Whenever this happens, I simply go into my watch history and delete whatever the fuck it was that turned my entire FP into just that one topic.
Good to know you can do that.
Really shouldn’t have to tho. It’s always for a video I clicked accidentally or only watched 15 seconds before I was like “nah.” It should weigh things you’ve fully watched way heavier.
I also hate that yt has enshittified to where it no longer has new or interesting stuff to reccomend. All my subs are from years ago as of late it doesn’t reccomend me anything but the biggest channels.
Been dealing with this BS for over 1.5 yrs now. Nothing fixes it. Skill issue on the YT dev team.
youtube algo is such a piece of shit.
Watch lets plays and tech channels, every day, for months.
Accidentally watch 30 seconds of a right wing psychopaths video because they buried the lede with the video title, and all youtube wants to show me for 2 weeks is right wing extremist bullshit, and takes months to get back into getting suggested the shit i normally watch on the daily.
I hate how pro right wing YouTube is. Half the time I make an anti-Trump comment, it gets censored. But plenty of pro-MAGA comments get through constantly.
I can tell that I’m getting censored because my comments simply won’t be there when I go back to the same video from a different account. But it’ll show up in my comment history with a “some comments might not be visible yet” disclaimer at the top. Sometimes if I keep reposting the comment it’ll eventually go through, but by then the video has stopped being promoted by the algorithm and so no one sees it. This only happens to me when I get political.
most websites like youtube/twitter/facebook/etc/etc are all heavily pro-right wing.
They’ve claimed in the past they don’t want to appear “biased” by cracking down on right wingers for rules violations. but honestly, it was obviously bullshit since they had no problem with “biased” appearances when cracking down on any other group, and often for far far far less than what right wingers routinely get away with.
Right wingers are where their bread is buttered. They buy more ads, they run less adblocking, and they click more ads.
As someone who has watched 6 of those videos in the screenshot from across 3 different channels, I apologize for my part in training the algorithm into thinking others who watch a single Balatro video might be interested in watching all the variety streamers play Balatro.
Use Freetube, it’s a FOSS desktop application where you can import your subs and playlists
Best selling point is how the homepage is the most recent videos by your subscriptions in order, from most to least recent
I honestly prefer it to youtube in every way
Trying it on my phone,thanks for the push.
Fuck big tech. They will keep enshittifying everything unless they are kept afraid all users might leave.
Nice recommendation, thanks. I’m starting to push away from all these US big tech companies (hence why I’m here in Lemmy) and finding an alternative to YouTube was hard to find. I just hope they don’t get into the same troubles as Vanced.
I’ve been using it for about a year now and I honestly have nothing but praise for it
Because it uses invidious as a backend for video sources, freetube can have similar problems to it (might have a day without access to yt vids), but that’s only happened twice in the past year that I can remember
Pause your YouTube watch and search history. It makes a world of a difference.
I like videos I care about and want to see more of. Watching a single junk video (in theory) doesn’t ruin my feed.
the trick is to ignore your homepage and only browse your subscriptions page
you can use an extension to automatically redirect to your subscriptions page
Pretty much what I do with Lemmy, too.
You watch one video about old people reacting to rage against the machine and suddenly all the recommended videos are by “reactors” that make $50k a month doing nothing but watching movies with their mouth open
an acquaintance of mine did a reaction vid where they reacted as one normally would - ie very minimal almost nothing - to a star wars announcement and got death threats lol
Hey, that is a useful job! Do you always have opinions on things? Are you sure, you always have the right opinions? Come on, let’s make sure and watch a person with a funny face watch other things and move said face in a way, we can immitate!
I use a 3rd party app Freetube. Don’t need a google account and you can set multiple subscription profiles for different types of content. I only find new channels from suggestions for each video but stick to subscription as home page. But as with any 3rd party front end, YouTube is in constant battle with them, especially with vpn which can break things once in a while but it is a price you have to pay for a bit of privacy.
Not just privacy, also usability. I can’t watch 5 minutes on YouTube without ads and the algorithm is aparantly more important than your own preferences, according to Google.
Oh definitely but my comparison was with Firefox using ublock origin so didn’t mention the ads. YouTube with ads is literally unusable for me and I don’t wanna pay money to google either. I haven’t seen YouTube recommendation page in so long so can’t remember how bad it is lol.
Free autism diagnosis by the algorithm
Unironically the YT algorithm that pushed me into videos that eventually made me get diagnosed by a professional.
Yep. The suggestion algorithm is way too aggressive. Keep in mind you can remove individual videos from your watch history.
I think it’s just quick to hop onto new things that appear, but it evens out fairly quickly. I assume it’s similar to a PID controller tuned to adjust quickly but overshoot, and then come back to level over time. It seems to essentially be a test to see how much of a new thing you’ve watched you’re willing to watch. Once it sees you’re not opening a lot of them it levels out almost as quickly as it started. This let’s it quickly adopt new things you like, but (at least for me) it doesn’t stick around if I don’t engage.
