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Tell HN: Had to delete my YouTube account

7 points by wruza ↗ HN
Personalization algorithm rant, no conclusion or insights.

Yesterday I deleted my youtube account and will never visit this site for quite some time.

The reason is its obnoxious algorithm which degraded to the point it annoys me more than I could stand. In recent years it got more and more “personalized” instead of explorable and I simply cannot discover content that fits my interests. Every time I watched <topic> video either out of short interest or accidentally, the feed got flooded with low-int clones (not that it was good before that, new nonsense simply replaced the old one). Not interested and don’t recommend channel buttons do not work anymore. Browse channels is full of generic attention seekers. Search is irrelevant. Out of desperation I tried to turn watch history on and off, that didn’t help. I then deleted my watch history, most playlists and subs and instead of becoming neutral, the feed is now full of korean girls day vlogs, cats and pseudophilosophy.

In previous few years yt felt like a dumb kid following you everywhere and presenting things similar to what you enjoyed yesterday and got enough of. You could yell at it sometimes, it was bearable but not funny. Now it’s full-on dementia and I can do nothing. It’s sad because I know that creators and topics I’d love (and maybe don’t know about yet) are out there somewhere, and the only barrier between me and them is this algorithmic prison.

I wanted to finish with some constructive discussion cues, but it made me too sad, hope HN will figure it out if needed.

12 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 37.2 ms ] thread
rl3
Spotify did this a few years back. It used to be amazing for exploration, then they changed the algorithms and now it aggressively feeds your own preferences back to you.
the_only_law
One day they’ll maybe get the idea to refresh their recommendations that I haven’t been interested in for years.
superchroma
I found that if you turn off history recording in your settings (side effect, no video history), your recommendations eventually align with your interests (likes, etc.).
whywhywhywhy
If your algorithm feed is in a state that works for you then you need to be careful to always prune things from that history page that will pollute it or watching them in private tabs.

Learnt this because I got sick of seeing Linus Tech Tips stupid screaming clickbait-face thumbnails in my recommendations for weeks every time I watched any video about PC parts from other creators.

It does seem to work, also always use the “don’t recommend this creator” button if they appear on your front page. Unfortunately you can’t search for people and do this it has to be the front page.

cinntaile
I use a Firefox extension to turn off all suggestions. It's just a search bar, so when I go to Youtube and search for something the results are always intentional.
wruza
I don’t know what to search, unless it’s specific. When google directory was still alive, I could spend hours visiting random or seemingly interesting subdirectories and links, products, sites. But now there is no way, on youtube or anywhere else to specify/discover your interest of the day and just go there. It’s like sitting in the office and interacting with the world through a shitty secretary who only does shallow de-nuanced searches for your verbal requests once or twice a week.
badpun
I think YouTube has the same problem all other content providers have. Good content that's genuinely worth watching is rare and there's no factory method that will produce it. Hence, all the full-time content creators have to settle for reliable and steady production of mediocre content, or go out of business. In my opinion, the recommender algorithm doesn't show me good (according to my taste) recomendation not because it sucks, but because there just isn't anything left on youtube it could recommend me that I would like.
muzani
It's the opposite for me. I don't like YouTube for a number of reasons, but only stick around because the algorithm discovers things I didn't know I wanted. I ended up making an extra account for music, and then once they started offering YouTube Music, I canceled my Spotify and happily threw money at them.
kderbyma
Google has completely weaponized it's search...it has destroyed it to make sure it is useless for anyone but their advertising....

it's disgusting. absolutely dreadful. the programmers should be ashamed...and frankly...never met a person who has worked and claimed to work on these algorithms.....never read an article by anyone taking credit....it's either the greatest NDA .... or more likely....just shameful purely shameful...

I bet the conscience of them is riddled like swiss cheese knowing they took a product that the world loved and turned into a pointless and completely broke. experience....well down .. would never hire you ..

mtmail
I met both software developers and project managers working on search. Well, they're now at Bing Search. It's mostly NDAs plus the occasional research paper. They're not ashamed, it's simply a very hard problem to get right at that scale.