You can disable your watch history and then you only get related videos to the current video as far as I can tell. It does remove all of the videos from the home page, but I've been using youtube like this for 6 years and I don't mind it one bit. I have an alternate account with watch history enabled and I look at the home page every once in a while (obviously my history is very stale), it doesn't seem like anything of value was lost and I definitely never have to see a Mr. Beast thumbnail on my normal account.
wewewedxfgdf 11 hours ago [-]
It's a pity YouTube doesn't let people built innovative interfaces to this treasure trove.
It's so frustrating that their interface is so very bad for discovery and exploration.
littlexsparkee 11 hours ago [-]
It feels like I stumble upon gems in spite of their UI and have been trying to spend less time there to avoid the timesink otherwise. If it's not saved on my watch later / in my subscriptions or recommended to me credibly, it's probably a waste of time.
krapp 3 hours ago [-]
Youtube is actually really good for finding new, non-mainstream music in my experience.
sph 2 hours ago [-]
No, you soon realize it’s promoting the same ‘niche’ videos to a large cohort. You and half a million people worldwide have that video recommended from the same unknown Russian indie rock band
krapp 2 hours ago [-]
So what?
Either it appeals to my interests or it doesn't. Why should I care if a million other people get it recommended as well?
kardos 22 minutes ago [-]
Well it won't be 'non-mainstream' for one
krapp 11 minutes ago [-]
Sure it would. No matter how many people see, say, Shpongle on their timeline, they're never going to be mainstream. No one is going to be talking about 空夜coo:ya in the same conversation as Taylor Swift or Bruno Mars. Being slightly more visible in the algorithm for a brief period isn't going mainstream.
And even if that were the case, again, so what? If Youtube makes good non-mainstream music more popular, that's still a good thing. That's exactly what one should want a recommendation algorithm to do.
I'm trying to see the problem here and I can't.
bill_from_tampa 3 hours ago [-]
I've tried doing a google AI search for some youtube video subjects, and get interesting results. It does not seem to integrate my youtube viewing history or subscriptions, so far as I can tell. Like any AI search you have to compose the prompt carefully, but if google AI has access to the titles or description of youtube videos that may be a path to searching success?
pixel_popping 4 hours ago [-]
People have the illusion that they choose, but they don't, when you know the number of videos uploaded and the millions of videos with high view count, you quickly understand that you are in an echo-chamber.
expedition32 3 hours ago [-]
Life is too short to hang out with people you don't like.
If I were a vampire I'd have no problem spending a few decades studying the Torah o learning Sanskrit but as it is one has to efficiently manage one's time.
l72 5 hours ago [-]
I find youtube's interface so incredibly frustrating and hostile. Even when I know what I want to watch, I find it very hard to actually get to it. On their Roku app, search for The Daily Show, and try and watch the latest clips. It doesn't show them in that order and browsing the clips is frustratingly hard. Their web interface, especially mobile, is equally as bad.
I've given up on trying to use youtube's interface and now just rely on recommendations + rss (via freshrss) or tubearchivist to keep me up to date and organize the videos.
CodesInChaos 11 hours ago [-]
What particularly annoys me is that the sidebar used to show videos related to the video I'm watching. Nowadays perhaps a quarter of those links are relevant, the rest are useless shit.
And then youtube has the gall to suggest that if I want useful links there, I should turn on browsing history. You don't need history to suggest related videos!
----
Google ads went though a similar decline ten or twenty years ago. Google Adwords used to be related to the page they were showing on, and not based on your behaviour.
noisem4ker 7 hours ago [-]
You can still manually switch to a "Related" tab. On the mobile app, you scroll down a bit and the tab header appears. In the browser, there's probably a way to automate it with an user script.
mnky9800n 10 hours ago [-]
I was really hoping that the article would end with a tool or new interface to explore YouTube. But I guess the author only is building one but didn’t realise anything yet.
coolThingsFirst 9 hours ago [-]
Turns out quality is a subjective metric which is hard to quantify.
casey2 6 hours ago [-]
There is no technical solution to a social problem, rather the level of abstraction is wrong. Keep hammering these companies with regulation until the evil people leave due to lack of infinite free money.
yahootube 3 hours ago [-]
We need Jerry and David's Guide to Youtube Videos! Bring back yellow pages, web directories, and other listing services. The "algorithm" is an anti consumer pattern scheming to maximize the publisher experience at the cost of the user experience. I wish I could just easily search for videos and filter by date ranges, length, views. That would let me avoid all the terrible AI slop!
altairprime 27 minutes ago [-]
Google already ripped off curators once to build PageRank, the first of the modern AI unpaid content thefts. They’ll just do it again if you bring back listing services. Either you paywall these new indexes like Consumer Reports, or you get insta-sherlocked by AI agents — and now that Google is scanning print books for training data, you can’t even escape them by releasing it as a print catalog. If I were trying to do this, I’d circulate a list of good channels indexed by call numbers to librarians and politely ask them to keep it behind their counters when they share it around to other librarians, so that they have an advantage over the bots.
casey2 6 hours ago [-]
This complaint is factually false. Click on the ask button and you get a Gemini chat instance that can recommend qualitatively similar videos with a description.
