Comment by StilesCrisis
7 hours ago
> Do you want to watch a video? YouTube knows you like cooking and art streams. But why not also recommend a few clips about the stock market bubble, global warming, and the war in Iran.
I'm always fascinated when people claim YouTube pushes content like this. It's an extremely common take, but I don't think it's true.
My experience has been that if I stop clicking something, the algorithm soon stops recommending it. It occasionally brings back a blast from the past--e.g. I watched a sumo competition once, and once in a blue moon it recommends another. But you can downvote bad recommendations, and I simply don't get recommendations for ideas I've never engaged with before.
FWIW I'm not saying the algorithm is great. My feed is absolutely worthless right now, but it's all goofy Japanese content because one of my kids is extremely into that right now. There's zero political content because she isn't showing any interest in it. Heck, most of the stuff isn't even in English anymore.
Same. I don't think I remember the last time I came across actually "FAR right propaganda" recommended by an algorithm. Could be that the author and I differ in what "far right" means.
It's actually quite easy. If you watch something and you don't want more of it, delete it from your watch history. If it's particularly bad, you can block the channel entirely. I do this a lot for obvious AI slop content. Only subscribe to channels that are worth watching. Now my YouTube feed is almost too boring -- it's only showing me stuff in a pretty narrow set of interests and channels. I see very little outrage bait, celebrity news, "influencers," or politics.
And hide "Shorts" entirely. They will reappear after a few weeks, but you can hide them again.
Shorts aren't all bad. I feel like they've slowly drifted to regular-video length, and the major difference is just the tall aspect ratio.