I wouldn't mind if it didn't keep recommending me videos I've already watched (they're showing the red bar! they know I've watched it!) or from channels I've already said no to or on topics I've frequently said no to or on topics that I watched one video on[1] and now YouTube thinks I want a full page of similar videos.
The algorithm is, for want of some better words, absolute cack.
[1] Even if I don't finish the video or say I don't like it or say "don't recommend channel", FFHS
The (dis)like buttons are now completely pointless on Youtube, since they removed dislikes when people disliked the wrong things and made Susan (RIP) sad.
It feels like the Youtube algorithm is on drugs now. I get a lot of uninteresting recommendations of videos with no views from channels with no subscribers. A lot of recommendations of things I've already watched recently. A lot of recommendations of stuff that's extremely old (a lot of which I've already watched).
And these recommendations persist for ages. Somehow it must know after a while, after presenting me the same video 50 times that I'm not going to watch it. It's so tiresome. And god help me if I watch a few cat videos. My recs are going to be full of cats for weeks. I feel like I have to watch cat videos in incognito.
Lol, I know the pain (who doesn’t). Disliking and removing from history works for me, at least in the short term. I put history right on the sidebar with unhook extension, I believe. Sometimes I clear whole pages from there to avoid spam.
What to do with videos I don’t want to dislike, idk. It keeps recommending watch-once-already-watched videos indefinitely.
Or your in-laws watch your Netflix over their holiday visit. Now I can't tell if Netflix has generally worse quality content these days or if it's just recommending garbage to me based on what people have watched on my profile.
Netflix simply attempting to provide somewhat relevant recommendations was a massive data crunching effort years ago, and even that was "only" the official movies and television of humanity. Data take from a previous post I made 9 months ago [1] and from this article [2] and this paper on Youtube data statistics [3].
Underrated reason for tiktok's success: shorter videos lend themselves way better to recommendation algorithms, because you have better data about what users want to see
Almost all my recommended videos have tens of thousands of views or more. I don't know for sure if the algorithm usually ignores 97% of videos, but it might as well be doing that. Doing that vastly reduces the number of options and means you have lots and lots of data for each video.
It can't be that hard, once you develop a profile for a user, you just need to classify the incoming videos and cross reference their profile against the classifications.
I think it's just pretty hard to recommend things outside of what they know you like.
You can log off and look at what's popular on your country's front page. I get a couple popular music videos, clash of clans, soccer, and a whole lot of clickbait/prank/you won't believe this/pikachu face thumbnail videos.
I seen multiple creators performing A/B tests on clickbait titles/thumbnails/pokatchu faces and everywhere conclusion was the same: it's so effective for their bottom line that even when they are not comfortable with it, they cannot afford to not do it.
It wasn’t hard 10-15 years ago when it was at its peak. I suspect all it did was relaxing walk rules and simply presenting more diverse selection, which optimizes for surfing but deoptimizes for some modal group.
I also remember right-bar surfing techniques that don’t work anymore.
Part of it is also the creators optimizing for what the suggestion algorithm rewards. If you don't like the front page, you're looking for a needle in a haystack, because creators are rewarded very heavily for making the kind of content that lands on the front page and gets mass amounts of views.
Youtube doesn't have much of an incentive to show things that are not either popular in general, or that already worked on you in the past. There are some people that care strongly about that (me included), but it's a very small minority.
If the A/B test says distilled garbage is what hijacks the dopamine center the best, then you will be fed the A/B juice. And on average, people in your cohort will like it.
At the top of the homepage there's a menu bar with categories, if you scroll all the way to try right of that there's a "new to you" option. Try it out :)
Turn off watch history in your google settings. Then remove all your favorites. (save them to a playlist first to keep them) This forces the algorithm to only consider what other people who have watched the video you have open are watching when building suggestions, and this makes the suggestions dramatically better.
Youtube is one symptom that Google's business model is ethically and ecologically unsustainable. Process and store whatever nonsense to collect more user data.
