[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.

[Cyberdragon]

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.

I thought that was the "watch again" section.

[rdl]

When the Firefox devs took the attitude of "we know better than you how you should like your browser to look" and switched the UI to Australis, I switched to Pale Moon and have been using it for years now with no problems.

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

[RoGeorge]

Never heard about PaleMoon before, thank you! 

[tooki]

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.

I don’t think so. Those are in either the “watch again” or “continue watching” sections. When scrolling through quickly it’s easy to miss which section you’re in — and YouTube will mix up the order of the sections, too...

[bitseeker]

Ah, I think I figured out where the discrepancy lies. You're referring to the Recommendation section on the home page and I'm referring to the recommendations that appear with the video being watched. The recommendations on the home page don't have this "bug."

[RoGeorge]

For me, both the home page (only open it when terrible bored, just a couple of times in a year) and the videos listed on the right hand side while watching something (as what to "Watch Next" - which I also never do) have the bug of recommending videos I've already watched.  Some were watched recently, some watched months or years ago, doesn't matter. I wrote them at least a dozen of times to stop recommending what I've already seen (by pressing the feedback button on the bottom of the page and giving step by step instruction of how to reproduce). After a year or two, I stopped giving feedback, and just use the subscription only page and addblockers.

Also, I don't have a "Watch Again" or a "Continue Watching" section. I thought this was sarcasm, but there are already two persons talking about such things, so I start to think those are a real thing for some. For me (I am still using the Polymer interface) there is no such section as "Watch Again".

Do you guys have "Watch Again" or "Continue Watching" sections? 'Cause I haven't.

[bitseeker]

I see Recommended, Continue Watching, and Watch Later. However, I rarely look at the home page. I use the Subscriptions page as my "home page."

[Electro Detective]

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.

98% is being a bit conservative isn't it?  99.9999% is more like it every time I've blundered on to their 'hellpage'   

FWIW once you hook up to a few good Youtubers and their links and comments recommending other tubers,
you can do fine for ages without any of 'YouTube's 'Recomended' recomendations'
and IMHO still beats "cable with hundreds of channels" of mostly drivel that seems to appeal to multitudes of numbskulls,
repeats, BS panel blab, and facepalm worthy 'new' movies and shows 

As mentioned somewhere by our EEVblog host, Youtube needs some competition

...to get off their overconfident butt, drain the staff swamp, lose the obvious paid trolls and shills, and get serious about running their business,

or flog it for a realistic price to someone that can


Perhaps decadent cable shareholders have sunk some funny money into Youtube and 'advising' YT admin to do 'things' that make cable a better option for the paying decent folk? 

[JugglingElectrons]

Hopefully someone can tell me I'm crazy and there's a better way to customize YouTube. I just want my homepage to have a custom layout where I can choose my favorite subsciptions to be at certain locations. I feel like every time I refresh the homepage the layout gets shuffled around and the suggestions appear in different orders. If there's a way to get away from some of the algorithm and have some customization please let me know!
 

[RoGeorge]

Greasemonkey can rearrange a web page, but it's not trivial to do that. There might be some free Greasemonkey scripts already written so that can modify the YouTube pages.

To avoid the Youtube home page mess, I use https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions.

[JugglingElectrons]

The subscription page is about as close as I've found as well to a more customised homepage. I've even had to unsubscribe to some channels just to try and clean that page up a bit.

[Cyberdragon]

I love it when every time a video is sponsored, they won't show the sponsoring ads, but instead a competetor's ads throughout the video. This seems like a deliberate evil troll. (on mobile, I have adblockers on desktop)

[bitseeker]

(install an adblocker on mobile, too )

[RoGeorge]

This might be the cause of the strange recommendations: Google wants to guide your thoughts, because it now pretends to know what you'll want, better than you do and before you'll realize. 

I don't know if that is true, just my own speculations from this announcement
https://phys.org/news/2018-09-google-tunes-prescience-pictures.html

What I know for sure is that I already have problems finding what I want by using Google search, mostly because of the stupid AI that disregards my searching keywords. Even Verbatim mode fails.
Lately I found myself repeating a search, but with other search engines, just because Google ignores what it is typed in its search box. 

