YouTube is the worst for this.
You barely get results related to your search terms at all before it shows you blocks of completely interrelated "shorts" and then just a feed of your subscriptions and recommended content.
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
751 points (99.2% liked)
196
3030 readers
2361 users here now
Community Rules
You must post before you leave
Be nice. Assume others have good intent (within reason).
Block or ignore posts, comments, and users that irritate you in some way rather than engaging. Report if they are actually breaking community rules.
Use content warnings and/or mark as NSFW when appropriate. Most posts with content warnings likely need to be marked NSFW.
Most 196 posts are memes, shitposts, cute images, or even just recent things that happened, etc. There is no real theme, but try to avoid posts that are very inflammatory, offensive, very low quality, or very "off topic".
Bigotry is not allowed, this includes (but is not limited to): Homophobia, Transphobia, Racism, Sexism, Abelism, Classism, or discrimination based on things like Ethnicity, Nationality, Language, or Religion.
Avoid shilling for corporations, posting advertisements, or promoting exploitation of workers.
Proselytization, support, or defense of authoritarianism is not welcome. This includes but is not limited to: imperialism, nationalism, genocide denial, ethnic or racial supremacy, fascism, Nazism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc.
Avoid AI generated content.
Avoid misinformation.
Avoid incomprehensible posts.
No threats or personal attacks.
No spam.
Moderator Guidelines
Moderator Guidelines
- Don’t be mean to users. Be gentle or neutral.
- Most moderator actions which have a modlog message should include your username.
- When in doubt about whether or not a user is problematic, send them a DM.
- Don’t waste time debating/arguing with problematic users.
- Assume the best, but don’t tolerate sealioning/just asking questions/concern trolling.
- Ask another mod to take over cases you struggle with, if you get tired, or when things get personal.
- Ask the other mods for advice when things get complicated.
- Share everything you do in the mod matrix, both so several mods aren't unknowingly handling the same issues, but also so you can receive feedback on what you intend to do.
- Don't rush mod actions. If a case doesn't need to be handled right away, consider taking a short break before getting to it. This is to say, cool down and make room for feedback.
- Don’t perform too much moderation in the comments, except if you want a verdict to be public or to ask people to dial a convo down/stop. Single comment warnings are okay.
- Send users concise DMs about verdicts about them, such as bans etc, except in cases where it is clear we don’t want them at all, such as obvious transphobes. No need to notify someone they haven’t been banned of course.
- Explain to a user why their behavior is problematic and how it is distressing others rather than engage with whatever they are saying. Ask them to avoid this in the future and send them packing if they do not comply.
- First warn users, then temp ban them, then finally perma ban them when they break the rules or act inappropriately. Skip steps if necessary.
- Use neutral statements like “this statement can be considered transphobic” rather than “you are being transphobic”.
- No large decisions or actions without community input (polls or meta posts f.ex.).
- Large internal decisions (such as ousting a mod) might require a vote, needing more than 50% of the votes to pass. Also consider asking the community for feedback.
- Remember you are a voluntary moderator. You don’t get paid. Take a break when you need one. Perhaps ask another moderator to step in if necessary.
founded 3 months ago
MODERATORS
Yup. It's the worst change they've ever made to YouTube search.
And I don't even know why, 9 times out of ten it shows me videos that I've already watched! I'm not gonna watch them again YouTube!
I've experienced this, but only occasionally, and I can't figure out what causes it. One time the search returned good results, and a refresh returned garbage. I have no idea why.
They do it on purpose.
Next time you search, see if you can spot it: If you scroll far enough they ignore your query and show you recommendations based on your subs and history.
Sometimes you barely get 4 or 5 video results before they turn to junk. It's maddening.
A lot of these times departments are trying to justify their own existence by using data in self serving ways.
If you are reading a spreadsheet on user data you might notice that people are going into search, quickly finding something and leaving the site.
Your boss is screaming at you that the higher ups want more "engagement" so you start tweaking the search.
After a few button presses you see that on average people are searching, clicking on a video and watching for a bit, watching another video, going back into search and looking up more videos, scrolling and then finally clicking and watching a full video.
You run to your boss and brags that search now has 3x engagement as people are watching more videos for longer per search.
