Meanwhile, YouTube continues to force a coronavirus section in my recommendations despite me hiding it over and over again. It's just an annoyance but still.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who finds this “feature” annoying. Most of the videos are the same polarizing guidelines we’ve heard over the past two years, only now they’re regurgitated through a seemingly endless list of new channels I have to keep marking as not interesting.
I’ve already gotten vaccinated thrice and still contracted covid. When can I stop being harassed about what I’m already doing??
YouTube has been getting really aggressive about recommendations lately. They’re easily the majority of my homepage, and you can’t watch a single video on a new topic without getting flooded with related suggestions. Never mind there’s dozens of channels and topics I have enjoyed in the past, they rarely show up in the suggestions.
It’s gotten to the point that I use incognito mode for random video links to avoid wild swings in recommendations.
My YouTube addiction is scrolling the home screen looking for the viral garbage they promote to pollute my recommendations with things I would never want to see. I frequently don't watch any videos - I just play Whac-A-Mole on the recommendations.
the same thing is happening with actual videos to me. Youtube just keeps recommending me the same stuff, it totally overshoots. This has bothered me a long time but it feels like it has gotten worse
I watch a lot of YouTube content and sometimes I refrain myself from watching a video because I know that it's going to mess up my recommendations in a way beyond repair :)
I've been loading the Youtube homepage every 15 minutes for the past week (I've been sick). It's the same videos over and over again. If I scrolled past it the first time, I'm still going to scroll past it the 100th time I see it.
I've turned off my view history, but my recommendations are bloody awful. YouTube knows what channels I subscribe to, it knows what I click like on, it knows what video I'm currently watching, but it still serves me recommendations that are apparently totally unrelated to any of that.
My YouTube suggestions list is filled with videos I just watched in the last few weeks or months. Along with the some new videos, but remarkably many already watched ones. They are not labeled as such.
I suspect I blocked some cookie or changed some setting they didn't want me to change, and this behavior is deliberately calculated to be punitive. It's not very user friendly.
Or, the YouTube developers are just not very smart. Either way, it doesn't look good for them. This would be so easy to fix. If they don't know how, they are welcome to reach out to me and I can give them some ideas.
Yes it did occur to me that some users might like this. But they way they have it set up is very confusing and suboptimal for my needs as a user. I will admit though it may be serving some business need that they have, like saving their bandwidth by re-serving me old videos from my cache.
Years ago I once watched 7 minutes of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on Netflix.
The last time I had Netflix it was still telling me that because I watched Sky Captain, it is recommending a bunch of stuff (that is similar to Sky Captain).
All I can think is, how about we pretend that never happened?
So, this isn't a problem unique to YouTube. This is a problem everywhere the computers are left to make recommendations for me.
Browsing YouTube without an AdBlocker and cosmetic filters that hide emblems and badges on the video player is truly shocking. I really sense the goal of YouTube isn’t to get you to watch something, it’s to get you to watch something else - at all times.
I’ve seen it recommend related videos as soon as the video starts playing. It will recommend videos as soon as you click pause. There will be little interstitial recommendation overlays as it plays. How desperate must product managers at YouTube be to push this so strongly?
Thankfully I crafted some filters to hide all of this, but it’s so user hostile that I feel bad for anyone that doesn’t know how to get rid of all this noise.
I hate YouTube recommendations. You’re the guy responsible… I have some choice words for you, but I won’t say them here.. anyways, YouTube sucks a sick one. Recommendations are why I avoid YouTube. They are horrible, you track and one suggest what I’ve already watched/stuff I’ve saved. I can’t get away from recommendations without looking for specific videos. It’s so bad, it would take a while to list. Anyways YouTube sux and I and many others used to really like it. All good things must come to an end.
Makes me think that youtube can't avoid putting a playlist into their big recommendation learning algorithms, or something, so it's easier to just disable the whole feature.
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