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2023-02-06, 05:45 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2010
Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
Has anyone else noticed their YouTube feed and/or "next video" recommendations being noticeably poorer in the past week or so?
I'm going through my subscriptions watching good recent videos, and working on coming up with some good searches to "retrain" the algorithm. It seems to be working a bit, but I have a long way to go through my plan of action on this. But, I was wondering if this had happened to anyone else recently, or it's just me?
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2023-02-06, 05:49 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2009
- Location
- Washington D.C.
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 2
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2023-02-06, 06:02 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2007
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
While I have not experienced this myself (possibly because of generally using Youtube less), there is a claim that Youtube pushes certain content even when it's against the users interests. Personally, many times I found out about a new show because Youtube recommended to me a video complaining about it, which would definitely not what I would put in my recommended videos if I had full control over it.
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2023-02-07, 01:04 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2010
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
Some of that is fine, of course. Lately, though, the nearly all of my recommended videos have just looked uninteresting, boring, etc. This, despite the fact that when I look though recent videos from my subscriptions, there are quite a few that look interesting but haven't been in my recommended feed or next video suggestions.
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2023-02-07, 04:32 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2007
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
I guess it's tinfoil hat time. Besides being uninteresting, can you find other common threads between the videos Youtube wants you to watch?
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2023-02-07, 06:55 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2014
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
I honestly feel this way on a daily basis. Luckily, you can block channels from popping up. I think the worst is if through a TV app, as soon as you open it, it jumps right into ads.
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2023-02-07, 07:04 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2023
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
So it's not just me! I keep getting recommendations for sports videos, random "influencers" I don't care about, mommy vlogs, news channels, and streamers for video games I don't play.
My video history? D&D, Warhammer, comedy news, movie video essays, game/film/food theory, and Power Rangers.
And no matter how many times I select "not interested in this video" or "don't recommend this channel," it doesn't stop.
Their recommendation algorithm is pretty busted.
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2023-02-08, 12:00 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2014
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
Don't forget shorts, the answer to reels, the answer to tiktok, the answer to vines, the answer to......
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2023-02-08, 08:19 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2019
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
One of the true crime channels I frequent on YT has a Discord -- and its bot recommended the latest Tesla livestream crap.
It's never done that before. The bot is supposed to ping only when the channel owner has posted a new video. He's not involved with Tesla or Muskmelon at all.
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2023-02-08, 04:39 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2021
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
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2023-02-08, 05:36 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2019
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
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2023-02-10, 08:29 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2010
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
Also, I'm aware that this could just be a "Does Onyxia Deep Breath more?" type of situation. Probably is, really. My own experience of my YouTube account's feed can't be anything but subjective.
Thanks for the feedback.
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2023-02-11, 04:28 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2007
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
Last edited by akma; 2023-02-12 at 06:58 AM. Reason: spelling and phrasing
Madly In Science, an RPG in which you play mad scientists, you can get it for free.
Spoiler: Some other things.
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2023-02-11, 06:50 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2023
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
Youtube search has been annoying for a while too -- they'll give you like three actual search results, then ten videos from your history or frontpage recs, then three actual search results, rinse and repeat. If you don't find what you're looking for right away you're hosed
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2023-02-20, 11:33 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2015
- Location
- San Francisco Bay area
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
It does seem to be suggesting more comedy performances and other stuff that’s not the usual old songs that I listen to
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2023-03-27, 12:28 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2006
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
I'm glad to see someone else mention it because gods its absolutely terrible now. Unless I'm logged in (which I rarely do except to comment) I get loads of basically random garbage that I would have absolutely no interest whatsoever in ever watching. Unless I specifically search for what I want to see nothing that even remotely resembles anything I've watched before even shows up at all.
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2023-03-27, 10:58 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2013
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
I'm convinced this is the point. Sure, maybe the random garbage they show on Trending really is trending and it's just broadly appealing content that isn't to the niche tastes that might be present on this forum...but I'm also pretty sure that at least part of it is bombarding you with totally off the wall crap so that you're incentivized to sign in, thus they can track your behavior, thus they can market to you more effectively, which is their true goal of course.
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2023-03-27, 11:00 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2016
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
...Why are you guys expecting Youtube to give you personalized recommendations when you're not logged in? That's a You problem, not a Tube problem.
I mean yeah, when you're not logged in you're gonna get a random array of stuff that is currently popular. Would you prefer them to stop pretending that they need you to be logged in and give you personalized recommendations and targeted ads at all times?Last edited by Rynjin; 2023-03-27 at 11:01 AM.
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2023-03-27, 09:37 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2016
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
They could be trying to de-echo-chamber the site's algorithm
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2023-03-28, 01:46 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2014
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
I'm never logged in on YouTube, run a browser with pretty high privacy settings, and YouTube's front page is consistently filled with things related to what I've been watching recently. It doesn't seem to keep track over long periods of time, but it'll usually recommend additional videos from the channels I've been watching in the past month or so and other videos with keywords like the ones I've been watching lately. (As well as the garbage-lines of recommended Shorts and other such lines of "specific kinds of stuff that you don't currently watch but we think you should" such as news/politics related things or promoted stuff from YouTube Live.)
It takes about 8 "regular" rows before I hit things that don't seem to make sense based on things I've watched previously, and even then I can kind of see why they might think they're related to topics I actually like even though they're wrong.
