Algorithm [elder cactus]

You can fix your YouTube algorithm by going into your watching history and deleting the videos you don’t want used for recommendations!
- Also, tap the three dots on videos you don't want to watch and select don't recommend channel or not interested.
  
  You'd be surprised how good youtube is at finding similar crap.
  
  There's this one streamer/YouTuber I used to watch a lot, but after some controversy I didn't feel comfortable watching him anymore. For months now I've been telling YouTube to stop recommending his channel and it still pops up.
  
  Ha! That doesn't work for a decade now
- ... Fucking really? OMG, that's good to know!
- I manually clear my history once in a while. I used to have it turned off to force the algorithim to only work with my Liked videos but can't do that anymore. It will pretend that they can't recommend anything unless the history is turned on.
- Yeah, like a month ago my YT recommendations were dry, plus and I wanted to delete all my search history and turn it off, but I couldn't do that without clearing my watch history too. So I did that and the algorithm was fixed!
  The only problem was that it recommended videos I already watched.
- Also, use a private window or app for viewing videos outside of the "norm". I do this for pretty much everything I click through on Lemmy and some channels I just don't want to ruin my feed.
- You just changed my life!
- I used to do that on Netflix as well

I recently switched over to using LibreTube which cut me off from personalized algorithmic recommendations.
It was a little bit like switching off Reddit to Lemmy - less digital sugar pills, but after a while, I don't even really miss it.
I do have to actively seek out new creators if I want to watch something new, but in all honesty my current subscriber list keeps me more than busy.
On balance a net positive, would recommend
- On balance a net positive, would recommend.
  Seconded. All my homies love LibreTube.
  (At least I think they would, if I weren't the only person I know who uses it. But hey, now there's you! There are ~~dozens~~ two of us!)
- I've been using ReVanced for awhile now, but LibreTube sounds pretty good to get off the algorithms wild ride
  
  I love libretube, but I really need it to support queing videos. As it stands you have to pick each video you want to watch/listen to. Unless there is a hack I am unaware of Playlists don't really exist.
  Please prove me wrong, if you know better than I do.
- Same but newpipe/pipepipe
- Libretube glitches a lot for me :(
  
  It's not a perfect experience to be sure, since it doesn't have the backing of a trillion dollar company with tens of thousands of engineers. It mostly gets the job done with a bit of know-how for me, though.
- What are some fun channels you'd recommend on there?

I'm not sure what happened, but my algorithm is on fire lately (in a good way). I frequently get recommended quality videos with very little engagement and not many views. Smaller gaming channels, car enthusiast videos, short <20 second videos that are hilarious and remind me of early YouTube.
It looks like other people are getting these as well because they will be 5-6 year videos with 10k views and all the comments are from this last month.
The whole experience is very much "early YouTube" and I'm here for it. My front page used to be all from the same dozen channels but I have so much more variety now.
- I've been getting these types of recommendations as well but unfortunately I've only seen one good one, for the most part they are low quality/beginner content. I like the effort though. I'd pay for premium if they tried to get back to early YouTube, restored the dislike button, fixed the search functionality, only recommend videos related to what im watching, and didn't optimize their algorithm to murder my attention span.
  
  You probably already know but there's a good extension for returning the dislike button that a lot of people seem to use. And another one for skipping sponsored content automatically and it also adds a highlight button that will skip to what is presumably the point of the video (why you clicked) as well as ublock origin.
  Between that and the improved algorithm my YT experience is so much better.
- Noticed this last night when I got some totally unrelated stuff, comments are filled with "what is going on, why did YouTube reccomend this to me? I love it"

YouTube is still gonna recommend disgusting videos in "For You", even if you report them constantly.

Most of the time I open youtube in Google container tab, see any interesting video to watch, but I often don't want to have related videos recommended to me. So I watch them in temporary containers.
Because the recommendation is like this, just because I like 3kliksphilip talk about niche ladder mechanic in counter-strike, doesn't mean I'm interested to some random e-sport CS player talk about CS tournaments.
Or one time I watch 2kliksphilip's video on DiRT Rally, I get videos from racing youtubers talk about their driving wheels, and even real-life Rally videos. (Philip doesn't even use driving wheels, he used keyboard, but this is unrelated :3)
- Unsure what platform you're using, but on desktop there are options to tell it you're not interested in a video or even a whole channel.
  And once I've done that a few times, I get recommendations that are clearly the algorithm struggling to figure me out. What also makes me suspect it has no idea is the appearance of the "watch it again" section. "Ah-ha! We know you watched these videos, so you're bound to want to watch them again!" and then I say I'm not interested in those either.
  When the AI revolution comes, that one particularly confused robot is gonna come find me, I can tell.
  
  From my personal anecdotal experience those buttons are not very effective.
  
  Desktop, I only use NewPipe on phone. The idea is to prevent those videos listed in my watch history. But I do use the “I'm not interested” button sometimes to further fine tune the recommendation.

We have ways of making you talk. See this video of an AI voice reading reddit comments? Click
- So, poison torture.

Joke's on you, creep, I have a toddler. All my algorithm serves up now is Blippi videos, steam locomotives, and construction equipment!
- Impressively enough, my algorithm seems to automatically filter out all the videos that my toddler watches. I never get them recommended, like it knows "hey, this is just a dad playing this for his kid to watch - we don't need to recommend him Elmo."

Subscribe to Logan Paul's channel and I'll crack before you can like one of his videos.

History: off

Straight up I use private mode to watch shitty YT vids from shitty or uninteresting Ytubers all the time. My algorithm is precious to me. I needs it.

This is gold.

Algorithms suck - i spend more time saying not interested or dont recommend than i do watching anything it suggests, YouTube search sucks - it gives a few videos before switching to things unrelated to the search and I know the video I’m looking for is there so I have to use Bing or Google to find anything