My experience is that YouTube recommendations are heavily weighted based on my watch history. If I watch a single video on, say, videogames, all of a sudden my recommendations are all gamer stuff.

Fortunately, you can easily edit your watch history. I just go through mine periodically and remove any kind of video that I don't want recommendations related to. Doing that has given me a very dialed in recommendation feed. If anything, it's too dialed in, and I rarely get serendipitous recommendations.

> it's too dialed in, and I rarely get serendipitous recommendations

Youtube is doing better here for me in that respect than it used to. Once a week for the past month I get a button that asks if i want to see things it doesn't usually show me and I've even watched some of them. It's not perfect, but it does seem like they are trying.

It's biased by your watch history, but it's never just that. In my experience (browsing without accounts, in private browsing with no cookies, on rotating IPs), there seems to be a distinct spot in the algorithm for some inflammatory engagement bait regardless of your history. That bait is not dependent on your watch history and is based on your geographic location by the looks of it.

Regardless of what I watch, in the middle of otherwise on-topic recommendations, there will always be one or two videos that are attempts at getting me to engage with some complete off-topic inflammatory political bullshit. Of course, once you click on that, the "regular" recommendation system takes over and feeds you more of that (which is somewhat fine), but the fact that it's trying to suck the user into this in the first place despite no indications the he desires to be exposed to such content in the first place is disgusting.

There is strong incentive for youtube creators to create this kind of "clickbait" content (and especially clickbait titles and thumbnails) which perpetuates that situation regardless of whether the algorithm explicitly rewards it. As long as engagement is a factor and creators are rewarded for it then it seems like what you observed is kind of unavoidable.

I don't mean usual, on-topic clickbait consistent with the watch history. I mean that in the middle of said on-topic clickbait, one or two of the recommendation slots are always explicitly allocated to a broader, regional-level pool of inflammatory political clickbait completely unrelated to watch history.

So for example, I could be watching some niche technical videos, and my recommendations would be more of that for the most part. Except that on an English-speaking-country IP address, I'd also get some inflammatory Trump-related video among the usual recommendations. On a French IP I get the French equivalent, and so on.

So either consumers of various niche content (in unrelated fields, from retrocomputing to farming or vehicle repair) also all happen to be into political trash in various languages so much as to outcompete other on-topic videos in the recommendations, or the recommendation engine has an explicit feature to push inflammatory crap in addition to "organic" recommendations. I strongly suspect it's the latter.

My completely unsubstantiated pet hypothesis about this is that it's cheaper and easier to cache the same click bait for everyone instead of different well tailored recommendations.

Agreed.

The most insidious thing is when you see kids hooked on it. Not only are they fed the same garbage content and ads, some of it is actually harmful, like Elsagate. Some of those videos are still available on the site, and more get added all the time.

We can argue whether parents should let their kids use YouTube, and if the YouTube Kids app works well enough to protect them from this, but at the end of the day we're just data mines and not customers, so nothing besides public outrage and regulations could improve this. It's also an incredibly difficult problem given the amount of videos uploaded every day, but I'm sure Google could solve it if they had good reasons to.

My YouTube recommendations are like 80% RC planes

YouTube has become especially horrific. It seems a couple years ago they gave up on video search- after 5 videos it will suddenly start recommending random videos under “you may like”. If I watch one UFC video I am flooded with recommendations of Joe Rogan, despite my subscriptions all being unrelated.

You watch 2-3 videos on autopilot and Joe Rogan always pops up eventually. With that kind of promotion I dont understand why he's not bigger.

He’s pretty big. He helped tip a presidential election.

Considering his content is auto recommended to billions of people, should be bigger.

I don’t remember ever getting a Joe Rogan recommendation.

I have (recently).

I feel asleep to YouTube last night and woke up to a 4h Joe Rogan podcast playing.

Best thing is, if I search for something it'll give me hundreds of search results. But if I then decide to filter by upload date, whooopsie! there are no search results, sorry!

No idea about who Joe Rogan is, maybe because I'm not American and because I use YouTube via NewPipe on Android, almost never inside a browser on my laptop and anyway never logged in with my account.

NewPipe doesn't need an account. I can subscribe to channels, bookmark videos and save them to playlists. It's all I need.

Not having an account has the disadvantage that I don't have a common list of videos across my devices. I could export and import but it's too inconvenient. I just share videos to the other device if I have to, via KDE Connect.

On your desktop please try Freetube. You can also import your NewPipe backup (history and subscriptions) Freetube will also allow you to have different profiles, that you could use one per device and regularly import their backups.

I do have Freetube but I forget to use it. I developed the instinct of reaching to my phone or to my tablet when I want to watch a video. The only source of videos on my desktop would be technical stuff embedded in pages from HN but videos are too long (as in time) compared to text so either I read the transcript if available or I skip to the next interesting post.

Have you tried informing YouTube that you are not interested in Joe Rogan? There are several places and ways to do so in the application, and they seem to have worked for me.

I've been using DeArrow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36273890 it calms down the thumbnail clickbait on YouTube, I feel like I enjoy YouTube more by watching less.

Select “not interested” for those videos. There’s also “don’t recommend this channel”. “Like” videos that you like. Your feed will quickly adjust.

> Your feed will quickly adjust.

It does adjust in some way, but somehow it never picks up on the signal that actually made me like or dislike a video. It's very clear that some video-makers have figured out how to exploit this poor signal reception to shove really crappy content at people. Other video-makers, who aren't trying to dominate youtube revenue, are buried and difficult to find.

TikTok, meanwhile, takes about an hour of scrolling and reacting to cultivate a feed that is very tailored to my taste. It's truly remarkable. If the app gets banned it'll be a huge loss for finding people and content with similar interests.

(I also just don't have the desire to watch an entire 10-minute video packed with filler when I'm trying to relax unless it's very dense, and that's the entire revenue model of youtube. edit: I forgot youtube has shorts now)

While the YouTube algorithm could be better (e.g. its recency bias is much too strong), 99% of what it recommends me is in line with stuff I watched or liked before. So, I don’t know what to tell you.

Maybe your interests are shared by a lot of people who also like crappy stuff? Just joking, but there must be some reason for the difference in experience.

The problem is it never stops recommending stuff. So if I say to never show me some channel (because maybe it’s irrelevant to me), then it just fills that spot with the next slightly more irrelevant channel.

Pretty soon all the recommendations are way far off what I would ever watch, because of course i don’t want to watch everything YouTube has. There is a point where there is nothing left that I will ever wanted to watch.

How do I tell it to not show me any short clips with all caps font on them like it’s a news headline?

Done that, no joy.

Watching hobby channels every now and then is very refreshing. I wish YT would recommend me more of those

A strong recommendation for the crafman, he's the Bob Ross of crafting.

> I block the videos and the channels from recommendations but they keep coming

Part of this is channels opening side or mirror channels that they upload their videos to as well (since you'll sometimes see the exact same video but no ContentID strike) so they can get around people doing that.

Look into DeArrow https://dearrow.ajay.app/

Cuts down a ton of crap and shows you thumbnails and titles of things for what they really are.

For you. My recommendations are tech videos, documentaries and good music. I find YouTube to have a great recommendation engine. I do use ublock origin.

It's funny eh, the world's largest personal data collection company and they still have no idea what videos you want to watch lol

Their goal is not to show you videos you want to watch!