The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse

wewewedxfgdf•about 4 hours ago

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.

littlexsparkee•about 3 hours ago

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.

mnky9800n•about 3 hours ago

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.

coolThingsFirst•about 1 hour ago

Turns out quality is a subjective metric which is hard to quantify.

CodesInChaos•about 4 hours ago

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.

jiggawatts•about 7 hours ago

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.

abhikul0•about 1 hour ago

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.

The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse

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Discussion (7 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews