Maybe it's just me, but my recommendations have been absolutely terrible lately. I'm not getting presented with the latest videos from people I follow / watch regularly and have actually had to remember to go looking for them.
I am genuinely watching less YouTube because it's showing me less things I actually want to watch.
My recommendations have always been awful, so I avoid them and just use my subscriber list instead.
But they did make a UI change in the android app that I didn't notice until very recently that I'm sure made me miss quite a few videos I would have wanted to watch. The list now has options, and doesn't default to showing videos from your subscribed channels in chronological order. Instead, it's some weirdo order that Google has decided is what you really want to watch, and that omits things. You have to tap on the "videos" tab to get the chronological list now.
It took too long for me to notice this, and it certainly meant I didn't watch videos I would otherwise have watched.
Recommendations got bad for me a year or two ago. Like, the only things on the algorithmic homescreen that I was interested in watching were already in my Watch Later list.
I'm also watching less of even the subscriptions due to the ads being so long I can make a cup of tea before they've finished, but worse they're also dispersed throughout the content and not just at the beginning.
A significant fraction of the ads are for one specific service I am not able to use anyway, so those advert buyers are wasting money to annoy me so hard and so often that I use YouTube less.
Similar here. I regularly check my subscriptions, and I too noticed that lately a lot of them was never shown as a recommendation. Like maybe 20% of the videos were recommended, at most.
Instead I get even more silly stuff. Like one youtuber I'm subscribed to had an old video about anodes in water heaters. Hadn't heard about that (I've been sheltered) so viewed it. For a week after I had like 10 water heater anode videos in my recommendation list. Also more clickbait stuff, which I strongly dislike.
I don't understand why I keep getting recommendations for videos I've already seen. Do other users like watching the same videos over and over? Why would I want to see videos I've seen before when there are plenty of unwatched videos from the same creators?
If you disable watch history YouTube will disable shorts (the exploration feed, not shorts from your subs) and the algorithmic homepage. The setting will affect all of your YouTube clients. It's a great way to keep away from the general slop.
You can only "pause" your watch history, as they call it, for some reason. And I keep having mine become unpaused constantly which I find interesting. I'm not sure if it's one of my clients doing it automatically or if Google just reenables the setting from time to time.
My watch history has been off for almost a decade now.
They may weasel you into activating it via some other route that states in the fine print that they need to activate your watch history to provide [random almost unrelated feature].
It is awful. Recommendations either don’t surface your content at all or hyper-fixate in something you searched once.
I saw a couple of videos from a Chinese travel blogger and now I’m getting Chinese military parades, speeches by Fidel Castro and shorts with “tough guy moments” by Putin.
It’s not ideological, you can watch a bench press video next and then it’s all Joe Rogan and “feminist put in her place”.
It’s like it is programmed to give you the twisted monkey paw version of anything you wish for.
I know, but I think a corporation that controls my phone, email, searches, travel, purchases, photo gallery and a few other things could manage a more educated guess.
That's not really the point of recommendations though. You don't know whether you want things you don't yet know about, and that's what recommendations solve for.
Discovering new stuff happened way before Google and YouTube. I hear from something that looks interesting, note it down and sometimes later I may read or watch about it.
Why would you want an algorithm to feed what you should watch, like if you were soullessly ‘consuming’ video ? This is saddening.
I can recommend pocket tube extension. You can create subscription groups and assign different channels to different groups. It doesn't require user to be signed in to work.
Anecdata, but YouTube recommendations for me are reasonable when it comes to content in English, and within non-obscure topics. The major drawback is how much it pushes popular videos that just aren't my thing.
As soon as I'm watching content in other languages, the recommendation engine has absolutely no clue what to suggest.
(I have most watch history and personalisation turned off.)
YouTube ReVanced has a setting to default to the subscriptions tab instead of the home tab. I turned that on a while back, and I've been a lot happier with what I see when I open the app these days.
I'd switch to grayjay, but I like a lot of the other revanced features, like automatically skipping over "like and subscribe" reminders.
Not alone, so much GenAI content tailored to my preference, it covers exactly the topics I'm interested in, but it's clear that no human had a part in making it. It makes me watch less, just like you, and probably that's a good thing.
Disclaimer: this is an *hypothesis* I made, all this might be wrong:
* A social graph is built from various sources <-- this is where I wonder what the sources are, what is extracted?
* If I'm connected to Bob, I will see content related to his interests : It appears that the system tries to pick video channels related to me, but the video selection is skewed towards Bob's topics. It seems that Bob's topic embeddings are mapped to the text embeddings of video thumbnails (same for the video titles but with less weight). Since the context is small, sometimes it's off.
* If you refresh the page, it may return to your original recommendations, unless new data from external sources is fed into the algorithm. What's scare me: I wonder if the feed is in near real time. If this is the case, that's explain why my recommendation are as usual and sometimes completely off track for me but related to some people I know.
* It might buffer some topics : if you connect again with Bob but there are no new topics, it gives back the old topic related to Bob.
Once again, this is a pill of a lot of gueses.
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I really wish to go back to the previous algorithm which one of the reason I subscribed to YT premium, now it's just a minefield.
YouTube keeps recommending some AI slop factory to me that has different niche accounts but is clearly made by the same creator (red border, same looking AI woman). They have dozens of views and I keep smashing the "Don't recommend" and they keep showing up.
Whatever YouTube did in the last two months needs to be rolled back.
I am genuinely watching less YouTube because it's showing me less things I actually want to watch.