Normally, I use YouTube very little (watch a couple videos a month). However, I’ve been in bed with an injury for some time now, which has led me to watch quite a bit of YouTube. The thing is, I subscribe to a small handfull of channels that I enjoy content from, but after a relatively short time I had watched pretty much all the new content from those channels.
Now, I would expect that the YouTube algorithm, which is supposedly designed by competent people to get me to stick around, would be able to suggest some decent content to me based on my subscriptions. However, the past week, I’ve opened YouTube only to find the same old videos being suggested over and over. Even worse: Whenever there’s something interesting-looking from a channel I don’t recognise, it always turns out to be some shitty AI voice over some generic animations or footage.
I know for a fact that thousands of hours of content are created on YouTube daily, but it genuinely feels like there are maybe five creators out there that are making anything worth watching. It’s either that, or the YouTube algorithm is just complete crap at suggesting creators that are in any way similar to what I’m already subscribing to.
What’s going on here? Why does it seem like there’s no real content out there?
As a “funny” side note: What’s with the “aggressively American” AI narrator-voice? I’ve heard it before, but thought it was some dude until I realised it’s the same voice in a bunch of unrelated videos. It reminds me of the Discovery-channel “action-narrator”-voice from back in the day, but now it’s showing up in all kinds of crap videos.
A lot of it is AI slop now too
This is probably the biggest factor for me, outside of my subs all the content it recommends is low effort AI content. “Oh cool a video about this historical thing I’m interested in.” Cuts to AI slideshow with bad grammar, pacing and no inflection, click don’t suggest videos from this creator. YouTube suggests similar slop from other “creators.”
99% of channels suck. Its only the select few educational channels that actually have content. Other than watching Youtube, I pirate a lot of TV shows and movies.
This may be a large part of my problem. I’ve kind of just noted that theres so many people spending so many hours watching youtube, that there must be an abundance of good content. Then again, a decent amount of people are probably content with having some slop on in the background, and a major user-base probably consists of kids watching people scream into the camera. With that in mind, it may not be that unlikely that even with millions of hours of content, there may only be a few thousand actually worth watching if you find it…
I can feel you. YouTube is my “tv” and I’ve been watching it for years. But lately the quality of the suggestions has gone completely out of whack, imo. I scroll through the suggestions and find nothing worth watching. Sometimes i try to improve it by hitting ‘not interested’ or ‘don’t suggest this channel’, but it’s not helping.
Maybe Spez has bribed Google to show us rubbish, so we’d return to Reddit?
It’s actually kind of nice to hear this. You’re the kind of person I was thinking of when I thought to myself that “there must be heaps of decent content out there, because a bunch of people use youtube as their tv”, so if it’s gone to crap for you as well, at least that indicates I’m not just going crazy from lying still for way too long.
I’ve noticed a lot of AI slop being recommended all of a sudden too, not just AI voice stuff but lazy AI generated thumbnails and titles too. I’ve been clicking don’t suggest channel every time it turns up but YouTube is still trying to push it.
What’s with the “aggressively American” AI narrator-voice?
I hate the AI voiceover feature. It’s genuinely baffling that YT released it. It sounds worse than microsoft sam and is one of the buggiest messes I have ever seen on the platform.
For the people who don’t know: you can deactivate it by selecting a different audio track. And it will mostly remember the selection.
I know creators who started to deactivate it for their channel, as it genuinely made people unsubscribe, because they thought it was done by the channel
If you only subscribe to a handful of channels and only watch a couple videos a month, you’re not really giving it much data to work with.
Also use the “Don’t recommend channel” and similar feedback options. I did this two a handful of AI channels and have never gotten a suggestion for them since. Other than that, you have just have to manually find some more content till the algorithm catches up.
I’ve thought of that, but would have thought the algorithm quickly caught up the past weeks when I’ve been watching several videos a day. Then again, I’ve been bored out of my mind watching whatever, so I’ve probably not given it much to work with now either, essentially telling it that I’ll keep scrolling and clicking stuff for quite some time before I leave, no matter what it throws at me…
I’ll try using the “Do not recommend” button more and see if things improve.
Youtube’s algorithm is now Show the user videos like the last two they watched and NOTHING ELSE
deleted by creator
The other day I started off watching a video about fixing the vinyl on my center console in my car. Left to check a few things and when I came back it was some right wing BS.
On youtube your always 5 videos away from rightwing propaganda.
Mine autoplays physics concept explanation videos, lol
I know you just came to ask about the algorithm but I’d be happy to suggest you some great channels (100% human in content) if you could tell me your interests!
There are some extensions that make a big difference.
“Blocktube” sounds like one you’d get a lot of use out of - all it does is add a block video and block channel option to the drop down menu of each video.
Get that AI voice or any other content that indicates the entire channel is garbage, just block the entire channel in one click. Be aggressive with blocking channels, and you’ll start noticing much less trash in your feed.
Block video is more useful for the channels you’re subscribed to -once you’ve watched a video, block it as a kind of “mark as read” button. That way your recommended videos won’t keep showing you shit you’ve already seen.
Stuff Made Here
My recos are great. 🤷♂️
On desktop there’s a vertical triple dot button under videos that allows you to tell the algorithm that you’re not interested in that video or the entire channel. I assume there’s something similar on mobile. That somewhat reduces suggestions like the unwanted video in future.
When you refresh, you’ll see a different page of videos. If you do this to enough videos, you might start getting recommended videos you’ve already watched. You can give that as a reason for not being interested, so you can make those go away as well.
Speaking of which, you can also remove videos from your Watch History to prevent the algorithm from using those as examples. That’s often another way to effectively banish a channel where you only watched the one video.
Be aware that (as far as I know) the only way to undo directly telling YouTube you’re not interested in a channel is to completely erase your Watch History. Maybe finding and watching a few videos of theirs might also work, but I haven’t yet found the need to put that to the test.
my experience is that is def not made by competent people, and i have to train the algorithm by selecting garbage and tell it to shove it up and never recommend it while im alive…and MAYBE in the future im gonna get a watchable video
There is a lot of garbage out there, but also some really good stuff. I like to stay logged out and clear history occasionally to try to keep from getting too algorithm bubbled. It’s not just automatically filtering content by subject matter, it also filters by length if you watch mostly long form videos you’ll get more long recommendations, and same for short videos. Try using more generic search terms for hobbies, interests, topics, etc you’ll get a little more variety in search results and won’t rely as much on the algorithm to filter recommendations.
O tempora, o mores! A lot of it is Gen-Z/Gen-Alpha youtuber/streamer trash but I’ve found that the recommendations improved after I started subscribing to channels I liked. Once I’d fed the algorithm enough of my tastes it’s started to do a reasonable job of recommending things. Like there’s this Louis Theroux/Vice knock-off called Channel 5 News which have a couple good videos that it just inferred I would enjoy from my history.
Sounds like you’re letting the algorithm do all the work. You can’t trust that shit. If you know what genre of content you want then you need to research what actual human creators make it. If it’s nerd stuff, look to see who’s got content on Nebula. If it’s stuff similar to (insert creator here) or on a similar topic, then search or ask around for suggestions on similar creators. And if it’s AI slop or TTS bullshit, just pretend that it doesn’t exist and move on.