Unfortunately, I almost never have actual new things I want to watch show up, because I'm pretty picky about which specific channels within each topic area I want to watch things from, so it's mostly a mix of stuff I've already watched from the channels I like and stuff from channels that I'm not interested in watching videos from even if they are on the same topics. I suppose I should seed some new topics again to get my recommendations less same-y.
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2023-03-30, 01:10 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2013
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
Beautiful.
But yes, to your broader point - unless you're logged in, don't expect tailored results.
My point was more that whenever I open up a brand-new YouTube tab in an incognito/cookieless browser, the "trending" content seems aggressively uninteresting to me, compared to when I opened the same tab 5 years ago. If I was designing a frontpage of my video sharing website, I feel like I would work to make it cover more bases and have "something for everyone." Maybe the YouTube audience has just significantly changed in that time, or the algorithm totally revamped, or content creators figured out how to hack it, or kids are watching so much cocomelon that that's all it finds.
But maybe I'm wrong about all that, and the world has just moved on, and I need to accept I'm an old man and now I just have to perpetually see SniperWolf make that exact same annoying face on thumbnails until the heat death of the universe.
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2023-03-31, 08:34 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2016
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
It's definitely a shift in what content is popular and trendy, with a side of Youtube aggressively pushing content that is...family friendly? I initially wanted to say "for kids", but that's not accurate. "Appeals to kids without explicitly being made for them" is the general kind of content that does well at the moment, in any case.
Safe, nonaggressive, flashy without much substance. That's a lot of the trending material at the moment, and that's how Youtube wants it. They killed off animation, and drove away gaming content to Twitch (and are now trying to reel it back with their own streaming options; it's working apparently), so those are out. Skits do about as well as they used to, but many have moved to Shorts now with varying levels of success.
That leaves weird stuff like "stream highlights" that exist to just push people toward the Twitch account of the streamer in question, video essays (which got a big boom recently due to some wrinkle in the algorithm and nobody is sure why longform content is suddenly favored again), and "influencer" content, because children are easily...influenced.
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2023-04-07, 01:51 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2016
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
Google's results in general have been getting worse and worse for the past couple of years. I think something's gone terribly wrong with the entire corporation (like, beyond the whole morally questionable adware and data gathering angle; something is going terribly wrong with the services themselves)
This really sunk in for me a couple weeks back when I was trying to look up how many people are descended from genghis khan, and the featured snippets kept returning the same wrong answer (which I know is wrong because I read the articles they were from and they're actually the answer to a different, tangentially related question).
And you havan't been able to exclude results for years now.
And half the time it just completely ignores half of your query (although occadionally it's at least conscientious enough to inform you that it's done so)Last edited by Bohandas; 2023-04-07 at 02:20 AM.
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2023-04-11, 09:18 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2008
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
Not recently, but I've noticed it does this every so often over the years, throwing completely random videos that have nothing to do with anything I've watched into the mix. I've always just assumed it was deliberate to see if they could get you hooked on something else, and thus spending more time watching things on the site. I just tell it not to recommend the channel(s) and it usually goes away for a long while.
Toph Pony avatar by Dirtytabs. Thanks!
"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -C.S. Lewis
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2023-04-15, 10:03 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2007
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
I think the echo-chambering thing is more of a people problem than an algorithmic issue, people often simply avoid content that doesn't suit their worldview.
It could be related - either some sort of ideological push that accidentally has wider implications, or the workers themselves doing a bad job due to moral issues.
Google and others are widely considered to be evil corporations, so if someone that works there considers himself to be a good person, they could think of intentional sabotage as the right thing to do. Eviler workers could think of Google's success as making the world a worse place for the profit of those at the top, and making the world a worst place for people (including themselves) so other people will profit is not very motivating.
But I'm just throwing wild theories around, I barely even used Google search in the last few years.Madly In Science, an RPG in which you play mad scientists, you can get it for free.
Spoiler: Some other things.
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2023-04-15, 11:56 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2014
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
Not much to report, but alot of the chaff has disappeared from my page. Not sure if it was me reporting/downvoting/blocking enough stuff that it gave up (yea, I'm that guy), or the bad recs were part of them running updates (appearance has changed a bit, now has start up sounds, etc) but I'm happy about it.
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2023-04-16, 03:06 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2007
- Location
- In my own little world...
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
I'm always logged in when I browse YouTube, consistently say what I don't want to see, and it *still* recommends stuff I have said I don't want...
Custom Melayl avatar by my cousin, ~thejason10, used with his permission. See his work at his Deviant Art page.
My works:Need help?SpoilerNational Suicide Prevention Lifeline (USA)
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2023-05-01, 07:34 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2020
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
If you're okay with running extensions on your browser, you can normally find an extension that can actually make it so that you never see a recommendation from a particular channel.
Here's the one for firefox that I use:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...utube-cleaner/
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2023-05-01, 09:17 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2014
- Gender
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
Sorry, I exclusively watch from a TV ALL app.
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2023-05-03, 11:32 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2016
Re: Has anyone else's YouTube feed/recommendations been noticeably worse this week?
Last edited by Bohandas; 2023-05-03 at 11:32 AM.
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
Omegaupdate Forum
WoTC Forums Archive + Indexing Projext
PostImage, a free and sensible alternative to Photobucket
Temple+ Modding Project for Atari's Temple of Elemental Evil
Morrus' RPG Forum (EN World v2)