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?
Recommendation system is long time broken. I am subscribed to 100+ channels and check 10 channels on a weekly basis, meaning I watch all the new videos these creators make. So that means I want the new stuff from the frequented ones on my front page ASAP. Yet, it's a hit and miss. From the remaining 90 channels I never get anything recommended. Why?<p>If I subscribe to a new channel it gets recommended like hell, then it forgets about it.<p>BUT! Totally irrelevant things that I never watch, is kept on my front page for weeks. Like it wants me to check it or wants me to mute it, but fuck them I'm not giving them any more metrics. If I clear the fingerprints and block the acquiring of these metrics the front page gets filled with new, interesting content. Who the hell understands this? I have also observed that if you have an adblocker enabled it gives you trash all the time.<p>When the absolutely disgusting, braindead, bottomfeeding "depp vs amber" nightmare was ongoing I had to "mute" the same channels multiple times and then 55 others, because it just slams it into my face. Watch it, watch it, you must see this muck.<p>The topic of my fav channels represent... I get nothing relevant from them. :DDD<p>The shorts... was the pinnacle of YTs innovation. :DDDD<p>Goog is all about control now. Look innovation for somewhere else... well... if you can find any, lemme know........<p>You can't do shit with godzilla and now he does whatever he wants.
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.<p>Significant downgrade on what it used to be.
Machine learning probably had something to do with it. It notices videos with thumbnails of people with their mouths and eyes wide open doing some kind of shocked expression with red arrows pointing to something perform better than average. Then it starts recommending videos with thumbnails like this preferentially. YouTubers take notice and start producing thumbnails like this for every video.<p>Go to the front page right now with clean cookies and you'll see most of the thumbnails have "reaction faces" in them for no apparent reason, usually pulling some kind of exaggerated expression.<p>Clickbait used to mean that you baited the viewer into clicking, now it means you baited the algorithm into recommending you.
You asked about bots and spam but I want to talk about the content degradation.
YT has been heavily commercialised and lots of people are trying to make a living out of it. Most videos are about keeping viewers for as much time possible watching your content. As a result what would have been a 2-minute video becomes a 20-minute video with introductions, discussions about the weather and silly sales/crowd manipulation tricks. Content is key and I really don't have the time for such a time waster: I'm always skipping to the point or completely ignoring absurdly long videos.
YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed.<p>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.<p>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.
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.).<p>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.<p>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.
The answer is super simple.<p>Wrong incentives + lack of mechanisms to find, navigate to and promote interesting content.<p>Nowadays, people create content on Youtube essentially only for profit (be it actual profit from Youtube or promotion).<p>That's it. That's what you are selecting from.<p>There are of course exceptions, but these are rare enough to not dictate the general quality of content.<p>And if you are dissatisfied with general quality, that's it. There is no catalog where you can drill down and search for stuff that you don't know but you might be interested in. You can only search for things you already know -- and really interesting things tend to be a bit outside of what you already know.
This is almost boringly textbook late-stage "monopoly in practice" playing out. Start with an "edge". Get big because edge. Use "big" to sharpen edge further. Use big (and/or edge) to consolidate market. Once sufficiently consolidated and/or controlled, raise costs.<p>This is what costs getting raised looks like in a monopoly market. Who's gonna stop them.
<i>Why is Google not doing anything about this?</i><p>The obvious answer is "because they've measured how much money they make, and found lower quality feeds result in higher revenue."<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Aggressively clicking the drop-down and "Not interested"or "Don't recommend channel" on bad recommendations has significantly improved my YouTube suggestions.
This is part of a bigger problem of indexing, searching and result recommendations. We used to have to go to forums and threads to find the content we need, but we grew increasingly reliant on NLP search and feed. I remember fondly of the time Orkut was dominant. No recommendations, no feeds, you had to personally go to a community of interest and find threads there. You had to find communities by interacting with people, and that was key to it. The content you consumed was directly tied to your own social circle, instead of being controlled by a central corporation.<p>We might have to find a way to divorce ourselves from search engines until something comes along to replace them. I see no problem using YouTube and such as a hosting platform, but for finding and consuming content, a more personal approach is needed. I doubt however that the mainstream consumer will sacrifice convenience and content volume for better quality content. We don't have to act as a mainstream consumer though.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>My general experience with the platform is brands advertising on YouTube gives me repulse instead of wanting to buy something.
