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YouTube, the jewel of the internet

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Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#331

Post by gniv »

tinyhouse wrote: post #136
rcarr wrote: post #9

I agree with the author. I just cancelled Spotify and got YouTube Premium and it was an absolutely brilliant decision. Pretty soon I’m going to cancel Netflix and Prime too and just take out the odd month subscription to a streaming service if there’s something I really want to watch. I’m probably better off watching some informative documentary on YT than I am watching Netflix anyway and if I want entertainment, the…

> Pretty soon I’m going to cancel Netflix and Prime too No one is paying Prime for their video services...

Most of the world outside US is paying for Prime Video. Here's an article on their video library size (and costs) in various parts of the world: https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/amazon-prime-vi...

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#332

Post by nonima »

mastax wrote: post #81

I'm going to go against the grain here and say my YouTube algorithm is great. Signing out of YouTube and viewing the default home page is a reminder of the horrors that lie beyond, but my little corner of it is a bit too good. There was a period of time semi-recently when the algorithm was better than my heuristics, too. I had associated too-good thumbnails with overproduced shallow clickbait videos churned out by co…

I love that it often recommends me videos from small channels, often with 0 view. This started happening only about a few months ago I don't know if it's just me.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#333

Post by Cort3z »

crazygringo wrote: post #108
mastax wrote: post #81

I'm going to go against the grain here and say my YouTube algorithm is great. Signing out of YouTube and viewing the default home page is a reminder of the horrors that lie beyond, but my little corner of it is a bit too good. There was a period of time semi-recently when the algorithm was better than my heuristics, too. I had associated too-good thumbnails with overproduced shallow clickbait videos churned out by co…

Yup, I'm the same. I've totally given up on navigating anything except my home page, I'm actually astonished at how good it is. The newest videos from my favorite channels are always listed first, and then it's a smattering of older popular ones from the topics and channels I watch the most, and a handful of things "adjacent" to those that are sometimes not for me but sometimes become my new favorite rabbit hole, so…

I assume there has to be some degree of survivor bias here. You get good content, which is good, but there might be great content that is never shown. But I do agree that “the algorithm” often finds content that, at least, I’m interested in seeing which I would probably not have found otherwise.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#334

Post by no_butterscotch »

brewtide wrote: post #26
irrational wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free I have children between the ages of 9 and 26. You know what they are passionate about? Minecraft, Mr Beast, Travel vlogs, mommy vlogs, “reality” videos, etc. I’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want…

I have a 9 and 7 year old and we are constantly enjoying such YouTube channels as "smarter every day", "veritasium" (spelling?), "Stuff made here", to some extent Colin furze, "technology connections", and other such edutainment. Not sure it speaks about differences in kids, in ages, in households, or likely a combination of sorts. Also, not a judgement on your kids, just a counterpoint about the resources available…

"infotainment" or "edutainment" is what that type of content is - I think it's mostly mindless entertainment masquerading as informative or educational content

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#335

Post by nuker »

usrusr wrote: post #184
mastax wrote: post #81

I'm going to go against the grain here and say my YouTube algorithm is great. Signing out of YouTube and viewing the default home page is a reminder of the horrors that lie beyond, but my little corner of it is a bit too good. There was a period of time semi-recently when the algorithm was better than my heuristics, too. I had associated too-good thumbnails with overproduced shallow clickbait videos churned out by co…

So the reward for signing into YouTube is being able to "reset" by signing out? Because (on desktop) I do all of my youtubing with browsers that have never been logged into any Alphabet service and yet the algorithm has a very clear idea about what to show me. The idea that signing out would somehow give you a pristine neutral state seems quite naive from this perspective.

> The idea that signing out would somehow give you a pristine neutral state …

If you’re on Mac, try enabling iCloud Private Relay in settings.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#336

Post by pzmarzly »

argo_navis wrote: post #296
mastax wrote: post #81

I'm going to go against the grain here and say my YouTube algorithm is great. Signing out of YouTube and viewing the default home page is a reminder of the horrors that lie beyond, but my little corner of it is a bit too good. There was a period of time semi-recently when the algorithm was better than my heuristics, too. I had associated too-good thumbnails with overproduced shallow clickbait videos churned out by co…

Years ago youtube offered a choice between their recomendations and your subscriptions as a homepage. Then they removed the choice and forced their recommendations on everyone. So i installed an extension to redirect from my youtube homepage to my subscriptions. Haven't even seen the algorithm in ages. When i feel like watching something I go to my subscriptions and browse a chronologically sorted list of videos from…

I'm in the same boat as you, being in early twenties. I also have a userscript to hide the recommendation panel right of the video player and the cards at the end of the video, though I turn that off if I'm bored enough to discover new channels and content.

I don't know anyone with similar setup though.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#338

Post by butler14 »

robinsonb5 wrote: post #98
mastax wrote: post #81

I'm going to go against the grain here and say my YouTube algorithm is great. Signing out of YouTube and viewing the default home page is a reminder of the horrors that lie beyond, but my little corner of it is a bit too good. There was a period of time semi-recently when the algorithm was better than my heuristics, too. I had associated too-good thumbnails with overproduced shallow clickbait videos churned out by co…

I do have some admiration for the algorithm - but I also wish that refreshing the home page would show me some more of the many thousands of videos that I'd likely find interesting, rather than the same 20 just in a different order.

i cannot echo this sentiment strongly enough

how the algo can be so good, and so bad, at the same time boggles my mind

the repetition just feels so unnecessary in many cases -- I know there's so much more content out there that is not a huge leap from what I watch regularly but the recommendation engine makes it broadly inaccessible

one related symptom of this - i think - is when you watch one or two videos on one new thing and then get drowned in videos about that thing at the expense of everything else

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#339

Post by Escapado »

throwaway0223 wrote: post #297
JKCalhoun wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am hooked as well. (But, please, stop with the YouTube Shorts, I'm just not that into you.)

At least on the Desktop you can YT Shorts Block extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...

Not only on desktop. I was entirely addicted to shorts and hated that and my little monkey brain would at some point just click on them despite knowing it was entirely stupid. So I did not only block shorts on chrome but also on safari and safari iOS. You can do this by installing AdGuard and setting custom blocking filters so on the youtube website the shorts navigation button disappears and for subscriptions and suggestions I just set it up so it will show a black page. I couldn't get it stop playing audio but at least I am not seeing anything so I became unhooked. This only works in the browser of course so I uninstalled the YouTube app and I can only open YouTube in safari. I _really_ wish YouTube would just natively allow disabling shorts alltogether in their app and on their website.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#340

Post by layer8 »

mastax wrote: post #81

I'm going to go against the grain here and say my YouTube algorithm is great. Signing out of YouTube and viewing the default home page is a reminder of the horrors that lie beyond, but my little corner of it is a bit too good. There was a period of time semi-recently when the algorithm was better than my heuristics, too. I had associated too-good thumbnails with overproduced shallow clickbait videos churned out by co…

The only complaint I have is that the recommendations are too biased towards what I liked or watched very recently. It would be nice to have a setting to adjust that recency weighting.

Another, non-algorithm related complaint is that it’s difficult to watch a channel from oldest to newest, that is, keeping track of up to where you’ve already watched within the channel’s history, in order to pick up where you last stopped, in particular for channels with hundreds of videos.

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