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Youtube doesn't even want me to watch videos anymore!

Every video is just this now:

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Interesting. I've found YouTube to be so good at recommendations that I've kinda forgotten to subscribe to some channels I watch often, YT is good about promoting them when they release new videos. This applies to a few small channels as well, I don't think they're "partnered" in any way but they do have good engagement/long form content.

But reading through replies here, it looks like people are disabling features like history. Not sure why one would do that, I want to be able to quickly find something I passed by 3 months ago but can't remember the name of.

If I had to go through my browser history to dig up a YT video I'd probably be at a loss, there aren't thumbnails there.

The thing that helped me tame YouTube was creating separate channels for my various interests. This keeps all my relevant subs in one place and really helps the algorithm. I turn off all the feeds on my main computer using https://socialfocus.app/. This prevents me from going down a YouTube hole when I don't want to but my searches and views still tune the respective algorithms. Occasionally, a stray recommendation will show up in the feed and I try to mark it "Not Interested".

Now its a real joy checking my channel feeds on the weekend and queueing things up to watch later. I have excellent stuff to chew through when I feel like it - in the gym, cooking, cleaning etc. I really look forward to doing these things now.

Switching profiles takes a few clicks but the upside has been totally worth it. It's a shame they don't make this workflow more obvious (You have to go to Account -> Switch accounts -> View all channels -> Create a channel) to set this up.

I wish more social media allowed you to bucket your feed into "interests". Maximizing clicks/views doesn't have to come at the cost of scattered attention.

I can't even watch anything anymore. It tells me to sign in, but I don't want to sign in. The great YouTube uubiquitous video host of the web appears to be dying.

Totally! Why does it show the same damn videos I've skipped over 20 times? I don't want to watch them obviously!

It broke our addiction but I don’t think it did for the broad market. People for example who click on the videos where a person has their mouth open wide in the thumbnail or “watch this before you buy ____”.

I think they just couldn’t get personalisation in line with other goals and just gave up at some point because to them it’s just a long tail with their volume.

I relate to this entirely, finding anything I want to watch has just kept getting harder and harder.

I thought I "solved" this problem - I have a bookmark folder ("YouTube init") which i open in a private window after accepting their history tracking. It used to work. The bookmarks contains some programming like Fireship, some bass playing channels etc.

However. Now my YT hmepage includes shorts with females, some of them with big boobs. I never clicked on any of these. But they figured that since I'm a programmer and play bass, I must be into big boobs because well, a stereotype male, so the soulless machine is pushing all this empty BS that millions of people clicked on before. But not me. An I don't have the option to say "don't show this stuff to me".

(These are not erotic per se, but let's say a female guitar player without a bra in the tumbnail, or a bass player with her boobs in the foreground... I understand why people do these, but I really don't want these on my YT hp. it's lowest quality clickbait stuff.)

Ha! So I am not alone. I thought it was just me as I have search history off and all privacy toggles switched to maximum off.

I was under impression that this was the reason all follow-ups/recommendations are just irrelevant rubbish.

But the sound of it, it is just a feature of modern YouTube.

Also side note: 3-4 years ago watching hardware reviews was fine on YT. Today it is a pulp of sponsored/biased reviews (disclosed or not). I give youtube 0 trust, on par with Amazon reviews.

Most of trusted creators already moved or double publish to Nebula.

Although sarcastic there is something here. I was also thinking about ethical social media.

YouTube is the only place where timeline could be turned off when search history is off and guess what happened I am no longer addicted to YouTube.

Just imagine there is a way for users to opt out of algorithmic feeds in the other social media. Would Instagram still remain addictive? Would Facebook still remain addictive? I think this must be one day of the universal fundamental rights of a human in digital space. They are using our data to do all the crappy things they are doing. Imagine the problems this one small feature could resolve in this world. Remember we are here to improve ourselves spiritually. Using social media and it's algorithmic feeds we are most likely to transcend the baddest quality we have or are born with. So this is an important revolution to happen

The inclusion of shorts on the home page or search is the biggest irritative feature

Unless you fall into the bottomless rabbit hole that is Shorts. That's waaaaay more addictive than your regular long form YT content.