It has been one year since I can't find interesting stuff in the recommended section anymore. I also thought about building my own recommendation system using YouTube's RSS feed for each individual channel, Telegram for notifications and some simple logic written in Rust and SQLite (of course) and always running on my VPS, where I manually add and remove the channels I like and I also give them a score to have a priority system. Will probably do this next week, when I'm at sea with my family.<p>EDIT: grammar
At some point during Covid they seemed to just decide they wanted to abuse users and its been a steady decline since.<p>My largest use cases were watching DJ sets, music videos, stand up comedians, instructional videos, and life of (random career) videos<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp</a>
Youtube start reminding me a video platform from 3rd world country. There was this "look&feel" difference where you have more expensive less-adds and good quality.
That was their competitive advantage. Right now everything desperately optimized for money. That's how platform dies. They don't know how to grow organically. They become no different. Just another video hosting.
Lots of interesting YouTubers have been demonetized for dubious reasons and have simply stopped using the platform.<p>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.
It drives ad revenue. Content quality doesn't matter, only you watching as much ad's as possible.<p>I've switched to using Yewtu.be, it's a proxy where you can have subscriptions and, for instance, only see new content, chronologically, from your subscriptions. Does make it a bit harder to find new stuff, but at least no spam.<p>And the search seems less spammy too, not sure.
Videos that should be 45 seconds get stretched out to 10 minutes because of the monetization limit. Some we execs at YouTube have been trying really hard to turn YouTube into the wasteland that TV is. This is why TikTok is kicking their ass.
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.<p>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.
I consume a lot of YouTube content. I have also been a full time content creator for the past decade (so I consider myself a dinosaur in social media land).<p>I have noticed significantly less interesting content on YouTube over the past 2 years, but I attribute most of it to a lack of small creators on the platform now.
It takes a ton of time and effort to even make a good 10 minute video. This is a big time commitment on top of your other job, family, etc.<p>10 years ago there were no professional outfits on YouTube. Then everyone started to "grow up". About 5 years ago people started seeing there was money to be made on YouTube, so a ton of new creators joined the platform and there was tons of content. Fast forward to now and creators have realized it's actually very hard to live off YouTube, so a lot of them have moved on.<p>If all they want to do is show off their project they now turn to Instagram and/or TikTok. If all you are after is likes (and don't care about monetization) it is actually way easier on those platforms (due to their discovery engines) with a fraction of the production time.<p>I think YouTube knows this (hence shorts). The general rule of thought around YouTube now is to grow your brand using shorts and then monetize it using long form videos. So unless a creator has a large enough following to support their work making long form videos (over 90s) there is really no incentive anymore.
I can't relate. I primarily watch videos from my subscription page, but my homepage is full of videos similar to or related to the other videos I watch. There isn't a single video on my homepage that made me think "why would I get <i>that</i> recommended to me?", it's all at least potentially interesting.<p>And I agree shorts suck, but IMO that's because they suck as a format; the content of the shorts that are recommended to me are at least relevant.
> Why is Google not doing anything about this?<p>Probably because engagement and ad metrics are fine. What’s not relevant for you might result in people spending mindless hours in the app.
They got rid of the visibility of downvotes. They rewarded longer viewing times (stuff that used to be 5-10 minutes is now 20-30 minutes, sometimes longer).<p>And part of it is just spammers learning to hack the recommendation system that already existed. And without the negative feedback of downvotes, people watch spam content for long enough that the spam content gets recommended to others.<p>Shorts hasn't been around for very long, so it kind of always was terrible.
I'm using different blockers on Desktop and alternative apps on mobile. I used yt mobile and,I kid you not, I got 3 ads in less than 1 min.<p>I just waiting for some channels to start using alternative platforms and start consuming them there.
