YouTube keeps pushing right wing and pseudoscience to my feed even though I have marked “Do not recommend the channel”, blocked them, reported them, and sent feedback saying the “Do not recommend” doesn’t work.
I think what it pushes on me is bad, but then occasionally I look at it with a fresh account or an account I never use. The suggestions it gives for new accounts is awful. Mostly it’s just absolute brain rot content. It’s stuff that makes “Ow My Balls!” look thoughtful.
Even if I’m not interested in 95% of what the YouTube algorithm suggests, at least with my actual account it tends not to suggest things that are actually offensive to me.
It seems to me like there’s a lot of “engagement bait” in the suggestions it gives. Sometimes that’s good, in that it’s stuff you’ll engage with because you actually find it interesting. Other times it’s stuff that keeps you engaged because it makes you angry or something. It doesn’t distinguish between “You’ll love this video!” and “You’ll hate this video, but you’ll watch the whole thing!”
But, I don’t think we can discount that a lot of people who watch YouTube are absolute idiots who have 2 living brain cells remaining. Any time your feed gets a suggestion based on what other people are engaging with, it’s inevitably going to be terrible.
My Youtube feed is utter shit. I watch one One Piece theory video, and that is all Youtube starts recommending. I watch one trauma video and that is all my feed shows. Youtube is so annoying nowadays, more akin to dementia addled mind with ADHD.
Yeah they are sure pushing some things really hard, while I have to reclick on videos I have already seen so that theme doesn’t vanish, like some stupid algorithm.
I browsed some music on youtube on a fresh, logged out device a few days ago and it was so refreshing to get recommendations based the video I’m currently watching. Like 15 years ago. Now, if I’m logged in, the recommendations next to the playing video are the same ones as on the landing page, utterly useless.
Pro tip for YouTube: don’t use the main feed. Instead, look at the recommendations under an interesting video for other ones that catch the eye, and save them into ‘watch later’ playlists by topic.
Also, don’t watch random videos under the main account, open an incognito tab for that. With these two approaches combined, YouTube gives me some great recs, especially for music.
The kinds of videos I always make sure to watch in a private tab are things like:
viral videos
videos recommended by a friend
“how do I fix this broken toilet” videos, or something else that I need once and won’t ever look at again
With that approach, my recommended videos feed is still trash, but at least it’s vaguely on-topic trash. I don’t get recommended 500 plumbing videos because one time I needed to know how to fix my toilet. It doesn’t take the fact that I watched a video that 500 million people also watched as meaning “I want to watch all the popular videos” or “I have the same tastes as everybody else who watched this video”.
I can always tell when I screwed up and watched an off-topic video in my normal account because the recommendations go to shit for a while.
I deleted my whole history last week, and within a day YouTube was recommending me anime openings for things I have not had any interest in for 10 years. I’m pretty sure it’s at least partially bullshit.
I ended up just deleting my whole Google account. I’m making do with an RSS reader and yt-dlp for now, but I’m already so fed up with that whole process that I’m making a simple QT app that does the RSS reading and yt-dlp calling for me. Akregator fucking sucks, by the way. Every time I shut down my PC without closing Akregator first, it loses its shit and does not remember any read statuses.
Around 825 AD, Persian scientist and polymath al-Khwarizmiwrote kitāb al-ḥisāb al-hindī (“Book of Indian computation”) and kitab al-jam’ wa’l-tafriq al-ḥisāb al-hindī (“Addition and subtraction in Indian arithmetic”). In the early 12th century, Latin translations of these texts involving the Hindu–Arabic numeral system and arithmetic appeared, for example Liber Alghoarismi de practica arismetrice, attributed to John of Seville, and Liber Algoritmi de numero Indorum, attributed to Adelard of Bath.[8] Here, alghoarismi or algoritmi is the Latinization of Al-Khwarizmi’s name;[9] the text starts with the phrase Dixit Algoritmi, or “Thus spoke Al-Khwarizmi”.
So in referring to what someone’s true soul is, you can say “Thus spoke The Algorithm”
is the accumulation of one’s youtube feed truly the deepest gaze into the soul?
YouTube keeps pushing right wing and pseudoscience to my feed even though I have marked “Do not recommend the channel”, blocked them, reported them, and sent feedback saying the “Do not recommend” doesn’t work.
Get FreeTube and never sign in again. Only get served videos from channels you subscribe to (in the app, not on your account)
This is the way. I use Freetube on Desktop and PipePipe for mobile.
I think what it pushes on me is bad, but then occasionally I look at it with a fresh account or an account I never use. The suggestions it gives for new accounts is awful. Mostly it’s just absolute brain rot content. It’s stuff that makes “Ow My Balls!” look thoughtful.
Even if I’m not interested in 95% of what the YouTube algorithm suggests, at least with my actual account it tends not to suggest things that are actually offensive to me.
It seems to me like there’s a lot of “engagement bait” in the suggestions it gives. Sometimes that’s good, in that it’s stuff you’ll engage with because you actually find it interesting. Other times it’s stuff that keeps you engaged because it makes you angry or something. It doesn’t distinguish between “You’ll love this video!” and “You’ll hate this video, but you’ll watch the whole thing!”
But, I don’t think we can discount that a lot of people who watch YouTube are absolute idiots who have 2 living brain cells remaining. Any time your feed gets a suggestion based on what other people are engaging with, it’s inevitably going to be terrible.
just being in a certain demographic will do that
Yes, absolutely. If you look at my history, it shows nothing but repeated watches of the dog of wisdom.
Says a lot about me, I think.
My Youtube feed is utter shit. I watch one One Piece theory video, and that is all Youtube starts recommending. I watch one trauma video and that is all my feed shows. Youtube is so annoying nowadays, more akin to dementia addled mind with ADHD.
Yeah they are sure pushing some things really hard, while I have to reclick on videos I have already seen so that theme doesn’t vanish, like some stupid algorithm.
I browsed some music on youtube on a fresh, logged out device a few days ago and it was so refreshing to get recommendations based the video I’m currently watching. Like 15 years ago. Now, if I’m logged in, the recommendations next to the playing video are the same ones as on the landing page, utterly useless.
Pro tip for YouTube: don’t use the main feed. Instead, look at the recommendations under an interesting video for other ones that catch the eye, and save them into ‘watch later’ playlists by topic.
Also, don’t watch random videos under the main account, open an incognito tab for that. With these two approaches combined, YouTube gives me some great recs, especially for music.
The kinds of videos I always make sure to watch in a private tab are things like:
With that approach, my recommended videos feed is still trash, but at least it’s vaguely on-topic trash. I don’t get recommended 500 plumbing videos because one time I needed to know how to fix my toilet. It doesn’t take the fact that I watched a video that 500 million people also watched as meaning “I want to watch all the popular videos” or “I have the same tastes as everybody else who watched this video”.
I can always tell when I screwed up and watched an off-topic video in my normal account because the recommendations go to shit for a while.
It’s also important to do the same with links from social media.
Yeah, that’s basically what I meant by viral videos or ones recommended by a friend.
You can go into your yt history and delete videos and it will fix the recommendations
I deleted my whole history last week, and within a day YouTube was recommending me anime openings for things I have not had any interest in for 10 years. I’m pretty sure it’s at least partially bullshit.
I ended up just deleting my whole Google account. I’m making do with an RSS reader and yt-dlp for now, but I’m already so fed up with that whole process that I’m making a simple QT app that does the RSS reading and yt-dlp calling for me. Akregator fucking sucks, by the way. Every time I shut down my PC without closing Akregator first, it loses its shit and does not remember any read statuses.
I just browse on incognito (without an account). The home page is blank every time.
Yeah. Fuck YouTube and everything, but it’s still possible to curate a decent feed.
Naaah. Nowadays YouTube just represents the pinnacle of enshittification. Not something I’d admit publicly to using.
It is when a person’s depth is measured in teaspoons.
So in referring to what someone’s true soul is, you can say “Thus spoke The Algorithm”
It is to a smoothbrained techbro.
The deepest gaze into my soul is apparently that I enjoy disc golf, competitive pokemon battles and asian street food.