People have the illusion that they choose, but they don't, when you know the number of videos uploaded and the millions of videos with high view count, you quickly understand that you are in an echo-chamber.
I find youtube's interface so incredibly frustrating and hostile. Even when I know what I want to watch, I find it very hard to actually get to it. On their Roku app, search for The Daily Show, and try and watch the latest clips. It doesn't show them in that order and browsing the clips is frustratingly hard. Their web interface, especially mobile, is equally as bad.
I've given up on trying to use youtube's interface and now just rely on recommendations + rss (via freshrss) or tubearchivist to keep me up to date and organize the videos.
It feels like I stumble upon gems in spite of their UI and have been trying to spend less time there to avoid the timesink otherwise. If it's not saved on my watch later / in my subscriptions or recommended to me credibly, it's probably a waste of time.
What particularly annoys me is that the sidebar used to show videos related to the video I'm watching. Nowadays perhaps a quarter of those links are relevant, the rest are useless shit.
And then youtube has the gall to suggest that if I want useful links there, I should turn on browsing history. You don't need history to suggest related videos!
----
Google ads went though a similar decline ten or twenty years ago. Google Adwords used to be related to the page they were showing on, and not based on your behaviour.
You can still manually switch to a "Related" tab. On the mobile app, you scroll down a bit and the tab header appears. In the browser, there's probably a way to automate it with an user script.
I was really hoping that the article would end with a tool or new interface to explore YouTube. But I guess the author only is building one but didn’t realise anything yet.
There is no technical solution to a social problem, rather the level of abstraction is wrong. Keep hammering these companies with regulation until the evil people leave due to lack of infinite free money.
This complaint is factually false. Click on the ask button and you get a Gemini chat instance that can recommend qualitatively similar videos with a description.
Running with the c compiler example why not go the forge hosting the project, look at the contributors and forks, scrape all their socials and download their profiles/videos.
If you want to know if this is just an accident of the design, or a purposeful trap, just know that it is no longer possible to browse while not logged in!
If you log in, you get the personalised funnel.
If you don't log in, you get a blank page and a search box.
That's evil.
It's tantamount to censorship, of the worst kind, deliberately sending all viewers directly to their own personal echo chambers without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
As a random example: I now get only Australian news channels recommended to me. I have to go to heroic lengths to see the BBC or any US source, let alone something more out there like Al Jazeera.
I never log in, ever. It's blank until I open a bookmarked YT channel or two then it's all the things related to that channels user base. If I start with news I get propaganda. If I happen to start with an emergency preparedness channel then I get almost entirely AI hype conspiracy videos which tells me what that company thinks of preppers. If I start with one of the popular influencers then I get all the jack-ass type content. If I start with geo-politics then I get financial investment grifters. If I start with movie reviews I get 100% fake AI generated movie review channels for movies that do not exist. About the only topic I can start with that will stay mostly related and on-topic without much AI yet is firearms. I am just guessing that maybe AI botters are afraid their AI will generate something firearm related that will get them kicked out of the algo.
Basically the main page is useless to me. I just rely on really old bookmarks which means I will rarely ever see new channels unless one of the people I already watch talks about them and maybe that's good enough.
The blank page is what you'd get if you cleared your Watch History. I use this to watch a new-to-me topic/channel or just a video that I know I'd only watch once and don't want in my recommended history in Incognito mode(although you could just remove that video manually from history too).
This makes it easy to somewhat steer the algorithm, I just open and scrub through a few videos of the same "kind" that I'm interested in and this then makes the youtube homepage a bit wieldy. This still populates unrelated videos but at a lower rate.
People have the illusion that they choose, but they don't, when you know the number of videos uploaded and the millions of videos with high view count, you quickly understand that you are in an echo-chamber.
I find youtube's interface so incredibly frustrating and hostile. Even when I know what I want to watch, I find it very hard to actually get to it. On their Roku app, search for The Daily Show, and try and watch the latest clips. It doesn't show them in that order and browsing the clips is frustratingly hard. Their web interface, especially mobile, is equally as bad.
I've given up on trying to use youtube's interface and now just rely on recommendations + rss (via freshrss) or tubearchivist to keep me up to date and organize the videos.
It's a pity YouTube doesn't let people built innovative interfaces to this treasure trove.
It's so frustrating that their interface is so very bad for discovery and exploration.
It feels like I stumble upon gems in spite of their UI and have been trying to spend less time there to avoid the timesink otherwise. If it's not saved on my watch later / in my subscriptions or recommended to me credibly, it's probably a waste of time.
What particularly annoys me is that the sidebar used to show videos related to the video I'm watching. Nowadays perhaps a quarter of those links are relevant, the rest are useless shit.
And then youtube has the gall to suggest that if I want useful links there, I should turn on browsing history. You don't need history to suggest related videos!
----
Google ads went though a similar decline ten or twenty years ago. Google Adwords used to be related to the page they were showing on, and not based on your behaviour.
You can still manually switch to a "Related" tab. On the mobile app, you scroll down a bit and the tab header appears. In the browser, there's probably a way to automate it with an user script.
I was really hoping that the article would end with a tool or new interface to explore YouTube. But I guess the author only is building one but didn’t realise anything yet.
Turns out quality is a subjective metric which is hard to quantify.
There is no technical solution to a social problem, rather the level of abstraction is wrong. Keep hammering these companies with regulation until the evil people leave due to lack of infinite free money.
This complaint is factually false. Click on the ask button and you get a Gemini chat instance that can recommend qualitatively similar videos with a description.
Running with the c compiler example why not go the forge hosting the project, look at the contributors and forks, scrape all their socials and download their profiles/videos.
If you want to know if this is just an accident of the design, or a purposeful trap, just know that it is no longer possible to browse while not logged in!
If you log in, you get the personalised funnel.
If you don't log in, you get a blank page and a search box.
That's evil.
It's tantamount to censorship, of the worst kind, deliberately sending all viewers directly to their own personal echo chambers without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
As a random example: I now get only Australian news channels recommended to me. I have to go to heroic lengths to see the BBC or any US source, let alone something more out there like Al Jazeera.
I never log in, ever. It's blank until I open a bookmarked YT channel or two then it's all the things related to that channels user base. If I start with news I get propaganda. If I happen to start with an emergency preparedness channel then I get almost entirely AI hype conspiracy videos which tells me what that company thinks of preppers. If I start with one of the popular influencers then I get all the jack-ass type content. If I start with geo-politics then I get financial investment grifters. If I start with movie reviews I get 100% fake AI generated movie review channels for movies that do not exist. About the only topic I can start with that will stay mostly related and on-topic without much AI yet is firearms. I am just guessing that maybe AI botters are afraid their AI will generate something firearm related that will get them kicked out of the algo.
Basically the main page is useless to me. I just rely on really old bookmarks which means I will rarely ever see new channels unless one of the people I already watch talks about them and maybe that's good enough.
The blank page is what you'd get if you cleared your Watch History. I use this to watch a new-to-me topic/channel or just a video that I know I'd only watch once and don't want in my recommended history in Incognito mode(although you could just remove that video manually from history too).
This makes it easy to somewhat steer the algorithm, I just open and scrub through a few videos of the same "kind" that I'm interested in and this then makes the youtube homepage a bit wieldy. This still populates unrelated videos but at a lower rate.
> That's evil.
No. It is the normalization of evil.
> without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
This is the point. The point of circus, is not to stimulate your intellect, but to keep your intellect busy. Different opinions are dangerous.