[UN-SOLVED!!!] YouTube's 'Recomended' recomendations now suck AGAIN.

[BrianHG]

Has anyone noticed, starting around 2 months ago, YouTube's 'Recomended' recomendations now suck, and always show the same videos every refresh, and you now have to manually select 'Not Interested' on each crappy only to get more crap.

Or, is it just me?

I used to get a fairly random selection, along the interests of items I've been searching around that day...

[tautech]

What browser do you use, if it's Chrome YT's recommendations will be influenced by your browsing history.

[Red Squirrel]

I have not really personally noticed, but I did see comments in some suggested videos asking "why was this recommended?" so it seems they may very well be playing around.  One thing that's freaky is that I've been growing my hair out, so I keep seeing videos having to do with hair growth.  Just the act of me mentioning that on a forum is enough for Google to know and associate the post with my account and start showing me videos on that subject.  I get lot of spam email about hair loss treatment etc too, but I suppose those are common in general.   Seems to me stuff like adblock and privacy badger don't cut it. They can still track what you do on other websites. Makes you wonder what malicious users can do, ex: see your bank information when you go on a banking site.

[BrianHG]

What browser do you use, if it's Chrome YT's recommendations will be influenced by your browsing history.

I'm using FireFox.  Yes, I tried clearing history, cookies, forms.  If I clear everything out and log-out, YouTube momentarily does give a random selection for 2-3 refreshes, but then bottlenecks everything down to 2 or 3 topics only.  If I log back in, everything goes backwards to my old stuff.  The only reliable recommendations are after I watch a video and look at what's playing next on the right side.  Those videos are fairly distributed the same as always, it's just my home page recommendations suck, and unless I manually click on each video's '...' and manually select 'Not interested', almost all the same 18 video always come up.  These used to randomly cycle, offer variety, for the last 5 years until I noticed around 2 months ago...

Also something new has come up with the '...', not only is there 'Not interested', and then in the 'Tell Us Why', you have the usual 3 responses like 'I'm not interested in this channel:xxx', but, sometime a new feature comes up 'Don't show me videos recommended by channel 'xxx'.  This is new and has filled a lot of my 18 recommended channels with foreign language channels with weird topi and I have to manually set the damn 'I'm not interested in that channel + Don't show me channels recommended by channel 'xxx'', otherwise they never go away.

[orin]

The youtube suggestions went very weird for me last week.  Then I realized I'd logged into a work gmail account first, then my personal account.  Once I logged out of both accounts and logged in on my personal account, things went back to 'normal'.  So it can depend on whether you logged into google in some form or not.

[CJay]

The algorithm does seem a bit 'hinky', it seems to think I'm interested in flat earth proof because I followed a link that lead to a YT video by a Flattard and it stubbornly refuses to not throw their inane BS up as suggestions, it seems to be a search bubble that's difficult to burst.

[RoGeorge]

The most annoying is when YouTube recommend videos I've already seen. 

Anyway, the algorithm is changed periodically, and the AI keeps collecting data about you. All online activity that can be detected, is tracked and logged. All, not just the YouTube pages.

Also, the AI is trained on huge piles of data, so the prediction of what to watch next might be OK for the average viewer, but not OK for a particular viewer. Combine this with payed promotions for particular channels, and you got what we have now.

Last, yet most important, recommendations are not necessarily there to enhance your experience, but to harvest more revenue from your activity without annoying you so bad that you'll give up YouTube forever.

In my experience as a YouTube user over many years, there were times with great recommendations, and times with horrible recommendations. The algorithm seems to change its personality at each couple of months, or so. Another thing, the algorithm changes are not propagated to all users at once, so the changes you saw in the last 2 months might not correlate at all with the changes in the last 2 months of another user.

All the above are just my personal observations, I have no YouTube insight info.

As a workaround, I never open the YouTube home page, and instead open the shortcut for subscription only:
https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

[Cyberdragon]

The algorithm does seem a bit 'hinky', it seems to think I'm interested in flat earth proof because I followed a link that lead to a YT video by a Flattard and it stubbornly refuses to not throw their inane BS up as suggestions, it seems to be a search bubble that's difficult to burst.

Did you erase it from watch history?

[lordvader88]

For me its 98% mindless brain numbing garbage thats on the homepage. I don't log in but until I start looking for something, it all looks like its aimed at pre-teens and adults that still think like pre-teens. Garbage music, sports, gossip, Ellen Degenerate and late night TV talk shows meant to brainwash.

And as for "news", its all establishment propaganda from the big networks.


But I watch utube like I used to watch TV. My roommates have cable with hundreds of channels, but there's not much on there compared to utube.

[CJay]

The algorithm does seem a bit 'hinky', it seems to think I'm interested in flat earth proof because I followed a link that lead to a YT video by a Flattard and it stubbornly refuses to not throw their inane BS up as suggestions, it seems to be a search bubble that's difficult to burst.

Did you erase it from watch history?

I did eventually but it still throws up the occasional FE video even now

[Terry01]

I find it has went quite "stale" and "stagnant"! There used to be lots of new stuff but now it's the same old videos advertised again and again.
I get that the selection will be huge at first when I've just signed up then steady out a bit as I start watching the videos advertised but you'd think with the size of YouTube they would be able to keep "little old me" interested with fresh new stuff. I subscribed to quite a few of the channels that I was interested in so they should be able to work out what I like from that. If it's for stuff to try and sell me they work that out just fine!

