On YouTube’s recommendation system

The reccomendation system is absolutely dangerous. Just this summer, I watched one video on peppers out of curiousity. By the end of summer I've got multiple different varieties growing, and all the accessories to support them. I'm really enjoying my garden, but it's very unlikely I would have started one without the youtube algorithm. Similarly my doctor reccomended I exercise more, so I started running. Then I googled how to improve, and soon I'm purchasing gear, and trying supplements. The amount of economic activity driven directly from Youtube has to be HUGE.

For me, it seems like youtube's recommendation system mostly gets stuck in the local optimum. Once you watch a video from a particular channel, it'll keep on recommending the videos from the same channel for months. Soon, the recommendation just consists of stuff from the channels that have you already viewed. You rarely see new types of recommendations.

Be careful with YouTube. For years people have talked about social media&#x27;s effect on mental health, but personally, I&#x27;ve found the biggest hit to be YouTube.<p>Their recommendation system is really the heart of the beast. It&#x27;s essentially a dopamine reward system, not too dissimilar from a slot machine at a casino. Pull the lever (refresh the page) and get random results! It sucks you in to a cycle of refreshing, finding videos you&#x27;re interested in, clicking, rinse, repeat.<p>Personally I found myself losing hours per day to this behavior and gaining very little from it.<p>Far more productive, is going to YouTube for something SPECIFIC. Use the search function to find what you&#x27;re looking for, and watch those videos, but never use the homepage or sidebar recommendations.<p>There are actually google chrome plugins which will totally remove the recommended section:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;unhook-remove-youtube-rec&#x2F;khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;unhook-remove-yout...</a>

A lot of comments here seem to not know:<p>1. If you don&#x27;t have your YouTube activity history enabled, the algorithm doesn&#x27;t remember what you&#x27;ve watched and you&#x27;ll probably get clickbaity&#x2F;junky recommendations.<p>2. If you have set your history to expire after some amount of time, it will start re-recommending videos you&#x27;ve already seen once it has forgotten you have watched them.<p>You can set both options here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;myactivity.google.com&#x2F;activitycontrols&#x2F;youtube" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;myactivity.google.com&#x2F;activitycontrols&#x2F;youtube</a>

Can we get a button to stop recommending videos that have already been watched? On the front page out of 12 videos listed, I&#x27;ve already seen 7 of them and have no need to watch them again.

This article started out talking about what good signals are to drive a recommendation algo, but it ended up concluding with all the different ways YouTube goes against those signals to censor videos or otherwise manually tune your feed instead.<p>The meaning of &quot;recommendation&quot; seems to have shifted from &quot;what we think you want&quot; to &quot;what we want for you.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s not a wrong use of the word, just different from what you might expect.

I fell into a massive YouTube recommendation vortex two 1&#x2F;2 years ago when my barista basically insisted I take all his Cafe&#x27;s coffee grounds home and compost them. I had no idea how to compost (he was sick of telling customers it was going into landfill. every. single. day). I now have over 20kg&#x27;s of worms spread over 30+ worm bins and I&#x27;m taking organic residue from all over the district and turning it into valuable soil amendments. I never thought 5 years ago I would now be on the cusp of leaving digital marketing and going into manufacturing soil amendments. Profoundly life changing experience.

If you think of the Youtube recommendation system as a person, you would immediately understand how creepily this person is behaving by trying way too hard to get what it wants from you (ad clicks) under the guise of caring about you or your interests.<p>Just because I click on a video and watch it entirely doesn&#x27;t mean I want to see more like it, and it doesn&#x27;t mean it was healthy for me to watch, it could have just been a distraction. But now this system will latch on to my need for distraction and keep nagging me with stuff in the long term that is ultimately harmful to me.<p>I don&#x27;t believe recommendation systems like this can ever really understand people well enough where a person can walk away and feel healthy about it. But they are great at generating money and that is why they exist. I can see and appreciate the amount of effort that is trying to make these systems better but they are fundamentally flawed and limited.

