Algorithms suck - i spend more time saying not interested or dont recommend than i do watching anything it suggests, YouTube search sucks - it gives a few videos before switching to things unrelated to the search and I know the video I’m looking for is there so I have to use Bing or Google to find anything
Impressively enough, my algorithm seems to automatically filter out all the videos that my toddler watches. I never get them recommended, like it knows "hey, this is just a dad playing this for his kid to watch - we don't need to recommend him Elmo."
I love libretube, but I really need it to support queing videos. As it stands you have to pick each video you want to watch/listen to. Unless there is a hack I am unaware of Playlists don't really exist.
Please prove me wrong, if you know better than I do.
I can't que, but I can make playlists in libre (android). There's a "save" option under the video that lets me create playlists and save videos to them. We might just be using different app versions if you can't.
It's not a perfect experience to be sure, since it doesn't have the backing of a trillion dollar company with tens of thousands of engineers. It mostly gets the job done with a bit of know-how for me, though.
Most of the time I open youtube in Google container tab, see any interesting video to watch, but I often don't want to have related videos recommended to me. So I watch them in temporary containers.
Because the recommendation is like this, just because I like 3kliksphilip talk about niche ladder mechanic in counter-strike, doesn't mean I'm interested to some random e-sport CS player talk about CS tournaments.
Or one time I watch 2kliksphilip's video on DiRT Rally, I get videos from racing youtubers talk about their driving wheels, and even real-life Rally videos. (Philip doesn't even use driving wheels, he used keyboard, but this is unrelated :3)
Unsure what platform you're using, but on desktop there are options to tell it you're not interested in a video or even a whole channel.
And once I've done that a few times, I get recommendations that are clearly the algorithm struggling to figure me out. What also makes me suspect it has no idea is the appearance of the "watch it again" section. "Ah-ha! We know you watched these videos, so you're bound to want to watch them again!" and then I say I'm not interested in those either.
When the AI revolution comes, that one particularly confused robot is gonna come find me, I can tell.
Desktop, I only use NewPipe on phone. The idea is to prevent those videos listed in my watch history. But I do use the “I'm not interested” button sometimes to further fine tune the recommendation.
I'm not sure what happened, but my algorithm is on fire lately (in a good way). I frequently get recommended quality videos with very little engagement and not many views. Smaller gaming channels, car enthusiast videos, short <20 second videos that are hilarious and remind me of early YouTube.
It looks like other people are getting these as well because they will be 5-6 year videos with 10k views and all the comments are from this last month.
The whole experience is very much "early YouTube" and I'm here for it. My front page used to be all from the same dozen channels but I have so much more variety now.
Noticed this last night when I got some totally unrelated stuff, comments are filled with "what is going on, why did YouTube reccomend this to me? I love it"
I've been getting these types of recommendations as well but unfortunately I've only seen one good one, for the most part they are low quality/beginner content. I like the effort though. I'd pay for premium if they tried to get back to early YouTube, restored the dislike button, fixed the search functionality, only recommend videos related to what im watching, and didn't optimize their algorithm to murder my attention span.
You probably already know but there's a good extension for returning the dislike button that a lot of people seem to use. And another one for skipping sponsored content automatically and it also adds a highlight button that will skip to what is presumably the point of the video (why you clicked) as well as ublock origin.
Between that and the improved algorithm my YT experience is so much better.
But doesn't that extension just assume dislikes is some proportion of likes (1/3 comes to mind but I'm not sure why)? The whole point of dislikes is knowing ahead of time that the video is a pile of shite, for example if it's got 20 likes and 200 dislikes it's probably not worth bothering with. But if it's got 20 likes and, say, 7 dislikes based on dislikes=likes/3, that gives you no useful information.
Now if that extension queries some API that returns the hidden 200 dislikes, THEN it'd be useful.
It does a pretty good job with the ratio id say just give it a try?if a video is like 75% or lower it's usually a pretty shit video or the person has some wack views. I've seen a few videos too where it's as low as ~25%
There's this one streamer/YouTuber I used to watch a lot, but after some controversy I didn't feel comfortable watching him anymore. For months now I've been telling YouTube to stop recommending his channel and it still pops up.
Also, use a private window or app for viewing videos outside of the "norm". I do this for pretty much everything I click through on Lemmy and some channels I just don't want to ruin my feed.
I manually clear my history once in a while. I used to have it turned off to force the algorithim to only work with my Liked videos but can't do that anymore. It will pretend that they can't recommend anything unless the history is turned on.
Yeah, like a month ago my YT recommendations were dry, plus and I wanted to delete all my search history and turn it off, but I couldn't do that without clearing my watch history too. So I did that and the algorithm was fixed!
The only problem was that it recommended videos I already watched.
![Algorithm [elder cactus]](https://startrek.website/pictrs/image/cdb4503c-23ca-4790-b9cb-2b15880c9e31.jpeg){kind=link}