Yeah suggestions have got worse. Shorts are shit. There is still great stuff but they bury it. I rely on subscriptions and blocking crap channels that is repeatedly suggested. Gone are the days the optimise for best recommendations, now its about ad revenue. Adblocking youtube apps on Android TV are a godsend.
This morning I noticed a new source of videos in my "subscriptions" feed from "ThisMorning" a channel I would never subscribe to (fluffy cooking / morning show stuff)... turns out that's a thing Youtube does, randomly subscribe you to stuff.
I’ve given up, and I dislike having content pushed to me in general.<p>I use a combination of Remove YouTube Suggestions[1] and prefacing “intitle:” before any YouTube search to avoid weird matches that point me to irrelevant content.<p>I think it’s ridiculous that I need to constantly click “show less like this” and exert so much effort to train YouTube. I also hate how they’ll insert random unrelated videos “For Me” or “Watch it Again” in my search results. It’s all designed to keep me on the site and distracted… better to avoid it entirely.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions</a>
I like to use adblock's element picker to get rid of:<p>- recommendation bar on the right<p>- comments<p>- videos recommended at the end of the video by youtube<p>Plus I subscribe only through rss feeds. This way, I left just with the content and completely isolated from the toxicity that is the recommendation system.
Because Google is an R&D company not a consumer product company.<p>It doesn’t give a shit about UX, but generating piles of data for PhDs to generate statistics from.<p>Sundar bailed on the moonshots, but it’s hiring culture was already established and he’s not been able to turn the focus to interesting things relying on statisticians and leetcoders seeking the so called prestige of churning out nothing.<p>It’s funny how big corps LARP changing our world but the careless resource waste, rent seeking, gaming agency through corporate propaganda all smell like traditional political correctness to me.
From the title I thought you were talking about video quality. I've noticed the quality of videos is abysmal lately. Anything close to noise in a scene (like a waterfall, confetti etc.) is unwatchable. I don't get why they push the higher resolutions like 4K and 8K when upping the bitrate of 1080p would probably have a better impact. Marketing, I suppose.
Could it be just that producing relevant recommendation for every one at all times is a complicated problem that gets even more complicated as the volume of uploaded videos continually increases and SEO tactics get ever more sophisticated? Maybe what worked a few years ago is no longer cutting it and they have yet to figure it?
I proactively hide YouTube videos (mark them 'Not Interested', etc). If I'm intending to find a good 15-30 minute video, I actually do a pass where I add the good recommendations to my Watchlist and hide bad/clickbait/unrelated videos as I go. I take a very active role in curating the stuff I see on the front page.<p>This only takes a couple minutes every few days, but it really keeps my recommendations accurate. Every week or so, I go through my watch history and delete videos I accidentally clicked on, or videos I hated so much that they shouldn't be used to generate further recommendations. Pruning your watch history has a particularly powerful effect that I think people miss out on.<p>Also, I try not to be let down if a particular week has no cool videos. There's no law of the universe that says that every week has to have incredible videos.
My YouTube recommendations while being logged in are usually quite low quality. Mostly stuff already seen, some gaping mouth people and klickbait the rest stuff I don't care about.<p>Having a cookie for work and the private stuff while not being logged in works quite well, especially for music.<p>Adblock removes the Add crap and another plug in keeps the playback in the background going for music.<p>And I blocked the Shorts block in uBlock since that is 100 percent complete garbage.<p>No idea what purpose this serves seems to be some low effort Tiktok clone...<p>Maybe someone can develop a plug-in for vertical video, gaping mouths, click bait and lists (10 YouTube recommendations that you don't care about, number 5 will annoy you) and just dowvotes that so it does not show up in the personal recommendations anymore.
I never liked shorts on Youtube, even from the creators that I follow. If I want shorts, I go to Tik Tok.<p>Except that, the Youtube suggestions for me aren't bad. I do believe they are less good than before, because in the past I was able to find at least one new really good channel per month and now it has been a long time without one. It could also be that I found most channels that interest me, or that the pandemic did affect this quite a bit. I still get mostly good recommendations, a third are channels I already subscribe to (which is redundant on the frontpage as I go to the subscriptions pages for that) and videos I already watched, but everything else is mostly content I may be able to enjoy.