Fun fact: disabling watch history also disables Shorts.

I still watch a lot of youtube. I'm subscribed to lots of youtubers providing me with more interesting stuff than I can manage to watch. I'm not aware of a better platform for watching stuff like that.

The trick with youtube (if you are not paying, like me):

- Use Firefox and a decent ad blocker to skip the ads. I never see any. It think Google just gave up on doing anything about that and just focuses on making life miserable for Chrome users only. Whatever it is, if ads are the reason you are no longer watching Youtube, Firefox is the fix.

- Ignore recommendations and the glorified more of the same shit algorithm that produces them. It's just not very good. And you can't really potty train it to better. The controls are there but they don't do anything useful or productive. I just bookmarked the /subscriptions page and only bother with the front page if I'm really bored.

- Ignore shorts. They are easily recognized because they are portrait mode instead of landscape mode. So, just don't click them. I find them disappointing and bland. And stupid. I have no patience for that.

What did it for me was disabling my history (a setting). Consequently your YT homepage is blank and it doesn’t suggest any shorts. You can maintain a kind of history by liking videos or just via the browser itself.

The ridiculous amount of ads is what’s made me basically not use YouTube unless I really really need to.

On my computer I have an ad blocker which makes it more tolerable but then there’s the added friction of “ugh I have to go start the computer and sit down yadda yadda”.

I could pay for a mobile ad blocker so I could watch crap on my phone. But then again - it is mostly crap so why bother. Perfectly fine with less YouTube in my life.

I'm pretty sure Google knows what they're doing regarding addiction. They have all the engagement metrics and train their AI to optimize for that.

Maybe this doesn't correlate to a satisfying user experience though. For me, the biggest drop in quality was when they stopped showing the dislike counts. I know there's a Chrome plugin that works as a substitute, not sure if it's good.

The oddest part to me is among the popular videos and videos from channels I watched, there's the odd 300 views video that is somewhat distantly related to my watch history on the frontpage. Is the algorithm trying to give a chance to small channels?

This is a universal experience as far as I know. What I don't know is whether it was an intentional decision or not.

I certainly hope it was intentional, because the level of corporate dysfunction necessary to produce an unintentional decline in quality of this magnitude would be something to behold...

I often load youtube, choose a few videos to add to Watch Later and refresh the page. Most of the times, 3 out of the 5 videos shown stay there when I refresh.

I have to lower the scale to see more videos in the homescreen and even then, they reverted that change; so now I'm stuck with 3 videos instead of the 8 that used to appear. Add that to the refresh problem, and youtube feels unresponsive.

I have YouTube premium and on chrome, because I have ublock installed, it doesn't even load videos. Just a big black screen. My regular habit of opening up a few videos in the background tabs is completely diminished into closing all my picks just because I cant be bothered to open the links in firefox. You'd think youtube wouldn't be that aggressive towards paying subscribers, but the feel is they REALLY don't want to load any content for you.

Another funny thing for premium subscribers is when their ultra low bitrate 1080p videos have an enchanted bitrate option available to subscribers, you have to enable it manually every time instead of being a convenient feature.

My thinking is that in their pursuance of optimization lead them to overserve locally cached videos as priority to save on bandwidth, it's like internet providers are demanding more of them and google's projections for growth show a total collapse of the platform in some not-too-distaint future.

Works fine (read: addictively) here. Have you ever tried marking videos and channels as not of interest? Maybe you're doing something that effectively prevents Google from profiling you "properly" to then "properly" hook you in with recomms?

I have a very different experience. For me the algorithm works pretty well. And I use youtube a lot since many years. Also have the paid subscription so no ads anymore (beside sponsor ads of course).

I get a lot of content I want and interested in, but I also have a long list of subscriptions. Sometimes I run into a rabbit hole, where I watch some completely different content and youtube then shows that for me for a while, even after I'm not interested anymore. But that is just for some days and then it stops showing it on my home feed.

