Hacker News Reader

Comment by naikrovek | Hacker News Reader

agree. a lot of people I've known who say "there is nothing good on YouTube" either ignore or outright block recommended videos from showing up. there are centuries of videos worth watching on YouTube, and the more you tell YouTube what you like (by watching) the better it gets at recommending things you like.

View on HN

I deleted my youtube account last month and started new one because it stuck in a loop of feeding me bs I don’t like. I don’t know where do you find good recommendations there, for me it’s still the same bs. Maybe I am too picky, maybe you just like what it recommends, but I don’t. I guess if an engine makes enough users happy, it may be called good, but not for the other 5%.

For example I watched and subscribed to PBS ST to kick start. It instantly flooded my feed with low-quality sci-pop with “pro voice actors” voices and stupid sensational topics like “shocking alien planet” or “will our sun explode tomorrow? Emoji emoji emoji”. No astrophysics was recommended yet. Yesterday I searched for and binge-watched about hyena clan relationships, today it recommended me two quran surahs for good sleep, few colorful open-mouth-sensation morons (not sure which topic they were trying to “wow”) and a very badly compiled drama about different snow leopards chasing goats. And that’s while I’m holding my finger on “not interested” trigger for weeks.

What am I doing wrong?

I don't think you are doing anything wrong, YouTube is showing you videos that others who have watched what you've watched also watched.

if there is anything you started to watch, but didn't like, clean that stuff from your watch history.

click the "Like" button on any videos you like a lot, and favorite the very best.

sometimes YouTube's skull is very thick, but it will get a bead on you fairly soon if you do what you can to tell it what you like and don't like. that's been my experience, anyway.

Does it really use watch history? I mean when it’s off, it still collects it, just doesn’t show it to me/publicly. I know that because sometimes people watched videos at my work pc and after that I had to clean up this mess.

I tried to turn it on for a while and it didn’t make any difference. Same for likes/dislikes. The only effective methods are channel-wise, i.e. “subscribe” and “don’t recommend channel”, but then the feed becomes 90% of videos I have watched or new videos (from these channels) in which I mostly have no interest in. Other 10% are irrelevant to me.

Anyway, I’ll try to follow your advice (thanks!) with more active liking etc for a while, but my hopes are weak atm.

When I check my recommended feed it's all stuff very closely related stuff to my subscriptions and recent views, and some useless shorts. It's just an echo chamber at this point.

If I'm looking for potentially interesting content outside my core subscription views, I'm better served by turning on FM radio.

I actually want it to stop “recommending” and be a year 200x youtube when you could randomly stumble upon something interesting and follow it. Today’s youtube really feels like a chamber, a very secure one.

it's not an echo chamber unless you tell it to be.

all those videos in your watch history? others have watched those videos, too. youtube will recommend videos that those others have watched and that you have not.

the narrower the focus of your viewed videos, the narrower the focus of the recommendations will be.

My recommendations have become such an echo chamber that it actively pushes me away from using YT. It's frustrating scrolling through rows and rows of the same rehashed content from mostly the same network of creators. I wish I could turn the dial down on similar content and ratchet up interesting but unrelated content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com