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YouTube, the jewel of the internet

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Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#341

Post by Moldoteck »

sitkack wrote: post #177
crazygringo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have had the YT algorithm "hunt me" for a weeks, keep recommending some what looks like a dumb-ass video, only when I finally cave in and watch it, I get it, I needed to see it. The thumbnail and the title didn't did it the opposite of justice. I even tried using the yt api to see if I could scrape the recommendations but they aren't in there. You would have to scrape the browser while logged in.

btw I think there is a browser extension that replaces default thumbnail with a random image from the video

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#342

Post by seiteamoebe »

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…

Completely agree. Generally look forward to checking my feed for podcasts and science videos. I actually don’t even watch videos so much as listening to most of them while working. Pretty much replaced every other platform for music and videocontent for me personally

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#343

Post by nicky0 »

switchbak wrote: post #252
deepzn wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i had this happen to me. ive lost videos I wanted to see when i clicked one instead of another.

That's what watch later is for though. I keep getting recommended the same damn set to videos which I've passed over a hundred times. Not sure why the "algorithm" is getting so much love, it's got some attributes that are pretty clearly crap.

I wish though it would surface videos in my watch later in the recommendations page. As it is "watch later" is where videos go to get forgotten about.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#344

Post by nicky0 »

butler14 wrote: post #338
robinsonb5 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

If you get swamped like this it's a good idea to switch to your Subscriptions list instead and watch some of the things you want to remind it you like.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#347

Post by kecupochren »

Stephen_0xFF wrote: post #310

YT is the greatest media content platform to ever exist. I’ve tried to tell people to cancel Spotify and just rebuild your playlists on YT. The algorithms are just as good. You can also find ALL music on it. When I’m looking for a song that wasn’t popular I can usually find it as one of those slide show videos with the lyrics on it. The only thing I wish it did better was podcasts. If it followed Netflix’s footsteps…

The sound quality suffers though

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#348

Post by M4v3R »

lazycouchpotato wrote: post #180
chongli wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a very strict curator of my watch history. If I ever succumb to click bait and click on some video I immediately regret, I go into my watch history and delete the offending video. This puts an immediate stop to any recommendations of similar videos. I recommend it to everyone!

I do it slightly differently. My watch and search history have been paused for 3+ years, leaving the algorithm to only use my highly curated list of followed channels and Liked videos to recommend me videos from. Even if I watch a meme video or two, it should have no impact on my recommendations. If there's a random video that I want to revisit though, I only have my PC's browser history to rely on. Outta luck on mob…

I'm the same, and it has been working really good for me so far. The only downside is that it's very easy to stay in your bubble of subscriptions and not get broader view from other sources. That's why occasionally I will still just browse the Home Page and pick some random stuff from it.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#349

Post by yreg »

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 also think my recommendations are really good, but I believe it also takes a great deal of care and will.

I make a conscious effort to avoid watching 'dumb' tiktok-ey content as much as possible. Not because I would think watching it from time to time is inherently bad, but because I believe I would be prone to watching more and more of it and it would absolutely flood my recomendations. It's addictive. For this reason I also never watch shorts on my account.

If I really want to watch something from these categories, I do so without being logged in.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#350

Post by FredPret »

TMWNN wrote: post #269
rcarr wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guy a few years older than me at school was massively into maths and took out every book he could find from all the local libraries. When he finally arrived at Cambridge University to study, he ended up going to third year lectures because he already knew all the material in the first and second year classes. He went on to do a Phd in maths there. Imagine if he had access to YouTube. He probably would have ended up…

I've heard that reading about a subject for 30 minutes a day will, in six months, make you among the world's experts.

Top 0.1% of the general public, certainly. One of the go-to experts in the world? No
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