It's sad because I remember being able to find new and interesting creators passively. Now the main page is all corporate BS and the algorithm locks you in. We played a bit of WOW Classic last year and all of a sudden I was just flooded with Asmongold videos and videos of people clipping and replaying Asmongold. It took a day of "never show this again" to make it stop.
This seems pretty tautological. What you watch will reflect your reccomendations because there is a causal relationship there, unless you never use youtube for discovery. I alledge that what people spend time watching is more heavily shaped by reccomendations than they are aware of.
Personal experience sharing time. I use YouTube heavily, and even pay for YT Premium.
The other day a little modal appeared on the side of youtube.com desktop saying something like, "Curious for new stuff? Explore content that isn't what you usually watch."
It ended up being sorta like an alternate reality. It was all the topics I usually watch, but with different channels I don't normally see at all. In other words, it was as if all the channels I normally watch don't exist, what else would exist to fill the void.
YouTube premium is the best streaming service. There’s so much content of high quality content that’s relatively niche. I recently stumbled on SummoningSalt’s videos about speed runners and I can’t imagine any other medium that would create incentives for that type of content. Of course you don’t need premium, but no ads is great! I’ve gone on to support people on patreon from YouTube, from cgp grey to stuffmadehere. I can’t imagine finding that kind of content on Hulu, Netflix, et al. It’s possible there are YouTube alternatives as I’m quite old compared to a teenager.
When opening videos that are sent to me by others, I always use a private window, so my main account is pretty low "variance".
When I find a creator I like, I do a "fake binge", by queuing all their recent videos and some old ones too and playing them unattended.
I also try to minimize my use of the recommendation sidebar, since it usually shows content related to the current video rather than the more general recommendations of the home page.
When something foreign sneaks its way to my home page, I immediately click "not interested", paying attention to not hover the thumbnail.
Overall, Youtube has got me trained pretty well, but at least I get some nice recommendations out of it, so much so in fact that over half the recommendations I get are usually videos I have already watched (even if Youtube thinks I haven't yet for whatever reason).
When you depart from your usual intake, some departures are a lot more powerful than others. Sometimes you watch something new and YouTube spends days pushing similar stuff into your face. Other times you watch something new and only see one or two relevant recommendations mixed into your usual fare. My hypothesis is that YouTube knows that particular topics and particular content are associated with usage patterns that make money for them, and the algorithm is alert to any possibility of pushing users into those patterns.
What they watch is shaped by recommendations, but I think most are also aware of it. For example, when I want to watch something about basketball I typically go to YouTube and there are recommendations of what to watch. There are probably millions of basketball videos, but YouTube is going to show me a handful based on previous videos I've watched and liked. I'm not surprised to see certain content creators more than others. But at the same time if they did a poor job of recommendation (like Spotify) then I'd probably just go and search through channels that I know I like.
The Explore page seems to be globally-curated stuff not based on personal taste, so it seems like the opposite of recommended.
And is that the main page for you? When I open the website or the Android app I get "Home". "Explore" is a separate tab. "Home" is pretty much filled with recommendations from channels I've watched recently, no corporate stuff (excluding ads).
I do see the issue of recommendations being flooded with one topic you've watched recently, but I generally don't have too much of a problem with it. When the recommendations stop being relevant/interesting to me, I tend to shut off YouTube.
yea but its like 100% contend that is corporate... if i want to watch late night talk shows i would do that on my TV.... and most of those videos don't get the most views anyways on YouTube so its basically YouTube promoting corporate media
> Mine is all pretty much filled with content that matches what I watch.
it should know that I don't want to watch the same things every day over and over relentlessly. There's hardly anything (by topic) I want to watch again the next day, except some news and political commentary which I do watch and it NEVER offers me.
Anything news related is mostly corporate now when searching. Either it's a mainstream news channel for serious news or one of the checkmarked talk shows for satire.
if you try watch any independent news, YouTube will never recommend more of it but will give you MSNBC,CNN etc its bad, years ago the algorithm was very good,it would give you a mix of what your into and new interesting stuff now it seems like its pushing corporate content.
The majority of "independent news" have a highly partisan or highly unreliable tilt (both to the Left and to the Right): https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/
Interestingly enough, most people complain about the opposite: that if you watch some piece of slightly tilted piece of content on YouTube, the recommendation goes wholehog and pushes you towards the same radicalization direction, and so you start by watching someone complaining about Feminist Frequency and before you notice you're getting recommended White Nationalist content.