Recommendation on YouTube is somewhat good but search sucks. When you search for something it throws at you random garbage on top of the thing you are actually looking for, think AltaVista vs Google yes Google you own the YouTube. There is no ability to search for videos in playlists and there is no ability to search videos&#x27; comments.<p>Also they say &gt;borderline content—that is content that comes close to, but doesn’t quite violate our Community Guidelines.<p>TOS can not treat anything as &quot;borderline&quot;; borderline is akin to robbing a bank and then telling a judge your crime was &quot;borderline&quot; because you were out of money and you needed to get your financial situation straight by robbing a bank. My point is TOS and Law are binary either something is allowed or forbidden there is no middle ground.

&gt;Recommendations drive a significant amount of the overall viewership on YouTube, even more than channel subscriptions or search.<p>Chicken&#x2F;egg. Above is true is because they flood the sidebar with algorithmic recos instead of your subscriptions, and have tuned their notifications to not give you as many, even if you are subscribed and even if you click the notification bell.

&quot;Think about how hard it would be to navigate all of the books in a massive library without the help of librarians.&quot;<p>According to the blog post, YouTube is just like a public library. Nevermind the absolute absurdity of comparing reading books belonging a large library to watching YouTube videos. Its strange because I never remember walking into a large library and being tracked every where I went and accosted by librarians trying to &quot;recommend&quot; books to me. I remember searching the catalog without any interference. I rememeber going to the stacks to retrieve books and then discovering other books nearby because the stacks were organised according to a public standard, not according to a secret algorithm. I remember checking out books so I could read them outside the library, wherever I want to read them, in private. (I download YouTube videos as opposed to using Google&#x27;s Javascript &quot;video player&quot;.)<p>This blog author wants readers to believe going to a library and finding books is &quot;hard&quot;. I dont remember it that way. Not every patron who visits a library asks a librarian for assistance. YouTube doesnt give anyone a choice to be left alone. Theres a &quot;librarian&quot; looking over your shoulder the entire time. The amount of telemetry and tracking while using the website is totally unnecessary.

Why don&#x27;t they let me tell them the interests that they are trying to infer? I&#x27;d be really happy to review sets of recommendations and indicate the kind of videos i like and the kind i don&#x27;t.

&gt; With all that, why don’t we simply remove borderline content? Misinformation tends to shift and evolve rapidly, and unlike areas like terrorism or child safety, often lacks a clear consensus. Also, misinformation can vary depending on personal perspective and background.<p>This is a weird way to say &quot;ideas that we suppress for being misinformation are sometimes actually true.&quot;

Best decision I ever made was installing an extension to get rid of the recommendations (they&#x27;re such crap - I wish they would actually try to recommend me things with a high likelihood of me enjoying rather than whatever propaganda youtube wants me to see).

&#x27;low quality&#x27; content is ostensibly demoted by this system, which was built on the biases of the developers themselves.<p>At the very least, YT should recognize that this metric is quite subjective, and given the vast scale of information out there, they simply cannot be the experts.<p>Sometimes I just dont want any magic, just give it to me.<p>If I like seeing &#x27;flat earth&#x27; videos, then recommend the next best &#x27;flat earth&#x27; video, just keep it simple?

&gt; For my oldest daughter, it was finding laughter and community with the Vlogbrothers. And for my oldest son, recommendations brought about a better understanding of linear algebra through animated explainers by 3Blue1Brown—with breaks to watch KSI videos.<p>My first thought reading this was about reinforcing a stereotype as the son learning hard sciences and the daughter watching fun shows about people things.<p>Did anyone else notice or think about that that?

You youtube algo keeps showing me fox news. I have not once clicked but it keeps showing me them.<p>Also, what is the deal with mrbeast and other video always being on default? Did they pay for that exposure or what.

I hate how it has now started slipping Hollywood movies into my recommendation feed. All of a sudden i&#x27;m seeing the credits on a 2 hour movie after watching a 15 minute UrbanX video. NO YOUTUBE, BAD. If I wanted to watch shitty movies I wouldn&#x27;t be on YouTube.

&gt; Our recommendation system is built on the simple principle of helping people find the videos they want to watch and that will give them value<p>Well it doesn&#x27;t live up to the principle, not even close.<p>&gt; It’s constantly evolving, learning every day from over 80 billion pieces of information we call signals.<p>This is probably why. It&#x27;s a positive feedback loop mechanism for noise.<p>Another reason why is probably that it&#x27;s metric for &quot;give them value&quot; is engagement. Its a dishonest metric, because &quot;gives them value&quot; is less important than &quot;give us value&quot;, so even if you found that it doesnt give them value, you&#x27;ve got a perverse incentive to continue doing it and pretending it is in their best interest.

