I have noticed a change recently, 3-5 weeks ago. Quality is down.
This is good for me, I waste less time there, but I miss the good suggestions...
Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?
81–90 of 309 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?
#82[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?
#83Try using YouTube without being logged in. I never log in to YouTube and am happy with the recs but people who log in are complaining bitterly in the last few months.
Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?
#84YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed. Though there is a growing number of anecdotes surrounding (niche|not palatable to SV) channels who’s subscribers don’t get notified despite the bell thing being on, new videos no longer in feeds, and even people getting unsubscribed for no apparent reason. This is a problem, as I’d sooner give up peanut butter than on…
> YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed.
This used to be the case, but starting a month or two ago I get lots of completely and utterly irrelevant recommendations for things like soccer, hip-hop, "vlog" twats, and other "popular" content that I have absolutely zero interest in and that I can guarantee are 100% unrelated to any of my previous history.
I also started getting a lot of "recommendations" for things I've ... already seen. That started a bit earlier, maybe about half a year ago.
So now it's about a third forced stupid stuff, about a third things I've already seen, and maybe a third that's useful. I've been flagging things as "not interested" quite aggressively in the hopes it would improve, but I've seen no difference. I think they just changed the way recommendations work to always fairly aggressively mix in "popular content". If I wanted to watch random mindless nonsense then I would turn on my TV: I use YouTube to avoid all of that.
YouTube is slowly turning into a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser; I think very soon it will start offering me a cup of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?
#85And more importantly, how can we as a community take advantage of this opportunity to promote / establish some open alternatives?
Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?
#86YouTubers have become more professional and post a large number of videos optimized for monetization (trendy videos, videos around 10 minutes long with additional ads inserted in the video, etc.). In addition, in order to maximize advertising revenue, YouTube tends to place more importance on new click-bait videos that have a rapid increase in views, rather than high quality videos that can be viewed over a long peri…
Specifically, YouTube stops suggesting videos from your channel if you aren't posting weekly. They need to keep posting bad videos just to keep the revenue increasing on the good ones.
I'm personally regularly suggested videos from content creators with infrequent posting schedules. Heck, I fairly frequently get suggested a video from a creator who hasn't posted a video in more than a year.
Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can refresh the home page a hundred times in a row and the exact same videos in the exact same order get displayed. It never used to be like this. I have no idea what the hell is going on at YouTube head office.
That's a good thing in my book, that's a feature. Recommendations are made, and they are random in some sense. But an interface needs a certain persistence to be user friendly. Too annoying to glance something, try to go back, and it's gone. Some persistence creates an environment that is a bit more spatial and nicer to my brain.
I don’t think you’re understanding what I’m saying. As a YouTube user I don’t want the same 20 videos displayed on the home screen ALL day. If If I haven’t watched them by then I clearly don’t want to.
Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?
#88At some point during Covid they seemed to just decide they wanted to abuse users and its been a steady decline since. My largest use cases were watching DJ sets, music videos, stand up comedians, instructional videos, and life of (random career) videos Music videos have multiple ads before and after now. The music videos are still watchable but it sucks to put youtube on at a party now. Life of videos from channels w…
Your timeframe is right, but it's not just about ads.
In 2017, Youtube altered search results following the mass shooting at the Las Vegas nightclub "to quell the spread of conspiracy theories". [1]
It wasn't their first time changing the algorithms, but since then, they've applied measures of varying degrees of severity following similar domestic and certain politically sensitive events, like the attack on the Google campus.
In 2018, "YouTube announces sweeping changes to the way it handles breaking news. News videos will now be ranked based on what YouTube deems to be "authoritative." [2]
In 2019, Youtube search again went on lockdown following the act of domestic terrorism on mosques in Cristchurch, disabling the ability to filter by recent across the entire site. [3] This one lasted for weeks and the original function was never fully restored.
Youtube has taken a more active approach to content curation, suppression, and promotion since the Trump presidency, and it's made it a worse resource for academic and informational searches. Once relatively neutral, they've begun to exert a more overt regulation of customers' interactions with content, going so far as qualifying certain media as aligning with certain viewpoints or not, disclosing affiliations with certain groups or political bodies, and minimizing the ability to specifically or organically locate certain non-promoted content.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/10/05/youtube-alter...
[2] https://mashable.com/article/youtube-announces-changes-break...
[3] https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-restricting-search-newzeal...
Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?
#89Odd, the suggestions I am getting from it are very relevant to my previous viewing history, both on my work account, which I use mostly to listen to music, and on my more personal account.
Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've noticed this with Google, too. Particularly when searching for things in the past, it's like they adamantly don't want 3+ months ago to exist. I now have to archive news articles and the like because I know that I'm going to have an extremely hard time finding them later.
If search works too good you are gone too quickly. Amazon figured this out A LOOOONG time ago. If Google makes you rephrase your search 10 times that 10x ads they can show you. If they take those opportunities to also drive you to crap sites that waste time but are heavily monetized by Google ads then that's even more for them. It's no different than grocery stores putting the most commonly purchased items all the wa…
> even fast food menus are insane now
They were really good when the kiosks were new, just like Google was.
I guess PMs hunting local revenue growth but macro loss by spamming upsell and making what you want hard to find is a common problem with these luser uncentric systems.