If anything it's probably good that if you're watching "independent news", that the algorithm tries to moderate you with some mainstream content...
I’m hitting never show this again on one type of content all the time. There are days where my feed consists of like 33% of that stuff and it happens all the time. I’m at the point where it only recommends me my subscribed channels or the stuff I tell it not to show at all some days too. It’s so frustrating.
I think there are some intersections of interest that make the algorithm hypothesize that you're a certain kind of person. Like if you watch a lot of strength training content, and then you watch one lecture on Heidegger, YouTube is like, oh, we finally figured this guy out, he's a white supremacist or at the very least a gun nut. But if I watch a video about cupcakes, I'll only get a few suggestions about baking, not any associated interests, because cupcakes don't combine with any of my other interests to trigger a stereotype.
I always get those "calming meditation" music videos in recommendations, or "5 Powerful Psalms to Help You Sleep" which is on my homepage right now. Every video is from a different channel named something like "Calming Truth", and I can tell at one glance of the thumbnail that it's one of "those" videos.
I have never, ever watched one, and I always click Not Interested, or Don't Recommend Channel. But they keep on coming. There seems to be an endless supply of them.
As someone who had a bit of a YouTube hobby and is trying to get back into it, I've generally found that the algorithm brings me a larger audience than I would have otherwise. I've published three videos in the last 28 days, and my analytics says I've gotten 5200 views across all my content in that time. I have about a hundred subscribers. Search is still king, but 15% of those views have come from suggested. I've got a 7.8% CTR so it's suggesting it to quite a few people.
It seems like YouTube has realized that winner-takes-all is bad for the health of the platform, and is trying to grow smaller creators. I suspect they won't do this, because they realize that it ultimately strangles growth. Mr. Beast (for example) is already spending about $4MM/month on making videos; if they allowed this kind of stuff, well... not many people could compete.
After I made the post I remembered they already do it. Brands can pay to sponsor existing videos that put them in a good light. These recomendations do have an [Ad] tag, but the extra views and impressions are allow to feed into the algorithm which then doesn't have to maintain the [Ad] tag going forward:
Occasionally I will see a "Rising Creator" section on the Explore/Trending page showcasing a single channel. This channel typically has less than 5k subscribers and posts regularly.
That's why I started using multiple accounts, makes it a lot easier to keep the algorithm on topic and not get side tracked just because you searched for a song or game once.
In the end the core problem with the recommendation system is simply that there is only one list of recommendations, which makes it damn near impossible to switch to a different topic unless you start account hopping. The new topic-bar helps a little, but still offers no way to get rid of an unwanted topic completely.
„Using multiple accounts“
„Makes it easier“
That may work indeed, but i wouldnt call it easy in any way, or convenient.
Instead try to subscribe to as many channels you find interesting as possible. Thats what worked for me in the end getting rid of the clutter that is suggested.
I find subscriptions completely useless when it comes to recommendation, as the recommendations seem to be build up of what I watched in the last week, while my subscriptions have little to no visible impact at all.
There are numerous channels I am subscribe to that I haven't seen in months or years, just because I didn't watch them for a week or two and they fell out of the recommendation cycle.
You started playing WoW Classic and it was able to recommend WoW-related videos. It did its job. What else do you expect from a recommendation system? Predict what you're interested next or what you're going to do tomorrow? That's not recommendation, that's mass surveillance and psychological manipulation.
But on a useful note, maybe YouTube needs to provide a function to see a list of random videos that are unexplored or new.
Imagine if I went to church for the first time in a decade and the next day three monks show up at my door with a cassock and vows.
...that's the YouTube algorithm in my experience. I show a passing interest in one thing so it floods me with every drop of content they have on the subject to the exclusion of things that I have watched every week for years.
There are creators I watch every week or every drop. Somehow the algorithm chooses to not surface their videos regularly and surface 46,123 videos on Terraform because I watched a quick tutorial.
> What else do you expect from a recommendation system? Predict what you're interested next or what you're going to do tomorrow?
Actually, I think they kind of are trying to do this (in a sense), if you read the article:
> Our system then compares your viewing habits with those that are similar to you and uses that information to suggest other content you may want to watch. So if you like tennis videos and our system notices that others who like the same tennis videos as you also enjoy jazz videos, you may be recommended jazz videos, even if you’ve never watched a single one before.