&gt; Someone may report that they’re very satisfied by videos that claim “the Earth is flat,” but that doesn’t mean we want to recommend this type of low-quality content.<p>OK, that&#x27;s a very simple example they are throwing out there. But there are many cases where nothing is really settled and Youtube will arbitrarily decide what is fake or not - even though they have absolutely no right to make such kind of judgment. &quot;Authoritative News&quot; can routinely mean &quot;facts&quot; and &quot;hoaxes&quot;. It&#x27;s not like we have never seen those in recent history...

When I open youtube, 10 of the 12 videos displayed are ones I&#x27;ve already watched. 1 is a live steam, and one is from a channel I subscribe to. The non-viewed video is recommended to me frequently, but I&#x27;ve never had any interest in clicking on it. What possible &quot;system&quot; could they be using to come up with this being the best 12 videos to show me?<p>FWIW: I pay for youtube music, which comes with youtube premium included so I don&#x27;t get ads, but the recommendation system is pretty much useless.

This is all horseshit. YouTube should be a utility, democratically owned and governed. When are we going to stop pretending this profit-seeking ad platform isn’t dangerous, and start hosting videos according to other metrics than ‘monetizability’ instead.

The Orwellian language in this piece is absolutely ridiculous.

The article for me reads that the recommendation system carries the Bias of Youtube. So it is a recommender system that allows control from the owner. This means this recommendation system is not free but it may &quot;train&quot; the consumer on a specific content and act as an echo chamber.<p>Is earth flat? Of course not but should we punish people for thinking this? Our society says verbally no but its choices say otherwise, they try to do it through undemocratic processes (aka Youtube???). If we provide better education to these people or even a better Health System accessible to everyone we can have better results.<p>IMHO in the long run Youtube will just send these people to other more &quot;hospitable&quot; platforms and I have a feeling that it will help increase the number of flat earthers. So Youtube is in an interaction with its customers not only to maintain their echo chamber but possibly engineer the echoes. The decrease in variability of members is a way.<p>Do we need armadillos when we eat chicken?

A long Rant:<p>I just came here to say why on earth YouTube keep showing me the same Casey Neistat video 1000 times even though in the past I have never chosen to click on it. Doesn&#x27;t it make sense to just stop showing it then like after may be 10 times?<p>Also, what&#x27;s up with showing the video that I have watched already over and over again?<p>I have just realized the Algorithm weighs quantity a lot over the quality, I have about 200 subscriptions containing multiple small time creators with niche content, but it is the same content creators again and again in my recommendations. I don&#x27;t even see if any of my subscription posted a new video immediately.<p>NRI here, I watch a lot of programming content on youtube, but I have never watched a single programming video in hindi, but my entire recommendation is fill up with programming in hindi, can we just ask the algorithm to stop boxing user profiles into racialized tendencies.

I use, bookmark, and recommend <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;feed&#x2F;subscriptions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;feed&#x2F;subscriptions</a> , which is just a reverse chronological feed of videos from channels you subscribe to.

The YouTube recommendation system is okay in short bursts. I don&#x27;t log in and I use a private window when I browse YT. The downside is that I need to choose which rabbit hole I want to go down with a search, but after that I actually get relatively good recommendations for a while, then it slowly starts to decline and it&#x27;s time to open up another private window.<p>So the system is relatively good starting from a clean slate for a short period of time when focused on a relatively narrow set of content. Other than that, I haven&#x27;t found it to be very useful. Before doing this, I would rely on search and ignore most if not all of the recommendations that came my way.

The best recommendation system for me is none at all.<p>I recommend using an extension called &#x27;Improve YouTube!&#x27; [1], which allows to collapse&#x2F;hide recommendations&#x2F;comments&#x2F;ads&#x2F;related videos&#x2F;autoplay etc.<p>There&#x27;s also YouTube Vanced [2], which allows some of these things on Android.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;improve-youtube-video-you&#x2F;bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;improve-youtube-vi...</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vancedapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vancedapp.com&#x2F;</a>

I find it pretty decent if you tell it you don&#x27;t like certain videos. But it fails to identify obvious, literal sequels to your current video. And if you don&#x27;t trim it, it will surely feed you clickbait garbage.<p>On some level people love to click on things they expect to hate and downvote it. I suspect that increases the odds of showing them similar content, vs. say, spotify which explicitly says &quot;sorry we will try to avoid things like this&quot;. Youtube should make it clear which strategy they&#x27;re doing, and they should do the latter.