We all get a promotion and celebrate how much better search is now that people are spending time in it longer.
Have to tell it to only show videos and then it’s a little better
The best way is to use google and site search it
YouTube app's user interface is the worst.
My current pet peeve is that every time I start it up, I go "shit, did this get injected with some weird shopping malware? ...oh that's just the 'tuber merch bullshit thing, false alarm."
I'm starting up the app to watch videos, not to go clothes shopping, for cripes sake.
"Dark green is a color that is both dark and green. It is important to note that when choosing colors, dark green is associated with plant life, particularly trees. "
"Dark green is one of the 7 colors. A helpful redditor says you should kill yourself."
Listen, brown, light green, red, and pink paid for advertising and that matters much more than your search query
Maybe I’m bad at colors
Destroy the advertising industry. Burn it alllll down
my favorite thought exercise about advertising:
"without it, we would have to pay out of pocket for ad supported services!"
ok but when a company pays for advertising, where are they getting that money from? an added cost on the products we're buying! so we're paying for product A, we're paying extra for product A to pay for product B with advertising spending AND we're funding product A's marketing department to make the ads on top of that
remove the advertising and we would pay less for product A, we could then afford to pay for B directly AND we would all pay less overall because we take ad department employees and costs out of the equation. we're literally all paying more for everything overall by having some things "free with ads" than if we just paid for everything in the first place with no ads
I totally agree, and I never understood how adding a parasitic middle-man is supposed to make things cheaper.
"without it, we would have to pay out of pocket for ad supported services!"
Actually, I don't think we would for a lot of things. The internet existed long before it was advertising funded. Web-pages used to be things that people made because they were passionate about what they put on those pages. Advertising only came later.
Hell, there are still plenty of things that people build and maintain because they like it, not because they make money from it. How many people work for free on things like Wikipedia, FOSS, Fediverse, etc. just because they want to see it succeed?
load more comments
(49 replies)
Its amazing how many times I've gotten properly angry trying to google 'specific but not at all niche or complex thing' and spent half an hour only finding things tangentially related to it and not useful in the slightest. I swear we're rapidly approaching the point where even this meme will be genuine reality.
Missing the paragraph of ai generated slop at the top explaining how dark green is the light shade of a mixture of yellow and dark.
I really hate the modern internet for this.
The search on e621 works fine👍
turns out when a search engine is built by humans (tagging and tagged content) it works
honestly would love a web4 that says “fuck web3 and everything it stands for like algorithms and crypto we are doing federation and booru-style community building now”
load more comments
(1 replies)
Boolean operators are meaningless these days.
Man even quotes don't work to make it search for just the term you know you are looking for.
load more comments
(1 replies)
There's a good article about how a few years ago the search division at Google rolled out improvements to search but then the ad division complained that revenue was being impacted because people spent less time looking through search results and thus ended up seeing and clicking fewer ads. The executives came out on the side of the ad division and Google rolled back a bunch of those improvement apparently.
I guess this mostly came out in some court case where a bunch of emails about it were released
it's not just google. over in windows-land, informational text and documentation that used to be presented in locally-stored help files or displayed on screen are now links to bing searches that open in edge. because having documentation isn't profitable, i guess.
I really want a search that works like this.
- There are at least three Boolean operators:
and,not,or. They're well documented, users can easily see how to use them, and they apply to groups of search terms or individual search terms as the user wants. - Lack of a Boolean operator should be interpreted as "and".
- Case is simply not taken into account.
- Extremely limited approximate string matching, that can be turned off for individual terms or for the whole. And if you turn it off, the search engine should respect it.
- No semantic bullshit, stop assuming what the user "means" dammit. At most if the scope of the search is extremely limited, have a list of synonyms, but let the user turn it off.
- No profiling/personalisation. At most let the user filter results by language. (inb4: don't assume user language, ask them.)
Make it predictable. Make it procedural. Make it so users can actually find what they requested, instead of your assumptions / bullshit over what they want.
I haven't had a useful search result without the word "reddit" in it in years. Even that became less effective when they changed their API
load more comments
(1 replies)
~~isn''t that the old windows logo~~
Nah, that's just "recommended for you" based on your personal interests. Trust the algorithm. It knows better what you want than you yourself! /s
view more: next ›