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> Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.

Either I'm doing something very right, or everyone else is doing something very wrong, because my front page of YouTube is fine.

Most of my front page is videos about games I play or have played (Factorio, Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Cities: Skylines, and more), dash cam compilations (Which I watch a lot of), and various videos from channels I'm subscribed to such as Kurzgesagt, Chubbyemu, ElectroBOOM, LockPickingLawyer, Engineering Explained, Veritasium (Just discovered Newcomb's Problem and I'm a solid one-boxer) and more.

I never see Mr Beast or any of the other channels people complain about recommended to me. Every recommendation is relevant. YouTube knows me well.

Somehow, it just seems some people use YouTube in such a way that YouTube can't figure out what you like, and so you just get a default recommendation.

Agreed. It painfully overfits based on what I've watched. I've watched thousands of videos and it still doesn't understand me at all because it appears to treat every action as equal. As an example, I like watching the Starcraft II streamer uThermal but I'm not really interested in other Starcraft II content creators because uThermal scratches that itch. However YouTube will keep showing me Starcraft II content creators that I am not subbed to and whose content I will never watch.

Of the 30 videos currently proposed to be on front page I'd consider watching maybe 4 of them. To be honest I'm a big fan of the change they made to occasionally show new content because it actually provides some novelty (one of those 4 is of a video from a creator with only 19 subscribers).

The recommended videos next to the current video and generally awful now. But my YouTube usage almost exclusively starts on the first row of videos they show when I'm logged in. They're almost entirely recent uploads from the channels I subscribe to and what most often. I subscribe to too many channels to keep up on the full feed of uploaded, but YouTube seems to do a good job highlighting the subscriptions I'm most interested in.

Admittedly, I rarely "browse" YouTube looking for new things. I typically find new channels either from other sources (reddit, Twitter, etc.) or because one channel mentions another channel.

Their last video search changes have been the worst thing they've ever done, I can never find anything I actually search for, its pretty obvious its to shove ad stuffed videos in your face, and hide old videos they cannot monetize, but holy crap. There's even some youtube channels where both the video and audio I used to listen to is completely FUBAR'd so somewhere in YouTubes infra, old videos are hinging on a hard drive that's dying in production.

> If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!

A woodworker and former RIM engineer -- if you don't already know his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel

>Even searching for specific topics is hard.

It's the tyranny of the marginal user. How I wish YouTube (and generally other platforms for user-generated content) would have fine-grained search and filtering controls that let me specify exactly what I want, no recommendation algorithm trying to guess what I actually meant. But such a feature won't attract and retain the least interested people, so we'll never get it.

It's a constant job on my side, but asking the algorithm to not show me this trash channel seems to be working for me.

As soon as I see a clickbait thumbnail/title, I ask to not show it anymore.

On a daily basis I get 90% of interesting content on the home page.

It particularly works great for music; now I get better recommendations from YouTube than from Spotify (which is my main music platform).

The YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better - sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched, but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop.

At the same time, YouTube is an incredible resources; a civilizational achievement. It's a library of an enormous amount of knowledge, often presented in an engaging manner and well summarized. You can learn an enormous amount of things on YouTube.

I wish we could have one without the other, but all those videos servers don't pay for themselves, and the good stuff doesn't come without an enormous amount of subpar video content, and the stuff that pays is rarely the most useful.

I try to never engage with recommendations or the home screen, but it's hard especially when I'm tired or otherwise low on willpower.

Ideally I could get a YouTube app that's just a search box and can handle links that I click from other sources. I don't know if that exists and if it does, Google has a strong incentive to shut it down.

> If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!

Check out Peter Millard.

> Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.

Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want”

I’ve seen it on social media too, notably Facebook.

> If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!

There are dozens of great channels in those spaces. Here are some I remember just off the top of my head.

* Cars: Watch Wes Work (need 1.5x speed here!), Prop Department, Mat Armstrong, Chris Fix

* Woodworking: Frank Howarth, Matthias Wandel, The Wood Whisperer, John Heisz, Steve Ramsey

* Metalworking: Clickspring, Cronova Engineering, Tubal Cain

* General DIY/inventions: DIY Perks, Uri Tuchman, Stuff Made Here, Colin Furze, Applied Science, Breaking Taps

I think it's actually not too bad at surfacing this stuff. They also have a "New to You" button you can click.

My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.

I noticed that the Shorts pedaling is causing a major deterioration of the service and it started a few years ago.

At some point I looked too long at a thirst trap and now all I get is OF girls jumping on trampolines and stuff like that, despite spending literal days of time on longer form content for every second I've glanced at that stuff. They just really want me to interact with their Shorts doomscroll. It certainly has the scent of enshitification since Shorts.

curate your watch history a little bit

Quite a lot of stuff is on iPlayer. But as always, licensing is the killer.