Without getting into all the moral and ethical issues, YouTube recommendation system is absolutely useless. I watched one Tesla model S plaid video and now 50% of my feed is about Tesla. I never discover anything new on YouTube anymore. It seems stuck in a very fast feedback loop and has zero discoverability for me. I remember when you could actually &quot;surf&quot; YouTube and discover so much interesting content.

&gt; This means each borderline video watched is a lost opportunity to monetize, leading to real lost revenue to YouTube.<p>The only thing you need to read from that post

I&#x27;ve found some good stuff from YouTube recommendations, but the reccs are mostly pretty dumb -- tons of repeats, tons of &quot;hey, here&#x27;s something EXACTLY LIKE what you just watched.&quot; It&#x27;s nowhere close to as good as the recommendations for TikTok (which seem to read your mind <i>and</i> your subconscious). Would love to see TikTok make a YouTube competitor.

One thing I don&#x27;t like the recommendation system is that it offers videos I already watched and even bookmarked. It also offered videos from people I subscribed but this is OK-ish because some accounts have hundreds or even thousands of videos.<p>Basically, all recommendation system are based on one hypothesis: I know more about your preference than yourself. I can&#x27;t say I agree with it.

Sometimes, I want to watch a random video that was recommended, but I get anxious about clicking on it and start getting recommendations for that video&#x27;s theme forever and ever.<p>Once, I&#x27;ve clicked on a video about Tetris&#x27; World Championship Finals (I was curious!), and I was plagued with Tetris recommendations for some months.

I always wonder if those big platforms commercialize recommendations. I&#x27;m pretty sure it happens one way or another with the music app. The auto generated playlist always have some artists that I really dislike and would never listen, but are pretty popular.

So I&#x27;m going to go out on a limb here and say I actually enjoy YouTube&#x27;s recommendation algorithm, though I do make an effort to point it in the right direction. One example is guitar players: I&#x27;m an active guitarist, I&#x27;ve been for years, but as I got older the discovery phase of music dropped off. However I found YouTube constantly recommends amazing, phenomenal guitar players who almost immediately move into my list favorites. But some of these guitars only have a few thousand subscribers , there&#x27;s very little chance I would have ever found them without youtube, and almost certainly no chance they would ever have an audience without this recommendation algorithm

It’s a lot of power in one corporation. They have the power to shape what we think, at scale.<p>On the other hand, if they let youtube go without any ’fringe control’ the society might collapse into tribal war.<p>All the previous information distribution channels had some form of control.

I use a bit of CSS to remove the sections of the page that show recommendations while watching a video, and turn off autoplay. I then only ever navigate to my subscriptions page. In general, I try to avoid YouTube recommendations at all costs.

All I want to know is why the damn home page keeps recommending videos I&#x27;ve already watched 100%. What is the point?<p>E.g., <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;nQHHVkO.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;nQHHVkO.jpg</a>

And as I got on YouTube just now, the recommendations are just utter junk. It is a bunch of clickbait on things I don&#x27;t even like and find annoying and repulsive. This is why I use things like youtube-dl, NewPipe, etc.

If you find yourself indulging in unhealthy amounts of time watching youtube videos on the recommendation page I seriously recommend &quot;Distraction Free for youtube&quot;. Its available on chrome and firefox. I remember going to youtube just to watch a video explaining a compsci topic and came out watching a completely random topic. YouTube algorithm is dangerously addictive ( recommendation page ) and the browser extension I mentioned has saved me countless days to cautiously browse YouTube. Hope it helps.

&gt; Recommendations drive a significant amount of the overall viewership on YouTube, even more than channel subscriptions or search.<p>I wish I could organize my youtube subscriptions better. Right now everything lands in a flat feed of videos and all the stuff I feel like watching now is buried deep within 50 music uploads.<p>I got myself into this situation by subscribing to hundreds of channels but I also don&#x27;t want to pick favourites and unsubscribe from the rest, simply being able to put channels into categories would be perfect.