Very poor! 

[Red Squirrel]

You know, on the plus side I am actually finding some oddball interesting videos popping up now.  I find it's been stagnant for a long time but now I'm seeing more variety.  A lot of smaller channels too.  I wonder if they are maybe trying to do something to help the small channels, that would be nice for a change.   

I actually find myself more and more just clicking on recommended videos these days than searching for stuff. (even before this change)  Either on the side when finished watching a video, or on the home page. 

One thing I do find interesting though is finding videos from like the early 2000's popping up.  I'm sure some Youtubers are wondering why all of a sudden some old video they posted is now super popular lol.

[tooki]

What annoys me is how YT seems to only use your recently watched videos to come up with recommendations. So if I binge on some topic (meaning just 5 or so videos!), that’s all it’ll recommend now, even if I have been watching videos on another topic for years.

[BrianHG]

NEW: It got better for around 2 weeks, but now, today, holy crap, 0 useful recommendations.  And if I flag everyone as not interested and refresh, most of the same videos come right back.

[W2NAP]

also don't help is YT un-sub you from people at random.

lot of what i been getting in recommended has been stupid sh*t I wouldn't watch if you paid me. garbage music and garbage main stream news orgs and or the late night tv hacks.

used to id get lots of electronics, linux, trains, and car crash vids

[BrianHG]

garbage music and garbage main stream news orgs and or the late night tv hacks.

Yes, what's with all that music BS, especially most of it being user pirated uploads.  Even many of the late night TV hacks/news clips are pirated while the one doing pirating collect the monetization.

[W2NAP]

garbage music and garbage main stream news orgs and or the late night tv hacks.

Yes, what's with all that music BS, especially most of it being user pirated uploads.  Even many of the late night TV hacks/news clips are pirated while the one doing pirating collect the monetization.

I did notice that as well. for one the music is trying to push is garbage stuff I wouldn't listen to if you payed me. and two its some user pirated stuff anyway. and with the tv hacks I notice about a 50/50 split of pirated vs tv hack show account.

[BrianHG]

Apparently some content providers are being hit hard, see what's happened to Fran's channel here: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog2-re-fran/

Here recommended based views dropped to nothing, she analyzed here view stats, around exactly when my YT recommendations turned into pure turd.

It seems I'm not imagining things.  Something really has happened...

I think whatever is happening, it is just hitting different content providers and different users at different times.  Fran just somehow ended up with a really-really bad case, regardless of the viewers.  Either that, or, the rest of us just haven't noticed...

YouTube will soon start to be exclusively recommend the major paid network interests.  It's getting suckier, even though the content is still being made, this wont last.

[TerraHertz]

Not sure if this is related, other than 'youtube run by bastards and being morphed into shit.'

My favorite browser is an old Firefox Ver 38.0.1  (on WinXP) All nice and simple, and not too hard to weed out the corporatist cruft.

As of the last couple of days, suddenly almost no youtube videos will play on it. Everywhere gray screens with a message about 'browser cannot play this, html5 video, etc.' Videos that would previously work now don't. I have browser updates turned off, so it's definitely a youtube change.

I guess youtube is cutting out retro-compatible formats.

I'd just switch to using a later Firefox I have installed. Except that one introduced a lovely 'feature' where it refuses to run if there are any other instances of Firefox different versions already running. Also it loads very slowly.

It really is time to look into alternative browsers like PaleMoon etc. Any recommendations? Please don't even mention Chrome.

[bitseeker]

The most annoying is when YouTube recommend videos I've already seen. 

+1. 

Perhaps YouTube's general viewership like to watch the same thing over and over again.

[T3sl4co1l]

Apparently some content providers are being hit hard, see what's happened to Fran's channel here: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog2-re-fran/

Here recommended based views dropped to nothing, she analyzed here view stats, around exactly when my YT recommendations turned into pure turd.

It seems I'm not imagining things.  Something really has happened...

I think whatever is happening, it is just hitting different content providers and different users at different times.  Fran just somehow ended up with a really-really bad case, regardless of the viewers.  Either that, or, the rest of us just haven't noticed...

YouTube will soon start to be exclusively recommend the major paid network interests.  It's getting suckier, even though the content is still being made, this wont last.

Saw this, surprisingly in my YT recommend list.  (The EEVblog connection probably pushed it?)  After not seeing any Fran recommended for the better part of a year come to think of it.  Which is in agreement with the aggregate facts.

Tim

[tooki]

The most annoying is when YouTube recommend videos I've already seen. 

+1. 

Perhaps YouTube's general viewership like to watch the same thing over and over again.

For sure it resets the “watched” flag on a given video after a while. So eventually those get recommended again. A lot of the other “repeat” videos I get are of things that have been uploaded by many users. So yeah, I haven’t seen that particular upload, but I’ve seen the same clip...

[bitseeker]

Although that happens eventually, YouTube actually recommends videos it knows you've already watched. It even shows the progress bar at the bottom of the thumbnail completely filled in. Completely non-helpful.

[mtdoc]

It really is time to look into alternative browsers like PaleMoon etc. Any recommendations? Please don't even mention Chrome.

Opera seems to work well on the XP box in my lab. Can’t say I’ve run youtube on it recently though. Last time I did it worked fine.

[bitseeker]

I've been using Waterfox ever since Firefox switched exclusively to WebExtensions.