(Not to mention reputational risk, which is why so many episodes of Top Of The Pops are hidden)

> some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky.

I've seen that one!

I suspect they're going to soon do what Amazon did as well, where they start putting ads into the regular YouTube Premium service, and charge an extra $3 a month for a completely ad free experience.

I have the family plan shared across six accounts, and it went to $26, which really isn't that much but I'm not entirely sure why they're doing it.

The barrier to entry seems pretty low, technically at least. Maybe someone will create something with a different twist that will catch on. TikTok was able to carve out a niche after all.

Newpipe and freepipe!

they're competing against themselves to essentially not screw up.

Netflix, Disney, Paramount, cable TV, satellite TV, Twitch, etc etc

It's like saying McDonalds doesn't have any competitor.

Invidious is great. I quit visiting reddit, twitter, instagram, youtube in favor of frontends and libredirect. Has greatly improved my life because I use these platforms less, but also the peace of mind. Invidious seems to be the least reliable of the bunch of frontends, which makes sense because it is the most bandwith.

At some point I will set up a yt-dlp thing to download the videos I want because the public instance invidious experience recently has not been great. I could also try a self-hosted invidious.

Something interesting is considering the privacy benefits of watching the content on a privacy frontend while sitll talking directly to youtube. Does it prevent the fingerprinting? Does it improve your privacy significantly?

I imagine the shared frontend proxy approach is best for privacy, but is not reliable currently.

photon-reddit.com has been a gamechanger for one specific feature—it lets you recover deleted comments and posts. But, I have found it less reliable than redlib.

And Morphe (https://morphe.software) on Android.

Have a look at Odysee, it is a decentralized alternative to YouTube, not just a frontend, and some YouTube channels are mirrored there already.

What is shocking about youtube's advertising is just how bad the supposedly "targeted" aspect of it is.

The entire original advantage these tech companies had over traditional entertainment and media companies was their access to data and their ability to use that for targeted advertising. It was supposed to be a win-win, so they claimed. The viewer would get targeted advertising to match their interests and brands would get their ads delivered in a hyper accurate way.

Instead, the ads are just garbage. If anything, most of the ads I see on my tv (the only time I see ads on youtube) are worse than the ads I see in traditional media, like magazines or TV, in the sense that they literally don't feel targeted or curated at all. I watch tons of bike races and highlights on youtube TV and then almost all my ads are for cars, generic laundry detergent, and obvious scam crap products, anything but something bike related! Do you know where I do see far better targeted advertising? Bike magazines and print media!

The entire idea that youtube is good at what they do (to make money) just seems to be a sham in my experience.

> it respects my time

> remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must install

Which is it? Does YouTube respect your time and attention as a user or does it prey on them? I'm pretty sure it's the latter.

The fact that you can pay to opt out of ads has always seemed like a weird business decision to me. Sabotage your ad viewership by siphoning off users with spending money for things like an ad-free subscription. I suppose it prevents losing users to paid platforms or those who just wouldn't tolerate ads at all, and gives an out for users who would otherwise contribute to the ads vs ad blockers arms race.

Good to know. I disabled watch history just so YouTube wouldn't recommend any shorts.

They increased the price recently, but I personally just use UBlock.

It's a cool argument, but I don't think it's how YouTube is being used or how it makes money. Most views go to a relatively small number of mainstream content creators who converge on more or less the same sanitized format, down to the same style of video thumbnails.

Sure, there's a long tail of people who do free labor for YouTube by publishing niche reviews or science lectures and never seeing a penny, but if they disappeared overnight, I don't think that YT viewership or revenue would budge.

YT might have gained steam as a video equivalent of the old Reddit, but it converged on mass-consumption of professionally-produced, focus-group-tested content.

> YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment.

I think a big factor is that it's low friction. Just open the link or search whatever you want and it plays. It's not like cable where you need to sign up for a service, or Netflix where you need to scroll around in previews selecting for your next show, it's always on your phone, laptop or TV fast and free.

It's successful because it's mindless, people can just pull something up and consume content. If they start pushing more unskippable ads, or requiring subscriptions or accounts to view, their viewership would go way down and people would move on to next easier thing.

The world's greatest library of knowledge is owned by a private US company. For some reason I am reminded of this more often than I care to admit.

If you watch Shorts, maybe. If you watch normal videos, the comments are pretty much an afterthought.

But even shorts, assuming they're like reels/stories, the "social" aspect is very minimal compared with, say, Facebook posts back in the day, where your friends would see and comment and reply to each other.

The Algorithm doesn't really want that anymore; it wants to feed you content from arbitrary people to keep you passively engaged, not to foster conversation/active engagement.

Just anecdotes, but I feel YouTube comments are the bottom of social media. Even Twitter and Reddit are better.