DuckDuckGo seems better at obeying the searched words. Any other suggestions for alternatives to Google search, with mandatory and optional words, maybe some OR, AND, NOT operators, too?

[tooki]

Ah, I think I figured out where the discrepancy lies. You're referring to the Recommendation section on the home page and I'm referring to the recommendations that appear with the video being watched. The recommendations on the home page don't have this "bug."

So you don't mean the recommended videos for you, but rather the related videos to a video (the "up next").

[BrianHG]

So you don't mean the recommended videos for you, but rather the related videos to a video (the "up next").

The "up next" does still seem to be good.  But, if you cant first get to an interesting 'recommended' videos from your home page, then, you will never get to see any good 'up next' videos...

[bitseeker]

Yes, the videos that appear below the Up Next one. There's a horizontal bar separating the Up Next video from these others, so I don't know what they're supposed to be. They could be related, recommended, or something else. I've seen completely irrelevant videos show up in there. In any case, I find that list to be poorly implemented as it includes videos I've already watched and, thus, wastes space that could be occupied by something I might actually want to watch.

[tooki]

Yes, the videos that appear below the Up Next one. There's a horizontal bar separating the Up Next video from these others, so I don't know what they're supposed to be. They could be related, recommended, or something else. I've seen completely irrelevant videos show up in there. In any case, I find that list to be poorly implemented as it includes videos I've already watched and, thus, wastes space that could be occupied by something I might actually want to watch.

I think it includes videos that are frequently watched together with the one you're watching, as might happen when a video mentions another video, or when it's segments of the same presentation or series. That, to me, makes sense even if you've already seen it.

[apis]

Just a tip: you can click on the little "..." icon on the recommendations and choose "not interested" which helps the algorithm know it made a mistake.

[BrianHG]

Just a tip: you can click on the little "..." icon on the recommendations and choose "not interested" which helps the algorithm know it made a mistake.

Do you have any clue how many time I now have to click that BS for every single video in the list, all of them, hit refresh, and do the same again and again and again, and repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse...

[BrianHG]

It's getting even worse....

Does anyone else have Youtube now 'FORCE' the stupid 'Gaming For You' channel listing?
For the last few months...  I tried clicking the [X] again and again, yet, it keeps on coming back.
How do I permanently get rid of this junk?
Even worse, now, gaming topics always end up in 20%-40% my recommendations...
I keep on selecting telling Youtube 'I'm not interested in this channel/junk'
How is this possible?  I don't play computer games.  I haven't ever searched for any video game content.

[glarsson]

Just as thumbs up and thumbs down both indicates activity for the channel, trying to get rid of the games also indicates interest in games? :-)

[EEVblog]

I get videos I've watched before (on that login), it's silly. And yes, refreshes do very little.

[SiliconWizard]

Yeah, it's basically as useless and annoying as Amazon's recommended items.

[EEVblog]

I just got recommended the new Cobra Kai sneak peak video, 4 days after it was released. Yet they know I'm a premium member and have watched every episode and associated video of the series.
They can't even recommend their own stuff to known existing viewers in a timely manner
It was the only decent recommendation today, half of which I've already seen, and the other are the same ones that have been there for days. Very little variety 

[rdl]

Don't sign in and don't allow their cookies and you'll get mostly random stuff recommended every time you go there.

[BrianHG]

Don't sign in and don't allow their cookies and you'll get mostly random stuff recommended every time you go there.

Thanks but I want the old system back, where recommendations followed my subscriptions and varied with each refresh of the page.  But, now, even channels I've been subscribed to have not turned up new episodes in quite awhile, or even at all.  The system is now fundamentally flawed.  I'm subscribe to, example, CBC news here in Canada, and, not 1 new video has come out news related in months like it used to.  Yes, I know going to my subscriptions page list the new stuff there, but, it's like the recommendations now almost avoid most or all of my subscribed 'topics' in general.