YouTube algorithms went from being optimised for watch time to being tuned for ads. Just like any of Google&#x27;s products it has become an ads service and nothing more.

The whole system is infuriating. I stay pretty well in one lane for what I want to watch, and if I _accidentally_ click on ONE music video, the whole feed is wrecked for months.

The best YouTube interface I&#x27;ve yet found is the commandline &quot;mps-youtube&quot; (mpsyt) utility (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pypi.org&#x2F;project&#x2F;mps-youtube&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pypi.org&#x2F;project&#x2F;mps-youtube&#x2F;</a>)<p>Unfortunately, it&#x27;s been all but entirely crippled through API limits.<p>When it did work, what it allowed was:<p>- A terminal text-only interface.<p>- The ability to search by keyword <i>or</i> publisher.<p>- The ability to restrict to music, or all videos.<p>- The ability to set playback preferences (audio only, video, preferred resolution)<p>- The ability to create current or permanently saved playlists. These could be edited down from the search results.<p>- Runs on Linux, MacOS, Android (under Termux via pip), and Windows (Cygwin or WSL). On Android, it permits backgrounding video or listening to audio only.<p>- Accrues no user history.<p>- Recommendations-free.<p>And the killer feature:<p>- The ability to play through a curated playlist from beginning to end.<p>(It also suppresses advertising, which is a plus in my book.)<p>You could also download directly from the utility (audio, video, or both). All state are retained locally, there&#x27;s no need to have or use an account.<p>For topics of interest, I would stack up 5, or 10 or 20, or 40 videos, and roll through them over an hour, day, or week. It was really marvelous.<p>As noted, YouTube killed it through their application API control.<p>mpv offers the ability to play back either a single video, a (separately maintained) playlist, or a channel or YouTube playlist, and is my usual go-to. It&#x27;s also useful on other sites (mpv uses the youtube-dl utility which supports a whole slew of video and audio sites and platforms).<p>Absent mpsyt, what I&#x27;ll frequently do is use YouTube&#x27;s site search or a third party (e.g., DDG video search) to grab a bunch of video URLs, and either play those from the commandline (mpv will take multiple arguments) or as a saved file (useful for restarting later). This gives an ad-free experience as well.<p>But for YouTube itself, mpsyt was amazing.

For a less serious take, I&#x27;ve been playing a game with Youtube&#x27;s recommendation system that I want to share. It works like the Wikipedia link game[1][2] but more stochastic, I&#x27;d like to think. To play the game:<p>1. Have a specific video in mind. It mostly comes to me from memory of recommendations past. For example, &quot;Hey I remember Crash Course Film History had an episode on <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>.&quot;<p>2. Now the fun part: <i>NEVER</i> use search to find the video (external search engines too!) directly <i>or indirectly</i>. Rather try to bias the recommendation algorithm until it recommends that video to you again. You can only try to influence the algorithm by watching other <i>recommended</i> videos, liking, or disliking. Recommendations come from the homepage or from the sidebar when you watch other videos; this means you can&#x27;t start your search by visiting their channel<p>In this example, maybe I&#x27;ll try watching more content from Crash Course. I&#x27;ve been watching STEM Crash Course lately so maybe I&#x27;ll click on the first Crash Course Humanities content that gets recommended. To bias towards movies maybe I&#x27;ll watch myself some Nerdwriter. Again, note that searching for Crash Course Humanities content is considered cheating. It has to be recommended to you.<p>It&#x27;s a race against yourself to get to the video you want.<p>Obviously, I don&#x27;t have anything better to do with my time ;). Once I was looking for a video I was extremely sure Tom Scott made. After what&#x27;s basically a nonsequential brute force search through his channel (again, only through recommendations!), I still couldn&#x27;t find it. I gave up but I still didn&#x27;t search, rather I emailed Tom. He replied only to say he&#x27;s never made such video. This is when I used search; it turned out to be from Vox.<p>I just wanted to &quot;stick it to Google&quot;: if they are going to profile me and my interests, I won&#x27;t make it too easy. With this game, I&#x27;m hoping my interests appear broader than they are to Google.<p>Have fun.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thewikigame.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thewikigame.com&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;degreesofwikipedia.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;degreesofwikipedia.com&#x2F;</a>

For people who accidentally click on a video and find out their recommendations are all about that thing you can use this Chrome extension <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;channel-blocker&#x2F;nfkmalbckemmklibjddenhnofgnfcdfp?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;channel-blocker&#x2F;nf...</a><p>You can block channels pretty easily and never see content from them again.

