I reject all cookies from YouTube and browse without an account. It’s fantastic. There’s no history, which they try to make you feel bad about and paint as a negative, but knowing what the front-page is I’m glad I don’t have to see any of that trash. Every time I open a video, the recommendations are related to that specific video and not past history. For the channels I care about, I subscribe via RSS. Highly recommended.
Doesn't that mean you only get recommended the most popular stuff? If your taste is completely mainstream then I suppose it's fine, but it means it won't find anything for you related to even a mildly niche interest.
> Doesn't that mean you only get recommended the most popular stuff?
No, the only recommendations are the ones on the side of the video and they’re varied in popularity and age (from just posted to a decade ago). They seem to be related to the same subject or type of creator of the current video. They’re very hit or miss in terms of what I’d like, and that’s fine with me. Believe me, the recommendations have nothing to do with what’s popular on the homepage, and I know that because I remember well when they didn’t hide it; the homepage was absolute garbage and mostly shit from my country.
One thing I forgot to mention is that I also use iCloud Private Relay, which may further affect it. That in particular isn’t always good as sometimes YouTube refuses to play the video and asks me to sign in to prove I’m not a bot. Fortunately that has happened fewer times than I thought it would. When it does I either temporarily switch browsers or just close YouTube and go do something else.
It's again a French speaking initiative (but from a French-Switzerland research collaboration) about creating a recommendation algorithm with a lot of good properties and that scale (check the research paper on arxiv.org : 2107.07334).
It's also a plugin to help then have more data and to be useful for the users (by having an other recommendation algorithm on youtube), a win-win collaboration.
I used to love YouTube's algorithm: suggestions outside of my subscriptions but exactly on the spot. I used to took time to curate.
However since few months, all recommendations became off track. Then I started to realize these recommendations were related to the life of people I know. At least most of them, some subjects are private and personal, so this is really unsettling and I can't say if the algorithm is halucinating or not (I want to know if people tells me, not like this...). I have the impression that this is a Plato's cave illuminate with the private lives of those around me.
Technically, my understand is this:
* YT suggests channels closed to my interrests
* YT picks videos with thumbnails very closed to this "life of others" feed = the thumbnail leaks more than the video title.
I ended up to send a feedback to YT, no response, but most of these recommendations disapeared, and then it went back here and there, so I don't use the recommendation page anymore. YT music has more or less the same issue with automatic playlist.
The analytical part of me wonders why YT subscribes me to these "feeds", how these "feeds" are fed (maybe it goes beyond Alphabet / Google), but that's strange and disturbing enough.
Note: perhaps the fact I use ublock, blokadda, Firefox, etc... most probably makes my profile focussed on technical stuff, which makes other recommendations more visible.
And the algorithm seems to prioritize videos that have extraordinarily lame and over-processed preview images and comically dramatic titles.
I personally like the boring deep-dive technical videos. The people uploading these videos don't seem to give a damn about the latest hip SEO buzzwords to use (and, frankly, good) but I have to go out of my way to hunt them down.
YouTube really, really likes shoving Mr. Beast, LTT, and other channels at me, but I couldn't be any less interested, and filter them out with an add-on.
I can't wait for a replacement platform for the boring technical content. Until that platform exists, I recommend looking at DeArrow. It at least fixes titles and preview images.
Then, I have a video queue where I add videos that I find interesting.
Ever since I started using it, I started getting almost exclusively videos that I enjoy consuming, since YouTube seems to quickly adapt to my clicking patterns.
