Ask Lemmy

I'm constantly adding and removing subscribed channels. A few I added recently with many hours of content are Contrapoints, Tom Nichols, and Ordinary Things. Very informative and entertaining.

You clearly have the intelligence to spell the words 'algorithm,' 'aggressively,' and 'the.' The algorithm is not meant for you. It is made to suck children and idiots down into machine induced ADHD. If you have standards of any kind, you reject the obvious trash and end up where you are. You have my congratulations and my sympathies.

I hate their setup. The way they recommend the same creators over and over again if you just watch a minute of their content makes it so bland and repetitive.

When the algorithm stops reccomending new stuff I take a look at !videos@lemmy.world or r/mealtimevideos@reddit.com and find something cool that isn't in my recommended.

A lot of it is AI slop now too

The youtube algorithm used to show users a smattering of all the types of content on the site. Everyone was getting random shit from one public algorithm.

Now, it only shows you the tiny section related to the search data you seeded your own personal algorithm with.

People need to learn to subscribe to channels they like and then actually use the subscription tab.

Don't just let YT suggest videos to you. be active in your content consumption

The moment I hear the AI voice, I instantly jump to the next video.

The algorithm just really sucks. Sometimes it'll suggest good stuff, but when it next decides to update it's just all trash for weeks.

Unfortunately, quality content is hard to find on youtube, especially because the algorithm will focus more on already established creators and channels. Videos under 20k views and creators under 1k subs almost never appear, even if they're better related to what you're watching than what's being shown on the sidebar.

One thing you can try is to check the related videos while browsing incognito, or with Piped/NewPipe or Invidious, as these will ensure the recommendations are as "plain new account" as possible.

My personal experience, whenever I watch anything game related while logged in, YT will throw dozens of Brazilian Roblox/Minecraft videos as related, even if I'm watching english videos. I block them, refresh the site and another batch of similar shit shows up. I check the same video on Invidious and a different set of videos show as related.

The algorithm seems to have gotten progressively worse in terms of just continuing to show you the same stuff, especially recently. What it recommends me isn't worse, just more repetitive. A page refresh doesn't make much change.

Youtube's algorithm is now Show the user videos like the last two they watched and NOTHING ELSE

I can feel you. YouTube is my "tv" and I've been watching it for years. But lately the quality of the suggestions has gone completely out of whack, imo. I scroll through the suggestions and find nothing worth watching. Sometimes i try to improve it by hitting 'not interested' or 'don't suggest this channel', but it's not helping.

Maybe Spez has bribed Google to show us rubbish, so we'd return to Reddit?

99% of channels suck. Its only the select few educational channels that actually have content. Other than watching Youtube, I pirate a lot of TV shows and movies.

Sounds like you're letting the algorithm do all the work. You can't trust that shit. If you know what genre of content you want then you need to research what actual human creators make it. If it's nerd stuff, look to see who's got content on Nebula. If it's stuff similar to (insert creator here) or on a similar topic, then search or ask around for suggestions on similar creators. And if it's AI slop or TTS bullshit, just pretend that it doesn't exist and move on.

The algorithm isn't there to suggest you something enjoyable to watch.

It is designed to keep you on the site as long as possible by suggesting you what has kept other people on the site longer who also have watched what you watched, maybe.

Use the not interested button very liberally when it recommends you something you don't want to see.

What channels do you like?

I know you just came to ask about the algorithm but I’d be happy to suggest you some great channels (100% human in content) if you could tell me your interests!

There are some extensions that make a big difference.

"Blocktube" sounds like one you'd get a lot of use out of - all it does is add a block video and block channel option to the drop down menu of each video.

Get that AI voice or any other content that indicates the entire channel is garbage, just block the entire channel in one click. Be aggressive with blocking channels, and you'll start noticing much less trash in your feed.

Block video is more useful for the channels you're subscribed to -once you've watched a video, block it as a kind of "mark as read" button. That way your recommended videos won't keep showing you shit you've already seen.

What types of videos do you like? I have so much high quality content available I literally cannot watch it all.

my experience is that is def not made by competent people, and i have to train the algorithm by selecting garbage and tell it to shove it up and never recommend it while im alive...and MAYBE in the future im gonna get a watchable video

There is a lot of garbage out there, but also some really good stuff. I like to stay logged out and clear history occasionally to try to keep from getting too algorithm bubbled. It's not just automatically filtering content by subject matter, it also filters by length if you watch mostly long form videos you'll get more long recommendations, and same for short videos. Try using more generic search terms for hobbies, interests, topics, etc you'll get a little more variety in search results and won't rely as much on the algorithm to filter recommendations.

On desktop there's a vertical triple dot button under videos that allows you to tell the algorithm that you're not interested in that video or the entire channel. I assume there's something similar on mobile. That somewhat reduces suggestions like the unwanted video in future.

When you refresh, you'll see a different page of videos. If you do this to enough videos, you might start getting recommended videos you've already watched. You can give that as a reason for not being interested, so you can make those go away as well.

Speaking of which, you can also remove videos from your Watch History to prevent the algorithm from using those as examples. That's often another way to effectively banish a channel where you only watched the one video.

Be aware that (as far as I know) the only way to undo directly telling YouTube you're not interested in a channel is to completely erase your Watch History. Maybe finding and watching a few videos of theirs might also work, but I haven't yet found the need to put that to the test.

What’s with the “aggressively American” AI narrator-voice?

I hate the AI voiceover feature. It's genuinely baffling that YT released it. It sounds worse than microsoft sam and is one of the buggiest messes I have ever seen on the platform.

For the people who don't know: you can deactivate it by selecting a different audio track. And it will mostly remember the selection.

I know creators who started to deactivate it for their channel, as it genuinely made people unsubscribe, because they thought it was done by the channel