Agreed. You watch one video and the entire homepage changes.
I think maybe it’s geared towards people who watch more YouTube. I never have any single topic take over my entire homepage, literally ever. I even watched a balatro video like two weeks ago and I got two tiles on my homepage that showed balatro. But I also watch a lot of YouTube, so any one video doesn’t change much about my watch patterns. Last year my wife decided we were suddenly going to be watching videos about using turkey calls, and we watched about ten of them in a row and then I was getting a good number of recommendations for turkey shit, but still nothing like OP’s homepage.
I think there’s a sort of perfect storm that can happen. Suppose there are two types of YouTube users (I think there are other types too, but for the sake of this discussion we’ll just consider these two groups):
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Type A watches a lot of niche content of which there’s not a lot on YouTube. The channels they’re subscribed to might only upload once a month to once a year or less.
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Type B tends to watch one kind of content, of which there’s hundreds of hours of it from hundreds of different channels. And they tend to watch a lot of it.
If a person from group A happens to click on a video that people from group B tend to watch that person’s homepage will then be flooded with more of that type of video, blocking out all of the stuff they’d normally be interested in.
IMO YouTube’s algorithm has vacillated wildly over the years in terms of quality. At one point in time if you were a type A user it didn’t know what to do with you at all, and your homepage would consist exclusively of live streams with 3 viewers and family guy funny moments compilation #39.
You may be on to something. I am much more like person A.
I am also person A, so no I don’t think that’s it. A few of the channels I watch upload a good amount, but the rest is very infrequent uploads or very very niche channels.
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I watch a lot of YouTube and my experience contradicts yours. Watch one dog video and suddenly it’s nothing but dog videos.
Do you pay for YouTube in any manner?
Yes.
Same here. My wife and I primarily watch YouTube (mainly let’s play style stuff, but a lot of non-game stuff as well). Looking at my homepage right now, I’ve got a few gaming videos, some Dropout (amazing comedy), some 3D printing and DIY videos.
Over the years, the algorithm has gotten pretty good with its recommendations for us. Watching some niche videos barely affects our feeds.
Log out, clear cookies, never log in again.
If I ever watch one Mr. Bean YouTube video, all my suggestions become Mr. Bean. I mean he’s ok but they literally have the same video uploaded to multiple channels with slightly different names.
Give me more different Mr. Bean. Stop repeating the Bean.
Unfortunately there’s only like, 10 Mr. Bean episodes. Not much “more different” to go off of there.
That realisation was what made me doubt all of my childhood memories.
Kid me was sure there was at least 50 episodes of an hour each. Nope. Only 14. All less than half an hour long.
Rowan Atkinson’s been in a lot of other stuff, for example Blackadder (multiple series). He’s also played Mr Bean in lots of movies.
A childhood favourite of mine, The Witches, featured Rowan Atkinson as the hotel manager. Apparently during filming (which took place in a real hotel, not a sound stage) Rowan was in his room when the crew noticed water pouring out from under his door. They opened the door and found him sleeping in bed with the water running! The sets outside were flooded and a bunch of equipment was damaged by water!
This is there first time I am learning about this and I am also finding it difficult to accept
Just turn watch history off and find your own way. My YT homepage is blank. Fuck suggestion algorithms.
I had mine off for years. I would look at my subscribed channel feed and that’s pretty much it. But I recently turned it back on, and I actually like it. I pretty much only watch videos about science, math, philosophy, technology, SNL, and… Symphony of the Night randomizer races.
My entire recommended feed is just more of the same, and I’ve discovered tons of new channels to subscribe to. A lot of the channels I subscribe to only post like once every 2-4 weeks. I don’t want to have to do a search just to have something to watch at mealtime. Having random things recommended is nice.
If I watch a weird video out of the blue, I might see two or three recommended videos of that kind next time I open YouTube. Not at all like what OP’s screenshot is showing. I even went on a deep dive watching Snooker videos and it would still only recommend a few a day. And after I stopped watching him, I no longer see a single one of those videos in my feed.
I’d say it’s working pretty great for me. I don’t see what all the fuss is about.
Yep subscribing is the way to go.
The algorithm is dumb. It will even recommend the same video you watched before if you let it…
It will even recommend the same video you watched before
That is why I started liking (or dis-liking) every single video I watch, if it has the thumbs up/down I certainly know I already watched it and move on…
With that said I don’t know if I am tweaking or making my algorithm dumber lmao.
Ive found using clients to watch helps. They are generally much more intelligent on the history side.
What do you mean by clients?
Does no one use the Subscription page anymore? Are people even aware of its existence at this point?
I used to utilize the subscription page. Then Google replaced YouTube accounts with Google accounts. I haven’t logged in since.
Yes, I’m old.
Do you want to link your account with Google+?
Ok, we’ll ask you again later.
I don’t subscribe to anything, but I’d prob use it if I did. I only go to YT for one-off videos and just search for what I need.
Bump. This is what I do too. So much easier to just avoid it entirely.