Super interesting somewhat buried link on the guidelines for evaluators. I just assumed they were private so I never bothered to look them up; I wonder how easy they were to find before today<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;guidelines.raterhub.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;&#x2F;searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;guidelines.raterh...</a>

Personally, I carefully guard my youtube feed (same as twitter). I vigorously cull (`dont recommend&#x2F;not interested`) dull videos whenever they pop up. Once a month, I will go over my history and remove items that I didn&#x27;t particularly care for in retrospect. Youtube&#x27;s recommendation has gotten really useful for me overtime. It keeps my curiosity well-satisfied.

I personally like the Youtube recommendation system when listening to music. I was able to find and listen songs that match my taste.

How did Google get the .youtube and .google TLDs?

I use YouTube mostly for music. It recommends different versions of the same song I&#x27;ve searched for and am currently listening to. Then because I&#x27;ve watched a video about how to assemble my newly bought IKEA bed, it plays me ads for buying another bed because ...I must be in the market for more beds?<p>Feels like it&#x27;s not really trying.

For Android users, I can&#x27;t recommend enough (I know, the irony) NewPipe [1], an open-source alternative viewer to the YouTube app with much less clutter and incentive to maximize engagement.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newpipe.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newpipe.net</a>

If anyone from team youtube is reading this, by god, please let me hide youtube short recommendations in the android app. They all started filling with incredibly gross pimple popping videos with horrendous thumbnails which cannot be hidden.

Why must we click 3 buttons just so the algo doesn&#x27;t recommend the same video, couldn&#x27;t they use the like&#x2F; dislike system instead, seriously baffled how those buttons aren&#x27;t factored in at all.

Just please give me some options!<p>I want to be able to select exploration&#x2F;discovery vs sticking with familiar grounds.<p>It boggles my mind that there are zero explicit user settings and the only option is somehow game the recommendation system.

I dislike the whole idea of recommendations as a consumer. Give me great search results when I search, but please don&#x27;t tell me what to watch. Recommendations are just ads in that sense.

I recommend Freetube for a neutral YouTube experience without the recommendation system, tracking, ads, or need for a Google account.

I hate YouTube recommendations. You’re the guy responsible… I have some choice words for you, but I won’t say them here.. anyways, YouTube sucks a sick one. Recommendations are why I avoid YouTube. They are horrible, you track and one suggest what I’ve already watched&#x2F;stuff I’ve saved. I can’t get away from recommendations without looking for specific videos. It’s so bad, it would take a while to list. Anyways YouTube sux and I and many others used to really like it. All good things must come to an end.

This blog post doesn&#x27;t seem yo answer the hard questions, such as why recommend Plastic Love by Mariya Takeuchi on every video.

Wanna know how to spot an HN user in the wild? Mention Youtube and wait to see if they launch into dramatics. Grown adults getting mad at <i>a tool</i> for doing <i>its job</i>.<p>If you ask me, it&#x27;s the same story with just about every single digital service; recommendations are never perfect, merely useful. What&#x27;s more, the stakes are just so low, literally <i>spare time</i>. The level of vitriol feels, to me, disproportionate -- crowding out more interesting discussions.

That&#x27;s a lot of text just to bury the question &quot;why does Youtube never ever stop shoving literal Nazis onto my front page all the time?&quot; a thousand words down and then... not answer it.

&gt; 3. Do recommendations drive viewers to increasingly extreme content?<p>&gt; As I’ve explained, we actively demote low-quality information in recommendations. But we also take the additional step of showing viewers authoritative videos about topics that may interest them. Say I watch a video about the COVID-19 vaccine. In my Up Next panel, I’ll see videos from reputable sources like Vox and Bloomberg Quicktake and won’t see videos that contain misleading information about vaccines (to the extent that our system can detect them).<p>What is Google&#x2F;YouTube&#x27;s full list of &quot;reputable sources&quot;. Is it even reasonable to maintain such a list given how often sources treated as authoritative can be wrong? Doesn&#x27;t this amount to artificially converging users&#x27; information exposure towards either the reigning authority or towards whatever Google&#x2F;YouTube favor?<p>Generalizing my concerns further, I am not comfortable with having a narrow set of monopolistic tech giants serve as king maker in our information landscape. Perhaps what we need first and foremost is a renewed set of anti-trust laws to break up companies with giant market caps and to address the reduced competition faced by widely used platforms built on network effects.