[bitseeker]

The Subscription page is better, which is why I never use the home page. However, it doesn't always show you all new videos from channels you've subscribed to. So, YouTube introduced the "bell" button. Great! It wasn't enough to show interest by subscribing to their channel. Pffft! I haven't bothered to use this Band-Aid. If they can't get things right in the first place, I'm not going to compound it with another layer of "broken."

Anyway, I start at the Subscription page and, if I notice that I haven't seen a video from someone in a while, I go to their channel page to see what I've missed. If I can't tell, then I guess I wasn't that interested in that channel. YouTube has been, and probably always will be, broken.

We need competitors... 

[BrianHG]

We need competitors... 

I second that...

[BrianHG]

Here is the way to fix youtube's lousy recommendations:
1. Write down all your subscriptions.
2. Delete your gmail account and youtube login.
3. Create a new Gmail/youtube account login.
4. Re-subscribe to all you channels with your new account.
5. Now, refreshing your 'Recommendation's' page will give you all new videos like youtube used to do around 8 months ago.

I don't know why this works, or makes a difference, but, for now, my youtube recommendations appear to function like the way they did since over 5 years up until around 8 months ago.

I'll keep you guy updated once the bug appears again.
I only found this thanks to another bug where for some reason, yesterday, youtube only supported 360p and 720p playback video modes on my g-mail login account.

[jh15]

I get this same ugly face on the amazon prime main menu, think it is amazon originals.

[bitseeker]

Here is the way to fix youtube's lousy recommendations:
1. Write down all your subscriptions.
2. Delete your gmail account and youtube login.
3. Create a new Gmail/youtube account login.
4. Re-subscribe to all you channels with your new account.
5. Now, refreshing your 'Recommendation's' page will give you all new videos like youtube used to do around 8 months ago.

I don't know why this works, or makes a difference, but, for now, my youtube recommendations appear to function like the way they did since over 5 years up until around 8 months ago.

If it starts going awry again, try deleting your viewing history. A fresh account may have effectively done that.

[BrianHG]

Here is the way to fix youtube's lousy recommendations:
1. Write down all your subscriptions.
2. Delete your gmail account and youtube login.
3. Create a new Gmail/youtube account login.
4. Re-subscribe to all you channels with your new account.
5. Now, refreshing your 'Recommendation's' page will give you all new videos like youtube used to do around 8 months ago.

I don't know why this works, or makes a difference, but, for now, my youtube recommendations appear to function like the way they did since over 5 years up until around 8 months ago.

If it starts going awry again, try deleting your viewing history. A fresh account may have effectively done that.

I tried that a week ago.  Then I got stuck stupid 'Gaming' always forcibly ending up on my main page and a few days later, my video playback resolution had only 2 modes on every video, only 360p and 720p.

Also, the problem seemed to start when Youtube began feeding me 2 sequential video adds every time.  Now with this new account, I only get 1 add per video.

[bitseeker]

Interesting. I look forward to your further findings.

[BrianHG]

Interesting. I look forward to your further findings.

I now get an infinite list scrolling down my recommendations, including a column to re-play viewed videos.  I never had this in 5 years of using YouTube.  The recommendations have always been limited to around 2-3 pages, and recently, 1.5 pages.  Something in YouTube changed or happened between some internal update they had a number of months ago, corrupting my account information, regardless of my watch history, or clearing that history.

[bitseeker]

Well, I guess that'll be a good use for my very old Google Apps account. I can make lots of new accounts. If I need a new one annually, that'll last me until I'm dead and gone. Winner!

[BrianHG]

It's been 3 weeks so far and my fix appears to still be working fine.  I think Youtube has somehow messed up my old account setting at 1 point in time, then went downhill from there.

[bitseeker]

Well, that's a bit of good news.

[BrianHG]

  WTF is going on.
Now every recommendation is crap, even after clearing out an account, the recommendation turn back into crap within 1 hour!

What do I do now?

[MagicSmoker]

Count me as another person who has gotten increasingly frustrated with the terminally stupid youtube recommendations. I don't have a good fix for it, but I did stumble on a workaround/kludge while desperately searching firefox add-ons for such: install the Channel Blocker extension and you can at least permanently stop getting served the same recommendations over and over again no matter how many times you go through the tedious process of clicking on the 3 vertical dots, clicking on "not interested" then clicking on "tell us why" and then clicking a 4th time to check the box for "not interested in this channel."

