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Comment by herbst | Hacker News Reader

I get recommendations of people that literally make me angry. Like people I totally cant stand and because they make kinda similar content to people I watch they get recommended all the fucking time. I tried disliking (which is not fair to begin with, because I would not watch them if my TV would not simply start it) but it changed nothing.

So I am stuck with getting the same few shitty YouTubers pulled in my autoplay every single day.

I tried making an new account from scratch. But nope, recommendations seem to be based on the channels you follow with no personal references pulled in

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> I tried disliking

Don't do that! The algorithm counts that as an engagement action.

What you need to do is click on the three dots symbol next to the video title and select "don't recommend this channel". This absolutely fixes it. You may have to do this a lot. There is also a general "don't recommend this" option that, anecdotally, doesn't work as well.

Also, disable autoplay. It doesn't seem like YT can distinguish between clicking on a video and it just playing on autoqueue.

The YT algorithm is not fundamentally different from the other social media algorithms out there: it tries to serve you up with controversial content that "engages" you. You are most likely to be "engaged" by content you either directly disagree with, or by second-source channels that report on content you disagree with. As a fallback, the algorithm will also try to serve you content based on your cohorts, which can in of itself be pretty radical and disagreeable.

Get a YT Premium account if you can, sending a very small message that you vote against ads and all the algorithmic baggage that comes with them.

Yes, a view is a view and a dislike is engagement. If you really don't want to see people or content, use the triple dot menu and click 'not recommended' or 'don't recommend this channel' (which actually straight filters it out).

> Get a YT Premium account if you can, sending a very small message that you vote against ads and all the algorithmic baggage that comes with them.

YT premium users are still presented with the same recommendations as normal users, are they not? That's kinda my problem with the service. Sure you don't actually see the ads, but you're still using an advertising-based platform with all the user-hostile design that model encourages.

Oh absolutely, I'm recommending this because of the second part of my sentence above. I believe the ad model is bad for both consumers and companies, in ways that are not immediately obvious. Ad models tend to generate perverse incentives in my opinion. I also think it's important to signal a willingness to be a reasonable consumer, and to me it's also about ethics: I watch a lot of Youtube, I can afford to pay for YT Premium, and I run an adblocker.

I see this even with Netflix: the movies look like they are designed for optimizing for the longest view time instead of also taking account people who are older, willing to pay for shorter view time, but well written and produced content and storyline. The last example was Brave New World where my girlfriend also read the book, and even she wasn't able to explain me the series, because it just didn't make sense (although the visuals were beautiful).

I'm actually not sure that it works that way.

I watch a lot of YouTube content that's outright demonetized, and demonetization consistently correlates with recommendations and views plummeting as well. Yet this same content still shows up in my recommendations. My theory is that for free users, YouTube prefers to recommend videos that are monetized, because obviously they have a vested interest in doing so. For premium users, YouTube doesn't care about ad revenue--in fact, they may even have a slight incentive to recommend demonetized videos because then they don't have to pay a share of my premium subscription revenue to the creator. Instead, they're optimizing for keeping me interested enough to maintain my subscription.

The "don't recommend this" notably has two reasons on the "tell us more" dialog: "I've already seen this video", and "I don't like this video".

I often use the former, after watching stuff via mpv (chromium has tearing, but more notably, high enough CPU usage to annoy me with a half-broken fan that's quite loud).

> Don't do that! The algorithm counts that as an engagement action.

Do you have a source for that? Though it does sound plausible in a world where "we want to keep people viewing our ads for as long as possible" is the _only_ goal of the developers, I find it hard to be _so_ cynical about Google that I believe that "let's show people more videos they have told us they dislike!" would get past the idea stage.

> Do you have a source for that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx9Jv5uxfac

Here you go. :)

> they have told us they dislike!

if they feel passionate enough about it to watch, then dislike it, the video would trigger other people for more engagements.

The opposite of like is not hate - it's apathy. You want to be apathetic towards clickbait. You want to be apathetic towards those sorts of videos.

A few years ago I completely scratched using a YouTube account and instead switched to the android app NewPipe (I was primarily watching on my Android phone).

This has completely changed and improved the experience for me. NewPipe lets you create multiple feeds of groups of channels. So for example I can have a feed podcasts, music and tech news.

This not only makes it easier to actually get to the content you want to consume at any given time without distracting yourself but also helps you get better recommendations in these grouped feeds (the recommendations still work).

NewPipe is free and open source and can be downloaded on F-Droid.

Thanks for that. Going to look into it. (In the hope it works on TV and also blocks ads)

Seconding newpipe, it's great if you just want to watch specific videos or channels. Should work on Android tv, unfortunately not available for LG WebOS TVs.

Third for newpipe. The modern internet is practically unusable without FLOSS.

i wish there was a build of newpipe that works on a computer rather than mobile device.

I have tried to run it within anbox on my Pinephone devkit before, which runs linux. The app itself worked although all the videos didn't work. Maybe it has gotten better since though.

I have the same problem. I watch alot of science and history channels but damn near every time I watch videos on World War II I start getting suggestions for crazy far-right channels. And I don't mean like mainstream 'conservative' channels like FoxNews, I mean crazy stuff like Nick Fuentes. Even if I tell it to not recommend a certain channel it will just pop back into the recommendations after a few weeks. It would be different if the rest of the recommendations were good but they're just crap too.

I am personally abusing the block feature for this. I haven't tested if it is actually true, but I began blocking channels that I am not interested in and haven't noticed anything being recommended yet from any channel I remember blocking.

That sounds like it could work. Pretty sure I never saw that function on my Android TV tho.

Kudos, gonna try!

I spend time blocking/curating videos in a desktop browser so that my Apple TV YouTube app sucks less from a recommendations perspective..

It's lame that it has to be done that way, but it's the best way I've been able to do it.

> It's lame that it has to be done that way, but it's the best way I've been able to do it.

How else do you think they can figure out what you hate vs you don't like but don't hate either ?

Oh yeah I get that part.. what I mean is that it's lame that I have to sit at my desktop computer in a browser and do this manual work just so my Apple TV experience - which is where I primarily consume YouTube - doesn't give me garbage recommendations.

Is this abusing the function? Block is for things that you never want to see. It sounds fairly appropriate.

https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/

Turn off recommendations, comments, autoplay etc. I only see exactly who I've subscribed to and nothing more.

Not sure what client you're using, but on the web and mobile you can click/tap the kebab menu and select "Don't recommend this channel". Youtube has a nasty habit of recommending rage-inducing channels because they generate engagement. If "Don't recommend this channel" was a button on my keyboard it would be worn down to a nub by now.

Google just really hates their Android TV users. I realized I simply can block them on my phone which actually works!

I did this to Cocomelon as my daughters watched it a few times and the algorithm thought I wanted to watch nursery rhymes all day long.

turn off autoplay to protect your recommendations.

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