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YouTube Oddities

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Re: YouTube Oddities

#61

Least favourite behavior of YouTube these days is the mass of pimple popping and wart removal videos that show up near the top of search results for damn near anything. "Fluke 87v power on options"? Pimple popping. "Generator repair"? Wart removal. And it isn't just one, it's dozens of them, to the point where there might only be one or two relevant results and the rest are basically gore/grossout videos. It's still…

I don't speak web front end so I can't explain, but it seems a lot of those are fed from ad system and joined on-browser, "we already have a perfect system for this, why not just..." style.

For me, enabling more adblock volunteer maintained filters, custom element filters, and parameter removals took it away, at costs of YouTube showing me ever niche-er and increasingly monotonic selections.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#62

Least favourite behavior of YouTube these days is the mass of pimple popping and wart removal videos that show up near the top of search results for damn near anything. "Fluke 87v power on options"? Pimple popping. "Generator repair"? Wart removal. And it isn't just one, it's dozens of them, to the point where there might only be one or two relevant results and the rest are basically gore/grossout videos. It's still…

I think somebody watched a lot of pimple-popping videos while logged into your account. You might want to take a look at your viewing history: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history Because that's definitely not a default. I've never seen YouTube recommend one of those in my life.

Recommendations also are based on non-YouTube sources, as we might expect. I recently watched some things on streaming and they showed up in YouTube.

It's possibly coincidence, of course, but why wouldn't YouTube use the same profile data as everyone else?

Re: YouTube Oddities

#63

Okay just in case someone who knows reads this. Why doesn’t Youtube Premium background play work with members-only videos? Became a member of a channel with spoken content and can’t even lock my phone when playing a member’s only video. Posts and complaints on this go back years, with zero explanation from Youtube as to why this is, if it’s intentional or a bug, etc.

Youtube background play being a paid feature is so brazen. Google are disabling a basic UX feature in their OS and then letting you pay for it in one app that they control.

[deleted]

Re: YouTube Oddities

#64

Least favourite behavior of YouTube these days is the mass of pimple popping and wart removal videos that show up near the top of search results for damn near anything. "Fluke 87v power on options"? Pimple popping. "Generator repair"? Wart removal. And it isn't just one, it's dozens of them, to the point where there might only be one or two relevant results and the rest are basically gore/grossout videos. It's still…

I think somebody watched a lot of pimple-popping videos while logged into your account. You might want to take a look at your viewing history: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history Because that's definitely not a default. I've never seen YouTube recommend one of those in my life.

Literally never seen this shit. Not even once. This is like someone saying it's horrible that there's porn all over the computer and how computers are evil.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no option to block a channel or "don't recommend" from search results, at least in the android app. Afaik that's only available in the feed.

Yup, no option on desktop either. This is obviously not based on viewing history, YouTube is doing something weird just with the recommendations embedded into search results. For me these "you also might like" sections in search results are 50 woodworking and 50 gross out garbage.

It's nice to know my misery has company.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#66

> Roel Van de Paar, at this current time has 2,035,484 videos uploaded. > https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPF-oYb2-xN5FbCXy0167Gg What the hell. It doesn't seems to be autogenerated video.

I worked with him and he was as weird as you'd expect. He got let go after getting in someone's face for saying "oh my god", because it's "taking god's name in vain". (: He used to do that back then too, AFAIK they were absolutely autogenerated. (throwaway because I don't want him to harass me, he does do that too)

Would you be okay sharing if he is/was he based in the US? His name seems a bit European/Dutch to me.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the rest of the responses here. It's not history.

I have, and I'm not convinced history doesn't play a role. No need to be rude about it.

If I've ever watched one of those type of videos it's so far back in my history that I can't find it any more, as in years in the past.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#69
post #54
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google ignores incognito mode https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39078417

My front-page recommendations in incognito is a completely different set of videos from my front-page recommendations in my logged-in main account, except for one (a Veritasium video with 14 million views). So if YouTube is tracking me across incognito mode, then they aren't doing a very good job there.

They can't be too obvious about that. So works as intended.

Re: YouTube Oddities

#70
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I searched "Fluke 87v power on options" on YouTube in an incognito page, and all I got were results around the multimeter. Like literally, my screen only had pictures of multimeters. For good measure I repeated the search in my main Youtube account. Same thing.

https://i.postimg.cc/J49KjXZ2/Screenshot-20240215-183710.png It's likely some coincidence of my previous viewing history, though how woodworking, small engine repair and distributed systems pointed to grossout videos I have no idea. I've heard of at least a dozen other people that this happens to so far across a wide range of viewing habits.

Funny, when I run that search in mobile Safari, disable my ad blocker, and then request desktop site to see if I can repro, I'm immediately redirected to one of the advertised sites (a scam/fraudulent site, naturally). Another oddity to toss on the pyre.
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