Another, somewhat more malicious but just as tedious method that works on a per video basis, if not per channel, is to report a video as spam (or violent or whatever). I try to reserve that for the clickbaity crap like, "Blah blah did blah, and then THIS happened..."

Oh, and is it just a US thing, or do people in other countries also repeatedly get recommendations that are in a language different from what you specified in your google account settings? I don't know why Google/YT thinks I can understand Russia or Polish, but it seems pretty convinced of it.

[AndyC_772]

My YT recommendations are generally pretty sane, but over the last few weeks something very odd has started happening.

The 3rd recommendation is, sometimes, completely random. Not the others, just the 3rd result, as if that position in the list is controlled by a completely different algorithm. It's often in another language, including languages that use character sets that I can't even recognise, much less read and understand.

Part of me thinks there's just a software bug involved, like an integer overflow or uninitialised pointer, meaning I'm getting a completely random result. Another suspects that someone at YT thinks I "should" be broadening my horizons, and that this can be achieved by suggesting one extraordinarily irrelevant video amongst others that make sense.

[SiliconWizard]

I never really even bothered looking at the recommendations. And yes they are crap, and very much like Amazon's recommended products. Same crap, very similar algorithm probably.

[bitseeker]

It sounds like YT may be profiling to see who may be receptive to non-English content.

I've long given up on YT recommendations and their home page. I just use the subscriptions page. I also don't use the bell. Why should I do extra work (and get unnecessary notification of every video, which creates more work for me) because YT can't do things right?

If I feel that a channel I've subscribed to doesn't seem to have posted in a while, I'll go check their channel's page for anything I may have missed. No notifications necessary.

[BrianHG]

Ok, I see the above point, but, even with my subscriptions, I would like to see new youtubers who I haven't subscribed to yet who may have content I'm interested in.  This is how I originally found EEVblog and other interesting channels.

As of now, not 1 single new semi-interesting hit which I would even bother clicking on has come about in weeks.

[bitseeker]

Makes sense. It's certainly broken. I guess I've just become apathetic to YT's troubles. YouTube, Google, Alphabet, etc. are supposedly full of smart people. If they can't figure it out...

I may have simply joined the Grumpy Old Guy, "Get off my lawn," club.

[AndyC_772]

It sounds like YT may be profiling to see who may be receptive to non-English content.

If that were the case, wouldn't it make sense to offer content that was at least on a similar theme to other content in which I already have shown an interest?

The last odd recommendation I had was, I think, a religious video with just a few hundred views - so, not a popular video in its own right, and nothing at all in common with the videos I usually watch. Other times it's suggested videos aimed at babies and toddlers.

It's almost as though it's trying to pick out the videos I'm least likely to ever see otherwise.

[SiliconWizard]

That's deep learning! https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub45530

Probably too deep to be figured out by mere humans...

[nali]

I don't know if it has any relevance but Google's tracking seems to be getting smarter. For example I was looking for a relacement shower door recently so plenty of Googling including the Shopping links. Within an hour or so my wife mentioned that she was getting adverts in her Facebook feed for shower doors...

Now aside from the household IP address there is nothing in common between our systems. I use a Win 10 desktop, she  uses an Android tablet. I don't and have never used FB, I don't use her tablet and she doesn't use my PC. I do get random and generally useless suggestions in my YT, maybe they're being triggered by links in some of the crap she continually scrolls through in her newsfeed or whatever they call it?

[bitseeker]

It sounds like YT may be profiling to see who may be receptive to non-English content.

If that were the case, wouldn't it make sense to offer content that was at least on a similar theme to other content in which I already have shown an interest?

Apparently, making sense is not a factor.

[bitseeker]

I don't know if it has any relevance but Google's tracking seems to be getting smarter. For example I was looking for a relacement shower door recently so plenty of Googling including the Shopping links. Within an hour or so my wife mentioned that she was getting adverts in her Facebook feed for shower doors...

