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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

It’s been a while since I’ve logged into YouTube but my impression is that the experience including recommendations is worse if you are logged in.

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That was my experience years ago when I last did so. Logging in offered no visible upsides and multiple downs.

I learned not to log in and use search wherever possible.

Now I use Invidious (with JS disabled and/or uMatrix blocking YouTube functionality in the browser as an additional nudge), or youtube-dl / ytdl / mpv to play video directly. Usually audio-only for talkpieces.

I'll also disable recommendations and comments portions of the website, for additional bonus (via Stylus).

If you actually subscribe to channels you like when logged in, you'll get much better recommendations. I have over a 100. (And no, all of the recommendations aren't from my subscribed channels, it's a mix of them which have newer videos and similar videos to my subscriptions.)

I greatly prefer not feeding Google's data-hoarding dragon.

I've been banging this drum for a while:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6746731>

<https://web.archive.org/web/20160307214624/https://plus.goog...>

That references a G+ post which is of course dead now with that service. Wayback claims to have captured the post but I can't find a version that renders properly (or at all):

<https://web.archive.org/web/20131015000000*/https://plus.goo...>

(The HN submission referenced a post of my own on G+, which I believe I deleted shortly afterward.)

When I did utilise YT under a YouTube (and for a very brief time, Google+) account, I found the benefits de minimis. And in particular, what I'd most prefer would be to dismiss channels (or entire genres) with extreme prejudice, which simply was not available. And I'm not going to play rat to the Borg's Skinner box to find the reward morsel. I've got methods that work with ample sufficiency for me now.

So, no, not gonna bite.

I've been using a cron job to watch/download my watch later playlist so I can view the videos on plex at a later time: https://github.com/nburns/utilities/blob/master/youtube.fish...

Theres another script that deletes watched videos from the specific youtube plex library every night.

It works great as long as you remember to remove the videos from your watched later playlist before watching them on plex. (Have yet to find out a simple way to automate playlist removal)

The tool that I was in love with for a few months before Google / YouTube effectively killed it off was mpsyt / mps-youtube.

<https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube>

It was (well, still is) a terminal-based YouTube client which provided search, locally-managed playlists, choice of playback mode (video or audio-only), downloads, and a number of other features. YouTube quashed it with an API-key limitations such that it is now effectively unusable.

But for a brief moment, YouTube content was accessible from a terminal window or console, without all the godawful dark patterns of the site itself. That was tremendously useful.

These days I'll snag videos by URL via youtube-dl/ytdl, and/or mpv (which invokes those transparently). Not quite as magickal, but still pretty good.

Hrm... Apparently there's a successor project, yewtube:

<https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube/issues/1191>

<https://iamtalhaasghar.github.io/yewtube/#installation>

I'm going to have to check that out...

Oh nice, I’m going to have to check yewtube out

I absolutely do not agree. I have some kind of legacy "youtube" account, which is not a google account. When I occasionally get switched to my Google account, which does not have my YT history of views/likes/etc, I get tremendously bad recommendations. Just the biggest youtubers with the most click-baity titles, and topics like celebrities, which I actively hate.

Also I find it gives me a ton of recommendations for videos I've already seen.

Just don't try the YouTube search and scroll down by more than six results, it will make you scream inside.

Best YT experience is to clear cookies then open a lot of YT links from HN, but when our human nature drives us watching a stupid video or two from YT recommendation then after that session do clearing cookies and open YT links from HN again.

You can delete individual videos from your watch history in the history tab to remove them from recommendation basis. Unlike the “Don’t show me videos like this” button, it works well.

Using YT via Incognito or Firefox containers, with frequently-cleared cookies, and using search as a primary discovery method ... works OK... It's not great, but it's not terrible.

The recency bias means that whatever terms you're searching become prevalent for that session. It's not possible to dismiss items or channels (idiotic on YT's part IMO), but you can at least create a short-lived preference instance unpolluted by any previous explorations.

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