resource for academic and informational searches. Once relatively neutral, they've begun to exert a more overt regulation of customers' interactions with content, going so far as qualifying certain media as aligning with certain viewpoints or not, disclosing affiliations with certain groups or political bodies, and minimizing the ability to specifically or organically locate certain non-promoted content.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/10/05/youtube-alter...
[2] https://mashable.com/article/youtube-announces-changes-break...
[3] https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-restricting-search-newzeal...
Are you the creator of Blockbattle.net? You seem to be the creator of this subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/a:t5_2sezu/)? I remember playing it a couple years ago but it seems to have been taken down. Have you thought about open-sourcing it potentially? I've been wanting to re-create it for a while but really like to keep to original aesthetic, so having access to the CSS and game-logic would be great so I could faithfully re-create it. You can contact me at benjamin@bartels.dev
If you want entertainment that is not funded by ads, why not subscribe to YouTube Premium? "YouTube and YouTube Music ad-free, offline, and in the background"
https://www.youtube.com/premium
However, the quality of the educational videos is just getting better and better imo. Also I never look at my subscriptions anymore just my mainpage.
Skipping a video to look for a certain scene will trigger double ads and sometimes you will see another set of ads a few seconds later.
If a video is less than 3 minutes long and it starts with unskipable 12 seconds ad followed by another one I don’t even bother.
My general experience with the platform is brands advertising on YouTube gives me repulse instead of wanting to buy something.
To anyone complaining about ads, FFS, just pay the money for the subscription. Life is too short. I haven't seen an ad for years.
Search is censored in a commercial and politically correct way. Started to happen in early 2020, to fight "conspiracy" COVID theories, which after a year become somewhat legitimate questions (still unanswered).
Search is censored again now because "Russian propaganda". Tell me what you want, but the reality is that we are all doomed to follow politically correct decisions of the elitist's agenda. This is the future which we will live from now on.
Internet is tied to the masses. Internet is the "reality" for many people. It is like a TV Programming in the 60-70. I don't like Telegram, but I have a complete picture of the events because of the countless channels, which give a completely chaotic and hard to control information bits. In a way, Russia has no serious investment in the tech and "information narrative" machine.
Some people still believe that Ukraine (which before this, everyone agreed upon "is the most corrupt country in European continent") is winning on the battlefield.
I am amazed how easy it was for everyone to accept cancelling not Putin's regime, but everything Russia related. From food to classical music. And I am ashamed of the Western media, which has conformed to political correctness and sensationalism. There is no investigative journalism. Under the old "Cold War" narrative, we again find ourselves in a pit of disinformation. And the big tech companies are the main outlet for this dystopian future in which people must conform and obey the new Gods without the option of questioning the powers that be.
Why not optimize for profit in the meantime? It is only logical.
Rant/Ends
Use RSS and VPN to optimize your UX when using YouTube. Search YouTube outside Google ecosystem.