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...