The moment a platform start the "monetization war" and have some "influencers" working for them and get traction... that moment will kill/bury original and honest content made from passion and not "to make a living, to win $".<p>The same way blogs died long ago, remember all the craze about having a blog, affiliate links, earn a living blabla<p>People jumped in.. and so advertisers.. and so 'they killed Kenny"<p>Imagine YT videos without ads (ok, buy a premium but.. the trash is still there just wihout ads), so it's not a solution, not anymore.<p>I just stopped watching YT, I just try to find articles and read them, using adblockers and imagine what: I disabled all images in Firefox, too much distraction.
I subscribe to scores of channels, yet YT persists in showing me only a few (and many, many vids I've already seen), along with a bunch of totally irrelevant suggestions. How about show new vids from more of the channels I subscribe to?
Goog pays lots of talented people a lot of money to make everything worse over time.<p>Personal complaint: the latest youtube android app no longer allows sorting a channel's videos by date ascending. UGH. Sometimes I want to watch the oldest ones!
I wonder how much removing the public downvote count has led people to reduce or stop reporting altogether. Now it's just another signal that does into the void, so who cares. Its now solely up to YouTube to consider that metric and possibly down rank videos. It used to, at least in part, be a social effect. It was an aggregate signal from many people to many people. Even if YouTube didn't consider it at all in ranking it would have power. Now YouTube is on the hook for modeling all of that.
I really like it. I accidentally tried a clean YouTube the other day and I was shocked what bs is on there.<p>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.
Don't let this be known to redditors in case youtube shuts it down for widespread use ala ytdl... you can search for youtube videos with the intitle:<search> for exact matches. This has helped me tremendously.
I really really miss stumble video.
algorithm was simple, like a video and the next video would be one someone liked who liked that video, dislike and the next would be a video someone like who also disliked that one, just click next and get a video you havent seen before with lots of likes. It was heaven.
These days bounce between bitchute or a couple of other for random giggles and 3 or 4 subscriptions on TY on computing and manufacturing. otherwise just stick with ones that get recommended on discord, mostly telegram it seems.
I really only use youtube for very specific things. Music, and watching sumo wrestling. For those purposes, it's pretty good.<p>But Youtube is absolutely intending to replace broadcast television. So they want everyone talking about the same stuff, they want endless passive engagement, etc.<p>I never visit the homepage, I just have a bookmark <a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s</a> with the shortcut `yt` and search for what I want directly.
Why is the Discovery channel a bunch of cheap to produce shows about ghost hunters or whatever it is these days? MTV long since is all reality TV and nothing about music. Pushing drivel like Heard-vs-Depp drives ad revenue and is what "the people" want to watch, and they can most easily get more revenue by trying to hook as many people as possible on that stuff. The fact that you in particular are turned off by all that is mostly irrelevant to them because you're no longer the target audience.
Advertisers want the lowest common denominator: means no monetization or recommendation for anything that might upset any part of their possible consumer base. A lot of interesting content about topics that 'trigger' different groups or that contain inflammatory opinions is thus only accessible to those who already know about it, and it's not monetized or recommended.<p>Imagine a restaurant that starts removing anything from the menu that a customer complains about. You eventually end up with nothing but bland glop.
I really recommend using something similar to firefox' containerized sessions. I like to have a few I rotate around and try and engage in different content each time. I have discovered a lot more new content this way. I also only login on one of them where I keep
my subscribed channels that I rarely add to.<p>As it is right now, the recommendation engine is just not optimised for people like us here. I think most people engage with extremely similar or constantly nostalgic content, or current pop culture
Counter argument: YouTube has been absolutely great for me. Spend at least 2 hours a day on it and YouTube knows me.<p>On my desktop it shows me action sports and high energy stuff. While in bed on my phone it's mostly science and documentaries and historical boxing fights. It doesn't ever recommend me anything mainstream.<p>Sometimes YT treats me on some really good gems as well.<p>The biggest problem is, the first 1-2 rows are mostly videos I haven't clicked on. Have to scroll more down to get to the good stuff.
