Ask HN: The signal/noise ratio of YouTube is abhorrent. Channel recommendations? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The signal/noise ratio of YouTube is abhorrent. Channel recommendations?

9 pointsleksak7 comments

The suggestions I get from YouTube feel like the proverbial Idiocracy variants of all my interests. It's managed to tell I'm interested in climbing, training, video games, and some other things but I get the equivalent of junk food recommendations for each interest that I have.

Examples of how astray it is: Training: (tired) cheat days, who's natty or not, YouTubers with insane incomes buying things for their own exercise needs, athletes trying other sports and failing "comically". What'd be interesting: discussions of mentality, keeping a positive attitude in spite of injury, balancing life and trying to be really good at a time consuming hobby. Video games: things you missed in Bloodborne, e-sport gamers playing games they're bad at. What'd be interesting: symbology in level design, parallels between games and politics/history. For instance, Abe's Odyssey and slavery.

What channels do you subscribe to and why?

YouTube is an engagement engine, their KPI is how much time you waste. People make their living gaming it, so you will not be successful for any length of time curating YouTube to recommend useful things.

You need to look from outside the platform in an in-scope forum. Look for climbers on Twitter or on some forums, etc. I’ve found in a new area that if look at a good book, use the author as a jump point to find Twitter people with useful info. Publishers force authors to tweet and there is good material there.

There’s also hints you can use to assess content. If you see the wide eyed YouTuber face, skip, for example.

I've never thought of looking at YouTube's front page for suggestions. I think I saw it once, yup, very Idiocracy! I never have subscribed to anything. Some fav channels are MonoNeon[0], Knower[1] and Scary Pockets[2] (music), Chess24 (chess) and the fairly defunct Vi Hart channel (maths/art/?).

It's frequently been asked on here before what peoples' fav channels are. One search:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I think the best channels I learnt about from HN were the magnificent Every Frame A Painting[3] and Captain Disillusion[4], god bless 'em.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/TheMonoNeon/videos

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/LOUISGENEVIEVE/videos

[2] https://www.youtube.com/c/ScaryPockets/videos

[3] https://www.youtube.com/c/everyframeapainting/videos

[4] https://www.youtube.com/c/CaptainDisillusion/videos

Subscribing to channels makes recommendations worse, not better. What I've found is that logging out of YouTube and aggressively deleting cookies while browsing videos from external sites like reddit is the best way to watch content on YouTube.

The problem is that their recommendation engine is a feedback loop that is really bad at showing you anything new.

Very good question!

I never really figured out how to find the good stuff on Youtube, so I simply don’t use it that much.

About 75% of the good stuff I have found was documentaries ripped from regular TV channels.

Unfortunately YouTube's algorithm is optimized to encourage the maximum amount of viewing time and ad views on the platform, not the most interesting videos for an individual. Symbology in level design does not encourage binge watching (or ad revenue) in the same way as comedy fails. To optimize for your interests, find channels and subscribe directly.

actively search, don't passively consume the algorithm

While I can’t help with recommendations for all of your interests, for climbing I recommend Magnus Midtbo, Adam Ondra, and Daniel woods and co “mellow” channels. Usually from those three I can find high quality climbing content via recommendations.

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