Is there a reason to keep showing me videos of already seen from beginning to end?

I&#x27;ve learned so much from YouTube. It&#x27;s essentially a Gutenberg Revolution.

I only use the Subscriptions page. The frontpage is a cesspool of imbecility.

Is the guy who wrote this Orwell reincarnated?

is nobody going to talk about the trending tab? It&#x27;s full of cringe atleast in India region. they seriously need to work on it.

I hope whoever submitted this sees how much ppl hate his teams work and how they should fire themselves, delete the entire recommendation algorithm and do anything else else…

&gt;While there are far more videos uploaded that say the Earth is flat than those that say it’s round, on average, flat earth videos get far fewer views.<p>what a sentence

Unpredictable invisible society changes

When did youtube get its own TLD?

&gt; 3. Do recommendations drive viewers to increasingly extreme content?<p>&gt; As I’ve explained, we actively demote low-quality information in recommendations. But we also take the additional step of showing viewers authoritative videos about topics that may interest them. Say I watch a video about the COVID-19 vaccine. In my Up Next panel, I’ll see videos from reputable sources like Vox and Bloomberg Quicktake and won’t see videos that contain misleading information about vaccines (to the extent that our system can detect them).<p>When my parents watch 30 consecutive videos that mention that you can&#x27;t trust the mainstream media, what good is suggesting to them a Bloomberg video?<p>My parents aren&#x27;t on FB or any other social media. But over the last 10 years they have gone off the deep end after watching more and more insane videos on Youtube. It started with hours of Ron Paul videos. Then Alex Jones videos. Who knows what cretins it offered up after that.<p>They&#x27;ve stopped talking to me recently. It&#x27;s because I&#x27;ve gotten the &quot;Kill Shot&quot; after they&#x27;ve explicitly told me not to. I&#x27;m apparently going to die from the covid vaccine within the next 6 months to 3 years... On my last phone call, they&#x27;ve told me that 300 old money families (who are all also insane environmentalists) have hatched and are executing a plan to depopulate the planet to 500 million... as told on the &quot;Georgia Guide Stones&quot;.<p>The US Government also has mind-control devices that are convincing people to get the shot. They told me the mind control devices were first used during the Iraq War, because it convinced so much of the Iraqi Army to surrender en masse.<p>Also, all of our technology comes from the wreckage of crashed UFOs, most famously the Roswell UFO. My Dad thinks I&#x27;m naive for not believing this.<p>Both my parents have college degrees. My Dad has a masters in an engineering field. They were once relatively un-political and rode out the Great Recession without any harm. Maybe they just didn&#x27;t handle retirement well. But I have a decade of nearly daily emails from them... &quot;Watch this! [youtube link]&quot;. When they are gone, I&#x27;ll have documentation of their decent into madness, with hyperlinks all going to 1 domain. I&#x27;m sure YouTube is doing all they can.

TL;DR - We&#x27;ll let you know what&#x27;s good for you.

&quot;videos from reputable sources like Vox&quot; - yeah, right...<p>I wonder who that article is addressed to? At first it may seem they want to reassure viewers that they will get shown the best content. But the longer the article goes on, the more it sounds like a reassurance that they will absolutely block out unwanted political views.<p>Why do they feel the need to put out such an article? To stave of government regulation? Or for their own political activism? To reassure the leftist mob that they won&#x27;t be part guilty of electing another Trump?<p>I mean as a user, I&#x27;d like reassurance that the algorithm tries to show me videos <i>I</i> want to see, not videos that others want me to see.<p>I am not afraid of being shown a flat-earther video, so I don&#x27;t get the appeal of the promise to not show me certain things.

Oh cool. Their algorithm is why I’m now a big fan of Beluga.<p>Thanks Algorithm™

I assume the reason people find the YouTube&#x27;s recommendation system less daring about jumping into very different content is a certain amount of caution described at the end of the article.<p>Basically, when you&#x27;ve accidentally created a white nationalist movement, you tend to ratchet back your ambitions.