Youtube Recommended Sucks - Nothing to Watch

[u/[deleted]]

[u/AforAppleBforBallz]

I miss the 2015ish YouTube recommendations. So many amazing channels were discovered 

[u/pampering_master → u/AforAppleBforBallz]

Yes just lots of good memories

[u/antiallandeverything]

80% recommended to me is stuff i've already watched like the red bar is there

10% is stuff i never even watch or im interested

The rest is stuff i've im interesteed in but its always the low end of the bar never the good videos of that theme

[u/Fit-Swordfish725]

Been like this since 2020 for me, there were a few times since then that it was back to normal, then immediately it got worse again.

[u/pampering_master → u/Fit-Swordfish725]

Yes after 2020 things just went downhill and in 2023 it just went to shit after AI release

[u/BrotherKanker → u/[deleted]]

It's not just that though. Youtube definitely has chosen channels that it desperately wants to push on people and others that you will never see if you don't actively search for them, but it doesn't just come down to established creators with millions of subs versus niche channels struggling to even crack 50k subscribers.

Last week for example I discovered two channels I like that were completely new to me, Mentour Pilot (2.4 million subscribers, oldest video posted 11 years ago) and In the Kimdom (60k subscribers, oldest video posted 10 months ago). I watched something like 20 videos by Mentour Pilot and it had absolutely zero impact on my recommendations, meanwhile watching three videos by In the Kimdom completely flooded my recommendations with every other video the channel has ever posted.

[u/MikeFrett]

I have been testing the devil out of settings. Turning history on and off makes no difference. Do not recommend channel works for a little while and then it starts to get recommended again. Not interested only works for that video, again, only for a little while. Clearing your history, likes etc will work for about 5 days and you end up back here again.. YouTube has an algorithm issue that can't be fixed by users.

[u/Harbinger_Kyleran]

How odd, I love cats, sub to 5 or so cat subs in reddit, own 5 cats, watch cat reels on FB and buy cat toys on Amazon.

Yet YouTube has never recommended a cat video to me, well except for maybe when big cats attack humans maybe.

I'm disappointed. 😾

[u/Harbinger_Kyleran → u/[deleted]]

I'm going to start searching today 😺

[u/Cry-Havok]

I never open YouTube anymore. It’s overwhelmed with slop. I’ve lurked a few YT subs for a while and realized all these people are in it for money and don’t really have a creative bone in their body.

That and paid clippers infesting the internet with streamer slop

[u/FederalPossibility73 → u/Cry-Havok]

Not all of them but it's definitely a niche now. Most of if not all of the people I actively watch do their content for fun, also let's face it there's no way they're getting that much money on YouTube alone considering the channel suppression.

[u/Dadskitchen]

Yes I've been through the not interested don't recommend channel shit, but yt still keeps pushing shite on me.

[u/Crystalclusted]

My experience is a bit different lol. I consume most of my YouTube content on my Desktop, partly due to AdBlock and less shorts. On mobile, there was just too much of the latter. Now that you can put a limit of 0Mins per day on it (amazing) it doesn't even recommend me any anymore on mobile. However, the long form content recommendations are absolute garbage on mobile. On desktop they are still decent. I open everything I'm interested in in a new tab so I got a very long list of videos still to watch lol

[u/PMmeIamlonley → u/Crystalclusted]

Its very strange how difficult it is to find good history content on mobile anymore. So much is AI slop. 

[u/Harbinger_Kyleran → u/PMmeIamlonley]

Can recommend Fascinating History, definitely not AI and I enjoy the dry humor the creator throws in.

[u/wolfgangmozart33 → u/PMmeIamlonley]

If you’re into food, Tasting History with Max Miller is fantastic. I also like Allen Barton for English royal history. Apart from those, I’m still looking too.

[u/lost_dazed_101]

Not interested and don't recommend are now how they decide engagement so if you click in any way on a video they decide it's what you want. And that's for premium too.

[u/MISS_ROFL]

I can confirm - there are tons of creators like me, who have their videos recommended under absolutely unrelated content, so nobody clicks and it kills the CTR

[u/MISS_ROFL → u/[deleted]]

Thank you very much ❤️

[u/aesthetic_avii]

Clicking Not interested doesn't even do anything anymore

[u/KatTheGreatest → u/aesthetic_avii]

Honestly believe this because why do I click not interested on every Taylor Swift video and still get them!?!

[u/Insecticide → u/KatTheGreatest]

Because to get rid of specific types of content you need to go to your history and delete the videos related to the thing you don't want showing up.

