Submitted 9 months ago by Interstellar_1@piefed.blahaj.zone to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Didn’t think it could get worse, and yet here we are. Not sure if it were an experiment, but for a while now my search results were always exactly 5 relevant videos, a block of shorts, and then just completely unrelated stuff.
I don’t really understand why we can’t have it, like it was before. If you’re subbed to a channel, you get the videos in your feed as they come in, and search just works as intended.
They are engineering solutions for problems that don’t need to exist
The “problem” they are trying to solve is “how do we keep people on the platform clicking and watching more videos for longer?” and the “solution” to that doesn’t necessarily involve showing you what you actually wanted to find.
Me: searches for something, clicks on “show unwatched”
YouTube: Here are the last six videos you watched about that!
If you add before:2026 to any YT search it removes all the “People also Watched:” stuff.
It’s completely sad that we need ho resort to this kind of shit.
Whenever I go to YouTube in an incognito window I always see videos from my country and it’s the videos that most people watch (usually Mr. Beast type stuff or some old guy talking about war). So yeah, it’s already curated based on where I’m from, before I do anything
i tend to use video.google.com on vpn or invidious to search, seems to work pretty well
Pausing the view history and regularly clearing search history seems to help
It’s by no means perfect, but better
I was thinking more in the way that your search results will always be curated to you, probably even before you watch any videos, even if it's just by your ip address or where you live
I had to go to California recently, it was crazy how much higher quality the videos YouTube recommended were while I was there.
I think it’s been a very long time (if ever) that YouTube searches weren’t somewhat localised. If you live in an anglophone country you might not notice it, but YouTube wouldn’t have got very far if Germans got rodents instead of advice when searching “rat”.
The algorithm seems to weigh heavily on a user’s history, what they have watched and what they have searched for in addition to what they also want you to see
They like to mix it in there so it’s less sus
As soon as I turned off all personalized ads, wiped and paused history as well as search history, the gloves came off
I immediately started getting spammed with Turning Point USA and PragerU ads without ever searching for anything like it
I haven’t seen any ads that are center or left of center and beyond since doing so
I have even tried searching for left leaning content directly in Google search while signed in with the same account
The search delivers the results of the search but nothing is carried over by the algorithm in YouTube like it had previously
Just more extreme right content.
Google has essentially become anothrr Sinclair Media Group, a conduit for right wing propaganda
The first 6 aren’t bad. After that, the relateds just want you to become a nazi who DUNKS on DEMONCRAT. It’s truly awful.
I’m honestly confused now the algorithm works. “So you’ve been watching folk punk videos for the last hour and a half? I think you’d also be interested in watching JORDAN PETERSON dunk on THE ATHEISTS.”
Oh you’re trying to change the brakes in your 90 Corolla? How about comedian SLAMS dumb Democrats?
shalafi@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I wonder why YouTube works well for me, and no one has ever proposed an answer. LOL, I almost always get dogpiled when I say this.
My recommendations are spot on. Shit can get weird fast if I continue to drill down. Watched a few vids on survival and willingly went down the rabbit hole expecting radical nut cases. It wasn’t bad at all and the survival stuff cleared out pretty quickly when I stopped viewing.
I don’t search much as there’s more interesting topics in my recommendations that I could ever see. But when I do search, I get what I aimed for.
Here’s another weird thing: I watch a great deal of gun related content, yet never get any right-wing horse shit. OTOH, I won’t touch right-wing gun nut channels, so maybe that’s it? Also, right-wing gun crap is far more rare than apolitical reviews, tests and fun stuff. 🤷🏻
My only guess is that my account’s so old (2006) that they have me perfectly dialed in. Anyone?
Having said all that, this bullshit is on my front page. Rather jarring as I never see garbage like that.