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Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

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Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#271

Post by throw0101a »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #200
antioppressor wrote: post #145

Recommendation system is long time broken. I am subscribed to 100+ channels and check 10 channels on a weekly basis, meaning I watch all the new videos these creators make. So that means I want the new stuff from the frequented ones on my front page ASAP. Yet, it's a hit and miss. From the remaining 90 channels I never get anything recommended. Why? If I subscribe to a new channel it gets recommended like hell, then…

If you know what you want to watch why rely on Google recommending it to you? I only visit my subscriptions page: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions I don't have notifications on and when I visit YouTube I'll check to see what videos I want to watch since I last visited. I usually check the up next to see if anything similar/interesting is recommended and very rarely go to the home page to get recommendations…

> I only visit my subscriptions page: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

Reminder that you don't have to have an account to subscribe:

* https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=THE_CHAN...

* https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=YOURPLA...

(Though an 'official' subscription with-in the system may help the creator.)

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#272

Post by lamontcg »

Why is the Discovery channel a bunch of cheap to produce shows about ghost hunters or whatever it is these days? MTV long since is all reality TV and nothing about music. Pushing drivel like Heard-vs-Depp drives ad revenue and is what "the people" want to watch, and they can most easily get more revenue by trying to hook as many people as possible on that stuff. The fact that you in particular are turned off by all that is mostly irrelevant to them because you're no longer the target audience.

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#273

Post by NCC1701DEngage »

dereg wrote: post #204
antioppressor wrote: post #145

Recommendation system is long time broken. I am subscribed to 100+ channels and check 10 channels on a weekly basis, meaning I watch all the new videos these creators make. So that means I want the new stuff from the frequented ones on my front page ASAP. Yet, it's a hit and miss. From the remaining 90 channels I never get anything recommended. Why? If I subscribe to a new channel it gets recommended like hell, then…

The best part of YouTube recommendations - side bar recommendations - have been broken for at least 7-9 years. I remember going on deep YouTube rabbit holes in another era, because their recommendations always pointed to new, highly related content. Then, at some point in time, YouTube switched their recommendations algorithm to direct me to a mixture of 1) videos (mostly on unrelated topics) that I've already viewed…

>I remember going on deep YouTube rabbit holes in another era, because their recommendations always pointed to new, highly related content. Then, at some point in time, YouTube switched their recommendations algorithm to direct me to a mixture of 1) videos (mostly on unrelated topics) that I've already viewed, 2) videos about topics that I've recently searched for or watched that are unrelated to the current video, 3) videos trending across all of YouTube, and etc.

I've been working on a small team to tackle this problem. We have a working prototype if anyone is interested in checking it out. Look up a channel to get a list of channels in the same niche or related niches. It is specifically designed to surface smaller creators.

Here is our list for 3Blue1Brown, which seems to be popular around here:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/

The icons are crawlable links, so you can click the channels in a given list to go to the list for that channel.

We also have mapped the channels to provide a new way to explore. The map clusters similar channels so you can get a spatial sense of where your interests are and what interests and niches are very far away, ones you may not consider or even be aware exist. For the curious, here is a short blog post explaining the map and how to use it:

https://channelgalaxy.com/blog/article0/

I hope this isn't too self-promotional. I think there is a need for this kind of thing and it is hard to resist the many, many cries of frustration about user exploration on YouTube and the narrowness of their recommendations that I frequently see around here.

Cheers!

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#274

Post by timbit42 »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #28
Gareth321 wrote: post #23

Odysee is going from strength to strength. It's quite solid now as a platform; just needs more content creators. As YouTube continues to ban creators for any and no reason at all, they'll find their way to these competing platforms. Rumble is also pretty good but I've noticed it tends to attract more right wing American creators. That's fine if that's what you're into but I am not American and prefer a wider range of…

I had never heard of this before, and it seems to be a shallow clone of YouTube with (surprise!) crypto grafted on. The videos all seem to be copied from YouTube, and the first "Top featured" video had racked up all of 188 views in the past week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBRY

The reason there are a lot of videos copied from YouTube is Odysee has a feature for importing all of the videos you created on YouTube.

This plugin will tell you when you are watching a YT video that also exists on Odysee: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/watch-on-odys...

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#276

Post by JKCalhoun »

causi wrote: post #102
JKCalhoun wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add it to a playlist (or bookmark it). I don't trust the videos to still be up when I might be interested in them so I've become a little bit of a data hoarder.

Yes, it only takes one scroll through your "Liked" videos and noticing how many are gone to become an archivist. The Youtube folder on my media drive is quite large.

We reach.

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#277

Post by GekkePrutser »

malfist wrote: post #187
coopierez wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search on the iOS app store is awful too. You type in the exact name of the app you are looking for and have to scroll through 10-15 vaguely related results before you get to the one you actually want.

Search on windows is uniquely terrible. Oh, you wanted to launch that app? Let me open Edge with a bing search for that app. I especially love it when I'm trying to launch stellarium and it only suggests "stellarium 200%" unless I delete the "m" from stellarium and then it'll suggest "stellarium", "stellarium 200%" and "stellarium (OpenGL)". Anything else and the only result is "stellarium 200%" It's total garbage. I…

Doesn't the Windows - R shortcut work anymore? This always worked much better than just opening the start menu and typing because it only looks for apps and doesn't try to 'help' you with other random searches. But I don't use Windows so much lately so it could be they removed that also. They seem to do that with everything that's useful.

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#278

Post by GekkePrutser »

ur-whale wrote: post #40
dageshi wrote: post #7

Their search has got pretty bad I've noticed. They've changed it to start showing random shit you might want to watch instead of the thing you actually searched for after the first 10 or so videos. They seem to repeat videos they think you ought to watch quite often in search results as well. Significant downgrade on what it used to be.

> Their search has got pretty bad I've noticed YT search was never good (that I can recall). When I want to find content on YT, I use Google search with a site restrict [1]. Infinitely better. I invite you all to do the same and forget the YT search box. [1] something like : life of Albert Einstein site:youtube.com

Very ironic that you have to use Google to get decent results in YouTube. The knowledge is in the same company just not applied consistently.

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#279

Post by GekkePrutser »

ralusek wrote: post #10
dageshi wrote: post #7

Their search has got pretty bad I've noticed. They've changed it to start showing random shit you might want to watch instead of the thing you actually searched for after the first 10 or so videos. They seem to repeat videos they think you ought to watch quite often in search results as well. Significant downgrade on what it used to be.

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.

I've found this too. And not only Google but also Bing/DDG. It's really annoying when trying to reference a past event in discussions
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