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.<p>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.
It's the same as it is for Google search: Youtube is now much to much in favor of the producer rather than the consumer. In clear text: advertisment ruins it for all
One way to tackle this would be exporting your subscriptions from Takeout as a JSON and importing it to something like Newpipe or Freetube. No ads and all the usual needed stuff without recommendations. 1 have around 170 channels by now and it should be clear that this is more than enough for consumption.
While watching videos, the sidebar still shows up so I can simple subscribe to them if I like the channel.
Like with everything, once you get to a certain scale it's just very hard. This is not Netflix and their tiny catalog. We're talking about millions of videos added to YT every day. My main issue with YT lately is the increase in ads before videos are played. I use it much less because of it. I know they have a mo ads tier. It's probably worth it for someone using YT often.
My Youtube recommendations are a palace, I am perfectly balanced on the machine learning gradient. I have like 80 subscriptions, and I literally derank every single video on my page that I don't want to see. One mistaken click, one slip up and I have to spend a week clicking "I don't want to see this" over and over.<p>It's almost a zen meditation at this point
I've actually really enjoyed some of the recommendations I get - my homepage is usually videos on Java, networking, DCS related content and for some reason last week I got a recommendation for a video by this channel that recreates historic life and the video was how to make a typical dinner as if it were 1820 - it was so random but awesome.
All creators are hacking the algorithms. More subscribers, more views, more comments, more like etc.<p>As the hacks get more open , Youtube needs to include more granular details from user perspective. Like community subscribers, comments, retention cohorts for the channel etc.<p>Also, feel that youtube is pushing monetization a lot.I am seeing every creator putting 3-4 ads in good videos.
Interestingly I’ve just been discussing this problem with a bunch of maker friends on YouTube. The recommendation system is so broken that we are working on ways to directly reach our audience. First attempt is a newsletter - <a href="https://makernews.substack.com" rel="nofollow">https://makernews.substack.com</a>
I feel like search as declined too. Still leagues ahead of bing.<p>Obviously, it sin't solely google's fault. They are exploited by content creators (and i will count geekforgeeks and other copycats as content creator there) and with the space those takes, it is now way harder to do an accurate selection.
Delete all your search and watch history, and perhaps all your comments and likes. After a hard refresh, you should see the algorithm suggest something new again. Also, whenever you see a bot/spam channel or a channel with robotic voice, click don't recommend channel again.
TL;DR The Unhook browser extentions makes YouTube usable.<p>Searching for something on YouTube does not work as expected at all.
At some point they started deleting older videos with not that many views, and I remember at one time that I tried to access a video through a bookmark because it would not appear in the search results, that I was asked to state if this video should be removed or kept.<p>It didn't get deleted thankfully, however I could not find it easily again via the search results because of all the crap recommendations.<p>What I have found that makes the search work again is the Unhook extension [1,2]. By applying a few tweaks, YouTube has become usable again, as it removes most of the unrelated recommendations.<p>As mentioned in other comments, uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock are a requirement if one values their time. There are more efficient ways to support creators instead of watching random annoying ads and sponsor segments.<p>1. <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...</a>
2. <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-youtube-rec/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...</a>
People creating content to scratch their own itch -> people creating content to make money<p>But YouTube is also giving more room to spammers, they make more money when you have to watch 3 videos than when you watch 1. Unfortunately there's a big lack of ethics in the tech community.
I have also noticed this. Seems like over the past 2 months or so the suggestions got much worse. My front page is 80% garbage with like 800 views that is barely relevant to my interests now. I am logged in. A few months ago every video was a decent suggestion.
Odd, the suggestions I am getting from it are very relevant to my previous viewing history, both on my work account, which I use mostly to listen to music, and on my more personal account.
Hard to get any data to back / contradict such claims.<p>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".<p>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 ?<p>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.
Wait until you hear about spotify’s recommendation engine...<p>Lousy AI and the push for all content to be commercialised equals bad user experience. Same thing with Google and duckduckgo results.