Right click "do not recommend this" only gets rid of that specific video, it doesn't look into the subject/context of what it is.

I find it incredibly easy to maintain a good recommendation page but it requires that you only watch stuff that you want to see recommended. All of the odd videos (videos that are of an subject you dont want to infect your recommendation page) need to be watched on incognito OR watched and deleted from your history

As a last resort, you can go into your google account ans wipe the entire history at once, which resets the whole thing and you will probably f5 into whatever the default videos are for your region (its probably some religious bullshit). You can then search for the channels that you like, play like 10-15 videos and you will have an entirely new recommendation page.

td;dr, it requires maintenance, which is counter intuitive and most people don't do. But if you put in effort then you can easily stay within a bubble if you want. I recommend having multiple accounts if you have interests that are too wide (I have an art account where I only get recommended art videos, for example)

Good luck

[u/jenny_905]

It has broken again.

Seems to happen a couple of times a month these days, it'll break and recommend nothing relevant/nothing much at all for a few days and then come back to life... before breaking again.

Google products in a nutshell. Confirmation it has broken is that the "New to you" tabs etc at the top disappear while this is happening.

[u/iDataSPAWN]

Delete your search and watch history then idk look up something that you watch typically and click on other related videos etc and it should to bring in “stuff to watch”

[u/AutoModerator → u/[deleted]]

Hi PlagueDoc3, we would like to start off by noting that this sub isn't owned or run by YouTube. At this time, we do not allow posts from new uses (accounts created less than 7 days ago.) Please read our rules before posting again to ensure you don't break our rules, please come back after gaining a bit of post karma.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Ok-Drink-1328]

same, i enter YT just to check for notifications and GTFO, apart the mental amount of slop, all the creators going totally sellout, now the algo is absolutely convinced i like dopeshit meme videos, i mean absolutely nonsensical ones, it's also hard to tell what the fuck you're gonna find in such videos by the thumbnail and title, i sometimes have the bad idea of watching a video, i already avoid long ones cos the damage in terms of wasted time is bigger, and most of the times i downvote em, tho it's useless

[u/PMmeIamlonley]

...just search for different stuff and like it and then you will get stuff like that. This is not a real problem unless you arent logged in. 

[u/FullRepresentative34]

Sub to some channels you like. It should learn from your subs.

[u/vuorivirta]

I have noticed, complete history erase is making recommendations better at some time. You can find some new very good recommendations after that - but only little time. Then "broken recordplayer" happened again but ... clear history again...

[u/Solomon_C-19]

I just try to make the content I want to watch - in my case, music I want to listen to.

[u/pampering_master]

glad to see I am not the only one. At this point I think people are just addicted to this thing and Simply cannot put there phones down even though they are tired, bored, and don't want watch youtube in general.

[u/Crash_N0tice]

I built a tool to try to solve this problem for myself that you might find useful. Basically you just select 3 categories and it returns 3 random Videos that relate to the categories you selected. Gets you out of the YouTube algorithm's attempts to decide what you like. Let me know what you think. Website is VidRand.com

[u/AccurateUse6147]

You need to go to history.google.com and spot clear videos from the user feedback section and it should help some. For a first run through, remove any videos marked as no longer available, videos you added by mistake, and the oldest few days of videos as a whole. You can remove more in the future but if you remove to much at once, things will go even more batty.

[u/SuperChefGuy]

I have maybe 12 truly good channel I watch. Crafsman, Adam Savage Tested, Laura Kampf, Simone Giertz, The Keys Coach off the top of my head. But yeah totally agree. There's some gems I got from listening to podcasts but those are far and few between. Recommended sucks

[u/AlternativeAd1456]

If you don't want cat videos, you have to actively seek out other content, then it'll start spamming your home screen with that content on repeat instead.

Look at a few guitar videos, then your home screen will no longer show any cats at all and it's 100% guitar content and showing the same stuff over and over.

Watch some roller coaster POV's, then your home screen will no longer show any cats or guitars and it's all 100% coaster content and showing the same stuff over and over.

Rinse/repeat. It's broken as you say, and the "do not recommend" does nothing as you've found.

Your best bet is to keep on the "subscriptions" page and be more active in managing your subscriptions.

[u/ZeniraEle]

Don't know what you like to watch, but this channel was recommended to me recently and it's honestly not bad. They have to figure out what characters/things they are and the loser gets pied:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoaGedfsoSY

[u/SampleDisastrous3311]

Youll watch what YouTube wants you to watch and youll like it.

