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The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse

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Re: The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse

#21

Post by krapp »

sph wrote: post #20
krapp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube is actually really good for finding new, non-mainstream music in my experience.

No, you soon realize it’s promoting the same ‘niche’ videos to a large cohort. You and half a million people worldwide have that video recommended from the same unknown Russian indie rock band

So what?

Either it appeals to my interests or it doesn't. Why should I care if a million other people get it recommended as well?

Re: The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse

#23

Post by altairprime »

yahootube wrote: post #16

We need Jerry and David's Guide to Youtube Videos! Bring back yellow pages, web directories, and other listing services. The "algorithm" is an anti consumer pattern scheming to maximize the publisher experience at the cost of the user experience. I wish I could just easily search for videos and filter by date ranges, length, views. That would let me avoid all the terrible AI slop!

Google already ripped off curators once to build PageRank, the first of the modern AI unpaid content thefts. They’ll just do it again if you bring back listing services. Either you paywall these new indexes like Consumer Reports, or you get insta-sherlocked by AI agents — and now that Google is scanning print books for training data, you can’t even escape them by releasing it as a print catalog. If I were trying to do this, I’d circulate a list of good channels indexed by call numbers to librarians and politely ask them to keep it behind their counters when they share it around to other librarians, so that they have an advantage over the bots.

Re: The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse

#24

Post by kardos »

krapp wrote: post #21
sph wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you soon realize it’s promoting the same ‘niche’ videos to a large cohort. You and half a million people worldwide have that video recommended from the same unknown Russian indie rock band

So what? Either it appeals to my interests or it doesn't. Why should I care if a million other people get it recommended as well?

Well it won't be 'non-mainstream' for one

Re: The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse

#25

Post by krapp »

kardos wrote: post #24
krapp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? Either it appeals to my interests or it doesn't. Why should I care if a million other people get it recommended as well?

Well it won't be 'non-mainstream' for one

Sure it would. No matter how many people see, say, Shpongle on their timeline, they're never going to be mainstream. No one is going to be talking about 空夜coo:ya in the same conversation as Taylor Swift or Bruno Mars. Being slightly more visible in the algorithm for a brief period isn't going mainstream.

And even if that were the case, again, so what? If Youtube makes good non-mainstream music more popular, that's still a good thing. That's exactly what one should want a recommendation algorithm to do.

I'm trying to see the problem here and I can't.

Re: The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse

#26

Post by thot_experiment »

You can disable your watch history and then you only get related videos to the current video as far as I can tell. It does remove all of the videos from the home page, but I've been using youtube like this for 6 years and I don't mind it one bit. I have an alternate account with watch history enabled and I look at the home page every once in a while (obviously my history is very stale), it doesn't seem like anything of value was lost and I definitely never have to see a Mr. Beast thumbnail on my normal account.

Re: The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse

#27

Post by itopaloglu83 »

thot_experiment wrote: post #26

You can disable your watch history and then you only get related videos to the current video as far as I can tell. It does remove all of the videos from the home page, but I've been using youtube like this for 6 years and I don't mind it one bit. I have an alternate account with watch history enabled and I look at the home page every once in a while (obviously my history is very stale), it doesn't seem like anything…

How to add channels under the same email address: Click on your profile picture > switch account > view all channels > create a channel.

Re: The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse

#28

Post by Dove »

Every few years, I think Yahoo's old attempt to have real people build a phone directory of the web wasn't such a bad idea. And I occasionally wish Google still worked by seeing what other people thought was a worthy web page on a topic. My algorithm for finding worthwhile content is similar: I try to visit the community of interest and see what they like. There is no substitute for the human element in evaluating quality.

Interestingly, tragically, YouTube seems to have gotten the message that I like long form informational videos, and serves me ones with intriguing titles that are clearly written, illustrated, and read by AI. I seem to be training it to deceive me, which is not a good thing. In fact, I had trained it so well to push my psychological buttons that I recently had to leave entirely, which is surely not what anyone wants.

Re: The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse

#29

Post by danielbln »

thot_experiment wrote: post #26

You can disable your watch history and then you only get related videos to the current video as far as I can tell. It does remove all of the videos from the home page, but I've been using youtube like this for 6 years and I don't mind it one bit. I have an alternate account with watch history enabled and I look at the home page every once in a while (obviously my history is very stale), it doesn't seem like anything…

A highly beneficial side effect is that it disables the main YouTube shorts stream. You still get some shorts for your subs and such, but the bottomless heroin feed if Shorts is gone, and good riddance.
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