So for me it does exactly what I want it to do.

Now I wonder, why is there such a massive difference in the experience?

Same experience here. It used to give me spot-on recommendations based on my watch history-often out of nowhere, but still accurate. That was one of the reasons I subscribed to YouTube Premium.

Now, I strongly feel it's based on a wrongly inferred social graph. It recommends videos according to what's happen in the group. It's really unsettling.

I wish there were a setting to disable this "feature." and to stick on my history.

What's even more interesting is that if you turn off watch history, they disable the home feed altogether. They just give up trying to show you anything, which has been great for keeping me off YouTube.

I couldn’t agree more.I'm experiencing the same issue. I rarely watch TV or movies (still hoarding my binge list). My routine used to be a quick 30-min mind reset before bed.Usually it's some random, oddly fascinating YouTube rabbit hole. My wife still hasn’t recovered from the video about a remote tribe brewing beer with spit.

But lately? It’s like the algorithm gave up. Same thumbnails haunting me. I used to feel like YouTube knew me. Now we are stranger's.

Makes me wonder, either the algorithm broke, or we’re part of a marketing experiment.

The search is absolutely infuriating!

You search for something you 100% know exists to show someone and it just gives up after a couple videos and starts showing recommendations.

Just the other day I was out at my parents house and I wanted to show them this channel my young daughter likes, a young woman who is herself learning to play banjo.

When we're home, to find her videos for my daughter I simply enter the girls name and "banjo" and her channel comes up. At my parents house however this just returned famous banjo players and completely ignored the name I had entered.

I was frustrated, shocked, and baffled as I scrolled through results where YouTube entirely buried this tiny creator behind giant creators, even when searched for explicitly by name. I then entered the exact same query into Google on my parent's computer and she was the top result.

My advice these days would be to just avoid YouTube search entirely and head straight to Google, as that still kind of works.

I still find videos I like on YouTube from the people I subscribe to, and I've also noticed that YouTube sometimes shows me interesting videos for new or smaller creators, but that second one is very hit or miss.

What really got me using YouTube less was using uBlock to zap the shorts feeds. That alone improved my experience by orders of magnitude, along with disabling (not deleting, unfortunately) YouTube on my phone.

My feed is blank every day and I love it.

When I choose to watch, it's stuff I truly enjoy, not algorithmic sludge.

YouTube has been showing me the same forced ad for more than a year now and it acts as a moment to reflect if I really, really want to watch the video or just close the page and move on with my day

I question whether or not they AB tested the new YouTube search full of crap vs the old one full of relevant videos.

I'm not sure there's anything new under the sun except that they tried pushing decade ol videos. I have one fairly popular video on my channel that dropped to less than a hundred views a day and suddenly it was pushed to a lot of people for a week or two and I got people complaining in the comments about why they are seeing this 16 years old video. Then it went away.

Anyway, it's the reason why I pay extra for music streaming despite having Youtube Music for free together with my Subscription. YouTube for some reason thinks that I want to keep listening the same stuff over and over again.

It's also why I love TikTok. Most of my find on TikTok happen to have a YouTube channel too but for some reason YouTube never bothered to show me any of those. It was for TikTok to let me try something new and drill down from there.

I still like YouTube a lot, it has some very high quality content that shines brightly among the slop that the wider internet has become but YouTube really needs to up its content discovery game.

Worst part? Youtube Premium's entire proposition is "you won't get ads". Otherwise it's the same enshittified experience

At least they finally fixed the subscription tab by separating shorts and videos

Thank you Google for breaking my YT addiction by introducing YT shorts, now its deleted

this is what happens at the the bottom of the feed when you binge whatch a channel or a certain type of content for a few days: https://imgur.com/zHytexT

The same here...

What alternatives are there?

Even better, get a VPN and you'll not be able to watch anything without logging in! :)

Even though Google has I imagine 10+ ways to determine you're not a bot, they choose to require a login. I'm mostly de-Googled, so I rarely sign in and have no incentive to do so.