I'd call that targeting less smart. It targeted the wrong person.

[nali]

Yeh maybe smart wasn't the best choice of wording !

[langwadt]

It sounds like YT may be profiling to see who may be receptive to non-English content.

If that were the case, wouldn't it make sense to offer content that was at least on a similar theme to other content in which I already have shown an interest?

The last odd recommendation I had was, I think, a religious video with just a few hundred views - so, not a popular video in its own right, and nothing at all in common with the videos I usually watch. Other times it's suggested videos aimed at babies and toddlers.

It's almost as though it's trying to pick out the videos I'm least likely to ever see otherwise.

https://youtu.be/1PGm8LslEb4

[BrianHG]

I don't know if it has any relevance but Google's tracking seems to be getting smarter. For example I was looking for a relacement shower door recently so plenty of Googling including the Shopping links. Within an hour or so my wife mentioned that she was getting adverts in her Facebook feed for shower doors...

I'd call that targeting less smart. It targeted the wrong person.

This might explain a thing or 2 since my ISP changes my IP address every 2 days.
I'm sure every IP address I get is shared in a pool of my ISP's customers.

[bitseeker]

Yes, that can make a mess of things. However, if you're logged into your Google account, they don't have to rely on IP address for targeting. They know it's you.

Even if you aren't logged in, your browser can be fingerprinted to differentiate it even if your IP address changes or if different devices share the same IP.

[NiHaoMike]

It looks like adblock might actually be the best counterattack to ad tracking. If they can figure out you use adblock, they'll know their efforts are completely wasted.

I suppose something like Adnauseum (hide ads but automatically "click" on some of them) might help in giving them an illusion of showing ads except in reality, nobody sees it.

[taydin]

People seem to be mostly focusing on the shitty recommendations of youtube. But I think a bigger problem is the fact that I cannot block a channel from EVER BEING RECOMMENDED. I go and click "not interested" and later another video gets recommended from that channel. I click "not interested" again and this repeats endlessly and I keep getting videos from that channel again

And putting my tin foil hat on, I have to say that this particular channel promotes a USA endorsed, but locally not very popular political view It seems as if one of youtube's mission is just that: promote channels that advocate certain political viewpoints and don't give a damn whether the user doesn't want anything from that channel.

[MagicSmoker]

People seem to be mostly focusing on the shitty recommendations of youtube. But I think a bigger problem is the fact that I cannot block a channel from EVER BEING RECOMMENDED. I go and click "not interested" and later another video gets recommended from that channel. I click "not interested" again and this repeats endlessly and I keep getting videos from that channel again

Yep, that infuriated me, too, but I found a solution that I posted on the previous page:

...install the Channel Blocker extension [for FireFox] and you can at least permanently stop getting served the same recommendations over and over again no matter how many times you go through the tedious process of clicking on the 3 vertical dots, clicking on "not interested" then clicking on "tell us why" and then clicking a 4th time to check the box for "not interested in this channel."...

[taydin]

I had tried channel blocker but it didn't block the channel that I told it to block. But will try again, maybe a bug was fixed in the meantime.

[tszaboo]

Probably the algorithm got trained by 3 year olds, who keep on watching the same videos over and over again.
I completely skip the home page, I go for subscriptions directly.

I dont know why you are suprised that google knows things. You order stuff online, you get a mail about it.
You go somewhere, your phone tacks you. It will even ask if you enjoyed your stay at a certain restaurant. The one you looked up the address on google and used maps to go there. At the end of the month, I get an email telling em that I was in 4 countries last month and spent 30 hours in a car and walked so many km.

You dont even have to be a conspirator theorist to see the pattern here, it happens in front of your own eyes, and it is written in the terms of service. All you can turn off, if you want to get a mail about it.

[AndyC_772]

People seem to be mostly focusing on the shitty recommendations of youtube. But I think a bigger problem is the fact that I cannot block a channel from EVER BEING RECOMMENDED.

I've never seen that behaviour. If I say I'm not interested in a channel, I don't get recommendations from that channel again. It looks as though the system isn't working the same way for everyone.