General > General Technical Chat

Is YouTube's video recommendation algorithm completely borked?

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Halcyon:
This is something I've noticed over the last few months. I'm getting video recommendations for things I have absolutely zero interest in an would never watch. For example: Football, Minecraft, non-English language videos/channels, videos about cats, bullshit clickbait videos aimed at teenagers.

No matter how many times I click "Not Interested", it still seems to keep recommended this trash, even though I'm actually signed-in to Youtube.

There's also no one else in my house who would be clicking on any of that kind of content and I have a static IPv4 address to myself.

Andy Chee:
Yes, I think they may have changed the algorithm behind "Not Interested".

Basically I think they've now incorporated "Not Interested" as a weighted #tag.  Or in other words, the only way to get the "Not Interested" to work properly, is to have other users with identical browsing behaviour as yourself, to also click on "Not Interested".

YurkshireLad:
I think they’ve given up caring about what you watch, and are trying to push random topics, in the hopes that you’ll click ok something new. Some of the videos YouTube is pushing on me are so far off what I normally watch, it’s hilarious.

BrianHG:
Warning, if you hover your mouse over videos you don't intend to watch, but they begin to play in their thumbnail, youtube now considers those videos watched and updates your recommendations accordingly.

Youtube did this a long time ago when they started playing the videos in their thumbnails, then removed the acknowledged watching of those videos to prevent the recommendation algorithm from going bonkers.

However, I noticed around 6 weeks ago, this is no longer the case.  Accidentally hover your mouse over a thumbnail with an animated character or drawing (IE: Disney's Mickey mouse has gone public domain on a news video) and all of a sudden, your recommendations are flooded with cartoons since when you scroll over the recommendations page, it goes into a self feeding feedback mechanism as your mouse tends to touch similar topic videos all along the way...

I keep 'not interested' all those cartoon topics, but once in awhile, 1 pops up somewhere, then that's all I see...

edpalmer42:
Other than being able to comment or like, is there any reason to be logged in?  I've only logged in to Youtube once, so that I could leave a comment.

I also delete their cookies every time I close my browser to minimize what they think they know about my interests.  Deleting their cookies during a session is also a good way to reset things for a fresh start.

I usually use Firefox where this type of cookie crumbling is easy.

Ed

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