Because for every one person that finds the recommendation system bad there must be ten others that find it so spot on that they spend 8 hours watching and clicking. It's the only explanation that makes sense.
Ask HN: Why is YouTube's recommendation system so bad?
11–17 of 17 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is YouTube's recommendation system so bad?
#12Because google decided to prioritise profit above all, so all their services were made to keep you engaged - more searching, more clicking, more viewing, more time wasting....by giving you bad results, forcing you to work for it and stay on their platforms.
I'm not convinced that showing me videos that I won't click is a more profitable strategy than showing me videos that I will click. I think they're just not very good at their job.
It's not about clicking, it's about time spent on the platform, looking for what you're actually after. The longer it takes you, the bigger their attention numbers get and the more ads they can show you.
Re: Ask HN: Why is YouTube's recommendation system so bad?
#13I turned off my watch history. Recommendations keep you there for hours.
Re: Ask HN: Why is YouTube's recommendation system so bad?
#14I turned off my watch history. Recommendations keep you there for hours.
I wonder if you can delete your entire existing history to sort of reset the recommendation engine? i've definitely had to delete individual ones from my history to downrank similar ones in the past.
Re: Ask HN: Why is YouTube's recommendation system so bad?
#15I find that it works much better for music on music.youtube.com
Re: Ask HN: Why is YouTube's recommendation system so bad?
#16YouTube's recommendation system is great... for children.
Re: Ask HN: Why is YouTube's recommendation system so bad?
#17That's why I started Tech Talks Weekly https://www.techtalksweekly.io/
YouTube's algorithm is built to maximize engagement for a broad audience. Especially shorts with animated "jumping" captions and videos that zoom in and out every three seconds providing no useful content most of the time.
I found it really frustrating that almost every tech conference talk ends up on YouTube, yet it's surprisingly hard to discover the ones I'd find interesting.
So I wrote a script that fetches all the talks from the channels I follow each week, groups them by conference, and sorts them by view count. That way, I spend about five minutes a week and quickly find the really good ones.
In 2024, I turned it into a newsletter. I use the exact same script and I just copy and paste the results into Substack. It turns out many people are facing the same problem because it grew to over 8,400 subscribers as of today.