The feed doesn't know you, and YouTube refuses to let you browse(evilgeniuslabs.ca)

16 pointsby andsoitis9 hours ago5 comments

casey27 minutes ago
This complaint is factually false. Click on the ask button and you get a Gemini chat instance that can recommend qualitatively similar videos with a description.
Running with the c compiler example why not go the forge hosting the project, look at the contributors and forks, scrape all their socials and download their profiles/videos.
wewewedxfgdf5 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.
- littlexsparkee5 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.
CodesInChaos5 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.
- noisem4keran hour ago
  You can still manually switch to a "Related" tab. On the mobile app, you scroll down a bit and the tab header appears. In the browser, there's probably a way to automate it with an user script.
mnky9800n4 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.
- coolThingsFirst3 hours ago
  Turns out quality is a subjective metric which is hard to quantify.
jiggawatts9 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.
- abhikul03 hours 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.
- hulituan hour ago
  > That's evil.
  No. It is the normalization of evil.
  > without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
  This is the point. The point of circus, is not to stimulate your intellect, but to keep your intellect busy. Different opinions are dangerous.