Comment by eimrine
1 day ago
You still seing it wrong. Youtube is the best radio possible, it never disappoints me while my outdoor activity. There are no reason to "watch" 99% of hours of content, nothing is interesting in seing talking heads.
Negative measures such as clearing history, putting dislikes and using "not recommend" just doesn't work because from my experience the only negative metrics which works is just refusing to watch shite. Youtube actively uses spaced repetition approach so consider any time you are being recommended to shite as active shaping your recommendation engine. Don't even touch that square with the cursor. Try teaching your recommendation blackbox in positive ways - watch some channels when you are not watching and listening, subscribe to small channels, write comments with no less than 8 words and actively use such nouns which you are welcome to be recommended to.
I also avoid spending much (if any) time listening to the radio/podcasts/etc these days for the same reasons.
> Negative measures such as clearing history, putting dislikes and using "not recommend" just doesn't work because from my experience the only negative metrics which works is just refusing to watch shite.
Clearing history certainly works, just make sure there is absolutely not a single unwanted video in your history or the algorithm will go on a tirade thinking "I REALLY bet I can get this person interested in Lego videos because they watched one 4 weeks ago and I have a ton of Lego content they've not even touched yet". The instant you clear the final offender the recommendations change like night/day.
I'm not sure dislikes/"Not interested" actually do anything. "Don't recommend channel" also definitely works, though there may be a limit to how long they are saved and it's better to just aim the algorithm.
The only thing the algorithm is really good for is finding videos it thinks will suck up your time. The curation is ultimately down to how much work you put into it, which isn't all that unique to YouTube. Putting similar effort into curating any large body of content will also get you more content than you have time to consume, but still doesn't help you actually gain much from engaging with it anyways.
I haven't really try cleaning all the history but I have 2 points of why I consider cleaning the history as futile.
1. Youtube obviously grabs some info not only from Youtube but it also grabs all history from Google search and most of all some random words from Gmail, cleaning that all just for the sake of experiment might be not handy.
2. If some video has got deleted it obviously disappears from history. But there is a man I really fond of, his channels are regularly get banned after a month of activity, than the man finds a new channel with new author/interviewer. Somehow I am among the first ones to get recommended about new interviews with the man.
> "I REALLY bet I can get this person interested in Lego videos because they watched one 4 weeks ago and I have a ton of Lego content they've not even touched yet"
I can share another anecdote. Ten years ago there were a music video "Wintergatan - Marble Machine". I used to watched it dozens of times almost every day. Now if I scroll the feed to the end (Yt is not a doomscrolling) I have 90% probability of receiving the Marble Machine in the very last line. I have not touched it even once in the last several years but it knows I used to love it earlier. BTW it doesn't remember what I loved 15 years ago when most of the videos required Adobe Flash.
> The only thing the algorithm is really good for is finding videos it thinks will suck up your time.
Isn't that how a really great teachers teach? Forget about the teacher's interest, the teacher exists until the fellow pupil is interested.
> The curation is ultimately down to how much work you put into it, which isn't all that unique to YouTube.
That's a lie because FB and other rivals have nothing except the engine (no useful content). Just consume it responsively. The only reason to not use yt's algo is when you are so fond of your work that you have the chair glued to your arse and every second spent to someone's wise thoughts means a lost penny. So pity I have typed a lot of text but noone has asked me to share all my hacks to shape the algo towards one's satisfaction.