Running with the c compiler example why not go the forge hosting the project, look at the contributors and forks, scrape all their socials and download their profiles/videos.
jiggawatts 15 hours ago [-]
If you want to know if this is just an accident of the design, or a purposeful trap, just know that it is no longer possible to browse while not logged in!
If you log in, you get the personalised funnel.
If you don't log in, you get a blank page and a search box.
That's evil.
It's tantamount to censorship, of the worst kind, deliberately sending all viewers directly to their own personal echo chambers without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
As a random example: I now get only Australian news channels recommended to me. I have to go to heroic lengths to see the BBC or any US source, let alone something more out there like Al Jazeera.
abhikul0 9 hours ago [-]
The blank page is what you'd get if you cleared your Watch History. I use this to watch a new-to-me topic/channel or just a video that I know I'd only watch once and don't want in my recommended history in Incognito mode(although you could just remove that video manually from history too).
This makes it easy to somewhat steer the algorithm, I just open and scrub through a few videos of the same "kind" that I'm interested in and this then makes the youtube homepage a bit wieldy. This still populates unrelated videos but at a lower rate.
Bender 4 hours ago [-]
I never log in, ever. It's blank until I open a bookmarked YT channel or two then it's all the things related to that channels user base. If I start with news I get propaganda. If I happen to start with an emergency preparedness channel then I get almost entirely AI hype conspiracy videos which tells me what that company thinks of preppers. If I start with one of the popular influencers then I get all the jack-ass type content. If I start with geo-politics then I get financial investment grifters. If I start with movie reviews I get 100% fake AI generated movie review channels for movies that do not exist. About the only topic I can start with that will stay mostly related and on-topic without much AI yet is firearms. I am just guessing that maybe AI botters are afraid their AI will generate something firearm related that will get them kicked out of the algo.
Regardless of what content I start with I get lots of shorts with women in seductive poses and minimal clothing with pure click-bait titles. Once in a while if I start with a comedian then I might see a short suggested to me of a comedian but with cringy music added to what they are saying so I am not falling for that a second time.
Basically the main page is useless to me. I just rely on really old bookmarks which means I will rarely ever see new channels unless one of the people I already watch talks about them and maybe that's good enough. Thankfully some of the people I watch are also on Rumble.
hulitu 7 hours ago [-]
> That's evil.
No. It is the normalization of evil.
> without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
This is the point. The point of circus, is not to stimulate your intellect, but to keep your intellect busy.
Different opinions are dangerous.
heuretic 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 18:14:08 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It's so frustrating that their interface is so very bad for discovery and exploration.
Either it appeals to my interests or it doesn't. Why should I care if a million other people get it recommended as well?
And even if that were the case, again, so what? If Youtube makes good non-mainstream music more popular, that's still a good thing. That's exactly what one should want a recommendation algorithm to do.
I'm trying to see the problem here and I can't.
If I were a vampire I'd have no problem spending a few decades studying the Torah o learning Sanskrit but as it is one has to efficiently manage one's time.
I've given up on trying to use youtube's interface and now just rely on recommendations + rss (via freshrss) or tubearchivist to keep me up to date and organize the videos.
And then youtube has the gall to suggest that if I want useful links there, I should turn on browsing history. You don't need history to suggest related videos!
----
Google ads went though a similar decline ten or twenty years ago. Google Adwords used to be related to the page they were showing on, and not based on your behaviour.
Running with the c compiler example why not go the forge hosting the project, look at the contributors and forks, scrape all their socials and download their profiles/videos.
If you log in, you get the personalised funnel.
If you don't log in, you get a blank page and a search box.
That's evil.
It's tantamount to censorship, of the worst kind, deliberately sending all viewers directly to their own personal echo chambers without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
As a random example: I now get only Australian news channels recommended to me. I have to go to heroic lengths to see the BBC or any US source, let alone something more out there like Al Jazeera.
This makes it easy to somewhat steer the algorithm, I just open and scrub through a few videos of the same "kind" that I'm interested in and this then makes the youtube homepage a bit wieldy. This still populates unrelated videos but at a lower rate.
Regardless of what content I start with I get lots of shorts with women in seductive poses and minimal clothing with pure click-bait titles. Once in a while if I start with a comedian then I might see a short suggested to me of a comedian but with cringy music added to what they are saying so I am not falling for that a second time.
Basically the main page is useless to me. I just rely on really old bookmarks which means I will rarely ever see new channels unless one of the people I already watch talks about them and maybe that's good enough. Thankfully some of the people I watch are also on Rumble.
No. It is the normalization of evil.
> without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
This is the point. The point of circus, is not to stimulate your intellect, but to keep your intellect busy. Different opinions are dangerous.