by thot_experiment
2 subcomments
- You can disable your watch history and then you only get related videos to the current video as far as I can tell. It does remove all of the videos from the home page, but I've been using youtube like this for 6 years and I don't mind it one bit. I have an alternate account with watch history enabled and I look at the home page every once in a while (obviously my history is very stale), it doesn't seem like anything of value was lost and I definitely never have to see a Mr. Beast thumbnail on my normal account.
by wewewedxfgdf
4 subcomments
- It's a pity YouTube doesn't let people built innovative interfaces to this treasure trove.
It's so frustrating that their interface is so very bad for discovery and exploration.
- Every few years, I think Yahoo's old attempt to have real people build a phone directory of the web wasn't such a bad idea. And I occasionally wish Google still worked by seeing what other people thought was a worthy web page on a topic. My algorithm for finding worthwhile content is similar: I try to visit the community of interest and see what they like. There is no substitute for the human element in evaluating quality.
Interestingly, tragically, YouTube seems to have gotten the message that I like long form informational videos, and serves me ones with intriguing titles that are clearly written, illustrated, and read by AI. I seem to be training it to deceive me, which is not a good thing. In fact, I had trained it so well to push my psychological buttons that I recently had to leave entirely, which is surely not what anyone wants.
by pixel_popping
1 subcomments
- People have the illusion that they choose, but they don't, when you know the number of videos uploaded and the millions of videos with high view count, you quickly understand that you are in an echo-chamber.
- I find youtube's interface so incredibly frustrating and hostile. Even when I know what I want to watch, I find it very hard to actually get to it. On their Roku app, search for The Daily Show, and try and watch the latest clips. It doesn't show them in that order and browsing the clips is frustratingly hard. Their web interface, especially mobile, is equally as bad.
I've given up on trying to use youtube's interface and now just rely on recommendations + rss (via freshrss) or tubearchivist to keep me up to date and organize the videos.
by CodesInChaos
1 subcomments
- What particularly annoys me is that the sidebar used to show videos related to the video I'm watching. Nowadays perhaps a quarter of those links are relevant, the rest are useless shit.
And then youtube has the gall to suggest that if I want useful links there, I should turn on browsing history. You don't need history to suggest related videos!
----
Google ads went though a similar decline ten or twenty years ago. Google Adwords used to be related to the page they were showing on, and not based on your behaviour.
by bill_from_tampa
0 subcomment
- I've tried doing a google AI search for some youtube video subjects, and get interesting results. It does not seem to integrate my youtube viewing history or subscriptions, so far as I can tell. Like any AI search you have to compose the prompt carefully, but if google AI has access to the titles or description of youtube videos that may be a path to searching success?
by mnky9800n
3 subcomments
- I was really hoping that the article would end with a tool or new interface to explore YouTube. But I guess the author only is building one but didn’t realise anything yet.
by yahootube
1 subcomments
- We need Jerry and David's Guide to Youtube Videos! Bring back yellow pages, web directories, and other listing services. The "algorithm" is an anti consumer pattern scheming to maximize the publisher experience at the cost of the user experience. I wish I could just easily search for videos and filter by date ranges, length, views. That would let me avoid all the terrible AI slop!
by whattheheckheck
0 subcomment
- Just use rss feeds like feeder.co and pipeline it into whatever app you want
- This complaint is factually false. Click on the ask button and you get a Gemini chat instance that can recommend qualitatively similar videos with a description.
Running with the c compiler example why not go the forge hosting the project, look at the contributors and forks, scrape all their socials and download their profiles/videos.
by jiggawatts
3 subcomments
- If you want to know if this is just an accident of the design, or a purposeful trap, just know that it is no longer possible to browse while not logged in!
If you log in, you get the personalised funnel.
If you don't log in, you get a blank page and a search box.
That's evil.
It's tantamount to censorship, of the worst kind, deliberately sending all viewers directly to their own personal echo chambers without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
As a random example: I now get only Australian news channels recommended to me. I have to go to heroic lengths to see the BBC or any US source, let alone something more out there like Al Jazeera.
- [dead]
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