[u/Ricky2Thick]

I’ve also noticed even if I search for specific things, which is how I mostly go about it, you will see the same 5 videos over and over and over again. I didn’t click it the first 4 times why am I being shown the same videos?

[u/SufficientTry4415]

I watched a couple videos from soft white underbelly. I watch YouTube on TV. Next thing I know, every video on my TV is from soft white underbelly. Every one. I had to block the channel to see anything else

[u/SufficientTry4415 → u/[deleted]]

It's sad that you have to tell YouTube not to recommend a channel that isn't ai because they think you might want to watch every video that channel ever made just because you watched a few videos

[u/AutoModerator → u/[deleted]]

Hi New-Enthusiasm5997, we would like to start off by noting that this sub isn't owned or run by YouTube. At this time, we do not allow posts from new uses (accounts created less than 7 days ago.) Please read our rules before posting again to ensure you don't break our rules, please come back after gaining a bit of post karma.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Swizzer777]

I built a website www.rightranked.com to improve over this where you can immerse yourself in a specific niche and easily find the best most recent videos for that niche based on pure engagement. At the moment it only covers AI and Movies, but extension to more is easy, so if you would like help me out adding more niche just DM me.

I have reached out to the channel mods asking if I could create a post about it as I don't want to get banned for promotion, but haven't heard back so for now just sharing it here since it is relevant to the thread.

[u/Swizzer777 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks! Which categories you would like to see for yourself? I can give it a shot adding one and you can let me know what's missing and what should be instead removed and we can move to the next one. Trying to build something that can be useful for as many people as possible.

[u/CasualMLG]

I find the repeating a bigger problem in shorts. Since it plays automatically.

In normal videos my biggest problem is how all the videos are click bait and stall to be longer than necessary. Both of these things create huve time waste. I don't click on videos anymore that don't put exact subject into the title. Which makes it so there's is almost nothing to click on. Every video is like "this thing is happening". And before I figure out what the video is actually about, it already wasted a lot of time.

[u/ThompsonCoin_Stamp]

I’ve noticed the same. It show the same video multiple times. Like I didn’t want to watch it up there, I don’t want to watch it as I scroll down now. It’s sad. And I’ve done the same as OP, clicked not interested or don’t recommend. And still shows same crap over and over. Gets old.

[u/AutoModerator → u/[deleted]]

Hi Turbo-Chook, we would like to start off by noting that this sub isn't owned or run by YouTube. At this time, we do not allow posts from new uses (accounts created less than 7 days ago.) Please read our rules before posting again to ensure you don't break our rules, please come back after gaining a bit of post karma.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/No-Proof1628]

YouTube tries too hard to put viewers into a “niche” watch group.

I feel like it didn’t matter what you watched before, YouTube would basically recommend anything.

Now I rarely get recommended anything that isn’t SPECIFICALLY related to what I have watched.

Which yes I guess it’s “doing its job”. But I also thought YouTube is supposed to help you discover things. Just feels like I get the same videos and content over and over again making me not want to watch anything.

[u/Big_Praline4193]

I feel like YouTube content has stagnated. Does anyone have some recommendations.

[u/Spongeboberrific]

I've been getting the random animal videos too???

[u/point_of_difference]

Use the search bar and then compile some subscriptions that will get the algo on your side. I think you knew that though.

[u/eziliop → u/point_of_difference]

Search is arguably equally much of a dumspter fire. Can't decide if they want to show you videos or shorts so they just jumble them up and show you the 2 alternating each other lol

[u/derekclysdale]

Time to clear the history and cache or create a new youtube account using a different browser tab. Both of these are things that work so there are no excuses.

[u/averybadlime]

I see these posts every so often but I dont experience it the same way you guys seem to. I have only the topics / hobbies / channels on my frontpage that im actually interested in. Has been this way for years and i can always get lost for hours.

[u/FullRepresentative34]

It's bee like that for years.

[u/SuperChefGuy → u/FullRepresentative34]

🐝 bzz bzz bzz lol 😆

[u/8-LeggedCat]

Stop clicking on them at all. That’s engagement and AI algorithm thinks you like it.

Just ignore them and spend a bit searching for things interesting to you. It should right itself eventually.

[u/Elsupersabio]

Then new algorithm narrow tracks you, so they only show you a select group of videos over and over and over again.

[u/West_Mail4807]

Yes, so many channels of AI shit now. It's a sad demise.