Comment by infecto

I think what you describe is what infecto was saying. You can't use YouTube to find interesting content anymore. You can only use it to find more of what you've already seen. In the past, it was better at unearthing new things.

Personally, I added uBlock filters so the home page is empty and recommended videos aren't shown. I only ever go to subscriptions now.

While I do agree it has a very strong focus on suggesting more of what you've recently watched, I feel it's also managing to suggest new and interesting unrelated stuff from time to time.

Some habits I have is to subscribe to channels which I truly enjoy, instead of marking as "not interested" I select "do not suggest channel", and be cautious of click-bait titles. If I get lured in, I remove them from my history.

So for me it's mostly great, though I get your frustration as well. For example I recently watched a couple of informative videos on the LA fires as I have some relatives living in the area, and suddenly my feed is tons of that and little else.

> It seems like as soon as it latches on 3-4 interests of mine,

Its worse than that. I thought that Youtube worked as you described, trying to find videos suited to your interests but it actually works the other way around.

Youtube has a series of rabbit holes that it knows maximise engagement, so its trying to filter you the human down one of those rabbit holes. Do you fit the mr beast ssniperwolf hole, or the jordan peterson joe rogan rabbit hole? Howabout 3 hour video essay rabbit hole, is that one your shape?

Its designing paths for engagment and filtering humans down not filtering videos for humans, its perverse and awful and it explains why the algorithm simply does not work for humans, because you are not the target audience, you are the data being sorted.

The homescreen recommendations seems to aggressively prioritize what you last searched for.

I missed the end of the recent Australia vs India cricket series so I searched for highlights from the final day of play. Since then for the past 2 weeks my homescreen has been an endless stream of cricket related videos. For some reason it has a particular focus on podcasts related to cricket.

I made the mistake of clicking on a Jordan Peterson video several years back. I'd never heard of him before and the title seemed interesting, so I clicked. 15 seconds in my charlatan detector went off, so I exited the video. For the next couple weeks I was playing wack-a-mole with a never-ending supply of manoshpere and right wing nonsense. Easy to see how so many people get sucked into sphere of influence.

Don't use the homepage, use the subscriptions page

I've come accustomed to deleting cookies on browser close. The first ~10 or so YouTube page requests, the sidebar of recommended videos is pretty good. After that, as you said, it gets way too muddled. I think a good plugin for YouTube would be to always delete cookies before opening a video so that you're getting as close to a pure vanilla recommended feed as possible.

Usually the better content is down the page a bit on the YouTube home page. I use this CSS snippet to hide the first 12 videos from my home page.

    [page-subtype="home"] #contents > ytd-rich-item-renderer:nth-child(-n + 12) {
      display: none;
    }

You have to block entire channels. I've blocked all the major news networks, all the major content farms, and all the major "garbage" snack size content channels. There's hundreds of blocked channels on my account.

It's _almost_ like the old youtube.

I don't think thats the case. Don't confuse homepage recommendations with end of video queue recommendations. It used to be end of video recommendations were heavily weighted on the current video or chain of videos you just watched. Essentially you could keep going to the next video and go down a weird hole of obscure videos. Now the algorithm will quickly circle you back to your profile homepage of videos as opposed to the video you just watched.

Same, and now I've spent the last two weeks trying to convince YouTube that I don't need several different videos of Christmas music playing over a fireplace.

Feels a whole lot like the dumb emails I get from places like Home Depot, where because I bought a table saw they feel I should know about all these other table saws they have.

Agreed. This is still how YouTube still works for me. It's great.

> That being said, occasionally I do have to go into my Google data and clear/clean the watch history to reorient my recommendations.

Can you elaborate on this? What effect does this produce for your specifically?

I think you missed how the old end of video algorithm worked. The old way had a much higher weighting when picking the next video on the current video being watched. The current next video pick algorithm places a much higher weighting on your preferences instead of the current video.

I think they can be paid to do that, but I'm not sure quite how it was arranged.

That, or the Peterson pipeline is a good representation of a local maximum: a fairly obvious way a set of videos can direct people to related videos and increase the appetite for them. That'd produce algorithmic reinforcement without anybody getting paid. Apart from Youtube, content-agnostically hungering for being paid in views on their platform.

It could have sent a very strong signal that 'this content maximally sends a statistically significant number of viewers down MASSIVE youtube rabbitholes never to emerge, therefore take the gamble and try to show everyone the content, ???, profit!'

This was at the center of controversy many years ago, described as a sort of alt-right pipeline. I believe there are studies about that exact algorithm behavior on youtube. My understanding is that it was changed to loop back around to trusted content sooner.

Dunno about parent but to me "old algorithm" is more like 2010, not 2014.

Edit: 2010 and earlier. To me old youtube is before the rise of Minecraft. There's probably a better threshold but that's the one that comes to mind.

Funny, I have the opposite experience. I used to get relevant videos to what I was watching. If I'm watching a Phish video, it would recommend other Phish videos. These days, if I'm watching a Phish video I will literally, as in literally literally, get a Candace Owens video recommendation. I have literally never clicked on one of her videos ever. I don't watch political content on youtube at all, and if I did I am very left leaning. I can't fathom what has made the algorithm so terrible that if you're watching 90s Phish videos it recommends right-wing talking heads.

What I am describing is not the home page recommendations but the hole you would go down on post video recommendations, essentially the queue that Youtube would create for you had for a long time a heavier weighting on the current video you were watching. The simple example being you watch the dog herding sheep, then you the next video was about sheep, then you got to some video from a different country with sheep in it, then finally you ended up with some person who pretended to be a sheep. Purely making that example up but it often even in weird obscure videos quite quickly.