I remember around 2019 the suggestions got noticeably worse.<p>Before then, I remember just browse YouTube in the evening after work, I would find lots of interesting content from channels I didn't follow, it was really fantastic. I still follow many of the channels I found during that time and am thankful to the YouTube algorithm for allowing me to find them.<p>Suddenly the quality of the recommendations dropped. It was sudden and marked.<p>Around that time YouTube was getting a lot of criticism for e.g. keeping people in "bubbles", and for showing people who were into right-wing content right-wing content. I mean in a way I would say that sounds like the algorithm is doing exactly what it was supposed to do, showing people content they're interested in. I can only assume they take your preferences into account a lot less now, and show much more content that they consider harmless, so they get criticised less.
In today's world of cybersecurity worries and data privacy, if you're worried about Youtube's quality and adverts constantly irritating you, you need ExpressVPN!
Like other comments have said, it's because your suggestions are tailored to show you ads, not to suggest you videos you want to find. You are the product.
Try using YouTube without being logged in. I never log in to YouTube and am happy with the recs but people who log in are complaining bitterly in the last few months.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned comment spam, it's a bit better but still present under any somewhat popular video I run across, it's been years!
I assume they return results sorted by profit margin.<p>This optimizes for a content creator / user behavior interaction that maximizes their utility function and not yours.
At least personally, it's gotten a lot better recently. I get more interesting conference talks (PyData, USENIX) and less twitch streamer clip shows.
sort of related, I wish there were a way to filter suggestions & subscriptions. I only care about videos longer than 4 minutes. Anything shorter is almost always not worth my time. Plus I subscribe to news networks in a foreign language to practice listening and my subscription feed everyday has about 60-100 videos that are a minute or less, or a short. But all I want are the 3+ hour news spots they do.
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.
Granted I'm mostly using YouTube on the AppleTV, and it may be something that it being rolled out selectively and just haven't reached my yet, but quality seems the same as ever.<p>The shorts are a bit weird. It's clear that it's to counter TikTok, but it's a little weird that they are on YouTube. I get why, Google is afraid that TikTok is stealing users, and stuffing the shorts into YouTube means not having to launch an entire new platform and try to make it take off.<p>The recommendations on the "Shorts" is broken. I have no idea why, but tries to push four things: Two military analyses channels, which I do enjoy, so good job. The it tries to push random influencers which seems to be aimed young women. Finally YouTube have decided that what I really need is Jordan Peterson clips. That seems like a really weird mix. The first two makes complete sense, based on my history. The other two, no idea, and they even sort of goes in opposite directions.<p>For the normal videos, I'd say recommendations are fine. Subscriptions seems to weirdly enough not to matter much. You can subscribe to channels and YouTube will still not show you new videos from that channel. Again this might be an issue with mainly using the AppleTV app.
Obligatory mention of Newpipe, an Android app where you can choose to just show new videos of subscribed channels as your front page. Makes youtube so much more bearable nowadays and you dont miss all the content of older subscriptions yt just doesnt show you anymore after a while. Would be great if it were available on desktop too.<p><a href="https://newpipe.net/" rel="nofollow">https://newpipe.net/</a>
Rant/Starts<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Why not optimize for profit in the meantime? It is only logical.<p>Rant/Ends<p>Use RSS and VPN to optimize your UX when using YouTube. Search YouTube outside Google ecosystem.
My explore tab has been pretty fine. I adblocked the sidebar, though, so not sure the quality of those.<p>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.)
It's always had issues, but something has changed in the last few months. I'm seeing much lower quality recommendations than a year ago. And when I say "lower quality" I mean obvious bot spam, fake news and agitprop channels ("NASA discovered aliens" and "Trudeau/Biden/etc is a communist", "How Putin just owned the west" etc.)<p>The question I have is: let's say "we" collectively decide to "move on" from YouTube -- what could possibly replace it?
It's all curated manually, we learned this from the Project Veritas leak. It's not bots or hackers. They're deliberately shoveling shit into your face.