But if the 99% garbage is the price of the emerging of channels like 3B1B, I think it's still a pretty good deal.

I often comment on videos but never do I check replies to my comments there.

There's nothing social about it. You don't add your friends and chat with your friends on YouTube.

Yet. I’m sure the relentless pressure to increase profits will force them to address that sooner or later.

And it's seemingly the only large platform where you have some control over the 'algorithm' - meaning if I tell it I'm not interested in something, or not to show me content from a creator, it actually works. On Facebook or Instagram the "not interested" button doesn't seem to do anything and it takes several clicks and a wait to block an account.

Is it? I've heard YouTubers make snide comments about subscribing "as if that has any bearing on whether you see my videos", implying that it has minimal impact on the algo.

That one is behind the `hasPremium` feature flag

I actually currently run youtube out of firefox in mobile and web, and its pretty much amazing in both and doesn't feel janky.

The upside of that is that if you add the correct script to the ad blocker extension, you'll never see a youtube reel for the rest of your life, which HEAVILY improves the experience on youtube.

this is the filter list I use: https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts

The social media companies got so large because they optimized for engagement over all else. If they were any less addictive, they'd have way fewer users, and we wouldn't be talking about them now. This can probably only be addressed with regulation

Where is it being shoved down anyone’s throat?

You literally have to intentionally click a short video or use the shorts tab to see any YouTube short.

YouTube is actually the least engagement-driven/addition-maxing social video provider, by far. Meta and TikTok are famous for discouraging external linking, limiting reach to non-targetted users, heavily moderating content to match engagement metrics, disguising advertisement as content, etc...

YouTube for the most part just serves what you post, does minimal content moderation, stuff a dumb insurance ad on the front (of the long-form content) that looks like a dumb insurance ad, and then does it for everyone else. I mean, sure, they could do better. But really if the world of amateur video content was all YouTube it would be a better place.

Its what people want.

Time to stop thinking corporations will suddenly start policing themsleves.

Also pretty sure Disney generates more revenue from merchandise and other licensing agreements to use its media in derivative products than it does from the media itself.

I've been getting off of YouTube more because now creators censor themselves even more than network TV does.

You can't say "kill", you have to say "unalive" or "took their life" or shit like that. You can't say "rape", you have to say "SA". You can't say "porn", everyone called it "corn". Apparently you can't even say 16, because I saw a YouTuber say "61 backwards" when talking about a creep on the internet. I remember one YouTuber censored "damn". It's one thing when it's like a comedy video, but what bothers is when you have "true crime" YouTubers who end up censoring half the video because it turns out that you really can't talk about murder without saying the word "murder", or "killed", and in the case of serial killers "rape".

I can watch Law and Order: SVU that uses all those words, and that was on network TV, the one where the FCC could actively block bad stuff.

So at this point, YouTube has become a pretty sanitized place filled with sanitized content, even more sanitized than network TV, which is fine, but it's sort of the opposite of what I liked about it from the get-go, and it has gradually become less appealing to me. I understand why these creators are afraid to use the actual words (advertisers and the like), but I have found a lot of content to be pretty bland as a result.

Part of why I got into YouTube as a teenager and onward was specifically because creators were allowed to act candidly. They would say curse words and talk about things that interested them. It was cool.

the fact that I'm into a lot of the topics that you've listed but have never heard of these creators simply underscores the sheer scale of youtube

This just highlights how YouTube is a different thing for all users. One person's experience can be radically different from another's. I wouldn't even know someone like MrBeast exists if Hacker News hadn't told me about it. Most of what I watch on YouTube is regular media that would otherwise only be available on obsure local networks or DVDs that I don't have, like Thrasher's skateboarding videos, broadcasts of the X-Games and Red Bull action sports events, ESPN/CBS/NBC highlights of yesterday's major pro sports events I didn't watch because they're on too late for me, or music videos via YouTube music. None of these are YouTube "creators." They're just normal media that uses YouTube as an additional distribution channel.

Honestly, my favorite channel is probably BBC to watch snippets of classic BBC Earth series narrated by David Attenborough. I'm pretty sure I could get them through HBO Max, which I believe is the US streaming that has distribution rights for BBC Earth, but it's convenient to get stuff like this all from one place and pretty much everything has a YouTube channel.

I watch more YouTube anything else combined by a pretty significant margin. I'm sure there's a lot of crap, but it doesn't show me too much of it. It has learned my preferences well enough to know that it should show me chess, Mario Maker, Australian machine shops specializing in resource extraction industries (a very specific genre to be sure, but I'm subscribed to two separate channels here) and various other things of that nature.

Things don't sound completely rosy for creators who want to actually make money from it, but it does seem like they manage to get by. From the perspective of a viewer, they absolutely deserve this.

proportionally the same as everywhere else, so insignificant for comparison