Comment by toofy
2 days ago
> It is literally the only recommendation engine that works.
do you really find this to be true? i find it’s incredibly wrong like 90+ percent of the time. i am not close to interested in most of its recs. i’ve tried for years to tell it what i like and its just wrong so often. i’ve even tried entirely new accounts.
i mean, sure every once in a while im like “whoa, that’s a great rec” but thats pretty rare. it’s definitely better than spotify and the like etc… they’re wrong almost always, but a miss rate of more than 9 times out of 10 is so bad.
recommendations from people is so much more accurate.
when i get a music recommendation from someone who works at the record store the positive hit rate is so high, same with movies and music recommendations from friends, etc… if it works for you that’s great but my feed is overflowing with video after video where i’m like “why in tf do you think i’d want to watch this?”
> when i get a music recommendation from someone who works at the record store the positive hit rate is so high, same with movies and music recommendations from friends, etc…
That tells me you are a simple person so yt gives you a simple recommendations. Music content in yt is poor, your music taste can be improved in different places. Movies are just a stupid time consuming, if you like to watch them, why to complain about bad recommendations?
> recommendations from people is so much more accurate.
You are happy to have well-educated friends probably.
> a miss rate of more than 9 times out of 10 is so bad.
For me its top 10 slots are 100% about the persons I appreciate, so to get to the point is time when 9 of 10 are bad I need to watch everything what the persons have published for the time I have been offline. 90%/10% is just the usual Pareto, it's ok.
> i’ve tried for years to tell it what i like and its just wrong so often
It doesn't take years. Just open all youtube links featured on HN and start playing those from your account without even seing/listening. You will see the changes immediately. Next step is to just stop watching any channel with 1M subs and any videos with 1M watches. Soon yt will ask you in some modal window: do you want to see the content from the smaller channels? Press the "yes" answer and you will unleash the real power of yt without clickbait headers, with no arrows on previews etc. Join small channels and treat them like Reddit subforums. This totally works for me, I participate in more discussions on yt than on HN.
I'd say YT recommendations are more than 90% right for me. It almost always recommends me stuff I'm interested in, related to things I've watched. It seems to have the best recommendation engine of all the social media I use, hands down.
I just have to be careful, when I watch something I don't want YT to think I liked, to remove it from my watch history.