Seems like the quality of youtube suggestions & shorts have been spammed by bots & other people hacking the system. Why is Google not doing anything about this?
Recommendation system is long time broken. I am subscribed to 100+ channels and check 10 channels on a weekly basis, meaning I watch all the new videos these creators make. So that means I want the new stuff from the frequented ones on my front page ASAP. Yet, it's a hit and miss. From the remaining 90 channels I never get anything recommended. Why?
If I subscribe to a new channel it gets recommended like hell, then it forgets about it.
BUT! Totally irrelevant things that I never watch, is kept on my front page for weeks. Like it wants me to check it or wants me to mute it, but fuck them I'm not giving them any more metrics. If I clear the fingerprints and block the acquiring of these metrics the front page gets filled with new, interesting content. Who the hell understands this? I have also observed that if you have an adblocker enabled it gives you trash all the time.
When the absolutely disgusting, braindead, bottomfeeding "depp vs amber" nightmare was ongoing I had to "mute" the same channels multiple times and then 55 others, because it just slams it into my face. Watch it, watch it, you must see this muck.
The topic of my fav channels represent... I get nothing relevant from them. :DDD
The shorts... was the pinnacle of YTs innovation. :DDDD
Goog is all about control now. Look innovation for somewhere else... well... if you can find any, lemme know........
You can't do shit with godzilla and now he does whatever he wants.
Their search has got pretty bad I've noticed. They've changed it to start showing random shit you might want to watch instead of the thing you actually searched for after the first 10 or so videos. They seem to repeat videos they think you ought to watch quite often in search results as well.
Machine learning probably had something to do with it. It notices videos with thumbnails of people with their mouths and eyes wide open doing some kind of shocked expression with red arrows pointing to something perform better than average. Then it starts recommending videos with thumbnails like this preferentially. YouTubers take notice and start producing thumbnails like this for every video.
Go to the front page right now with clean cookies and you'll see most of the thumbnails have "reaction faces" in them for no apparent reason, usually pulling some kind of exaggerated expression.
Clickbait used to mean that you baited the viewer into clicking, now it means you baited the algorithm into recommending you.
You asked about bots and spam but I want to talk about the content degradation.
YT has been heavily commercialised and lots of people are trying to make a living out of it. Most videos are about keeping viewers for as much time possible watching your content. As a result what would have been a 2-minute video becomes a 20-minute video with introductions, discussions about the weather and silly sales/crowd manipulation tricks. Content is key and I really don't have the time for such a time waster: I'm always skipping to the point or completely ignoring absurdly long videos.
I looked up how to pronounce a word the other day and found a 30-second YouTube video. I expected it to be a looping track of someone saying the word over and over, but what I got instead was 25 seconds of someone describing the word's origin (without saying the word itself), and explaining how many people want to know how to pronounce it. Only as the thumbnail overlay popped up at the end of the video did they actually say the word.
The sad thing is, this is the same problem TV has had for a long time that YouTube was solving. TV programming will take 10 minutes of content and stretch it into 40 minutes of filler with 20 minutes of commercials. YouTube used to have a much better content to filler ratio in general. "It was said that you would destroy the TV producers, not join them."
What you experience as short videos turning into long ones was to me the addition of ads inside videos everywhere.
SponsorBlock has saved my enjoyment of YouTube and allowed me to subscribe to channels I never would have watched because of their constant self-promotion.
With an adblocker stopping the ads outside the video, and SponsorBlock to stop the ads inside, I enjoy YouTube like never before.
YouTube requires videos to be eight minutes or longer to include mid-roll ads. So everybody making money from YouTube ads has an incentive to extend their video lengths to at least eight minutes.
>As a result what would have been a 2-minute video becomes a 20-minute video
Or shouldn't have been a video at all.
Lots of people come up with some schtick they don't give a damn about because they see (or think they see) all these other people getting rich on YouTube and TikTok.
And recommendation engines are awful in general. It's a problem that even those genuinely trying to solve it really haven't.
You are correct ... because if I'm only going to make a 2 minute video I would put it on TikTok or Instagram. Way easier to get likes (which is what I'm after if I'm not monetizing it), and way easier to make that content.
I think YouTube knows this which is why they are pushing shorts so hard.
YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed.
Though there is a growing number of anecdotes surrounding (niche|not palatable to SV) channels who’s subscribers don’t get notified despite the bell thing being on, new videos no longer in feeds, and even people getting unsubscribed for no apparent reason.
This is a problem, as I’d sooner give up peanut butter than only be served videos with open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails.
> YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed.
This used to be the case, but starting a month or two ago I get lots of completely and utterly irrelevant recommendations for things like soccer, hip-hop, "vlog" twats, and other "popular" content that I have absolutely zero interest in and that I can guarantee are 100% unrelated to any of my previous history.
I also started getting a lot of "recommendations" for things I've ... already seen. That started a bit earlier, maybe about half a year ago.
So now it's about a third forced stupid stuff, about a third things I've already seen, and maybe a third that's useful. I've been flagging things as "not interested" quite aggressively in the hopes it would improve, but I've seen no difference. I think they just changed the way recommendations work to always fairly aggressively mix in "popular content". If I wanted to watch random mindless nonsense then I would turn on my TV: I use YouTube to avoid all of that.
YouTube is slowly turning into a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser; I think very soon it will start offering me a cup of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
I can refresh the home page a hundred times in a row and the exact same videos in the exact same order get displayed. It never used to be like this. I have no idea what the hell is going on at YouTube head office.
So, your mind wandered to giving up peanut butter? For me it'd be something like... Uh, Tomatoes. I had to really think about it, but yeah, I'd give up tomatoes to not live in that world, which is saying something because tomatoes in one form or another tend to help keep my morale up through many, many meatless days.
This is only the case if you subscribe to channels that churn out content on a daily or weekly basis and have no interest in finding tangential content by new creators. I've given up on using YouTube for discovery, I have to actively fight the search in order to find anything remotely useful and the main feed is just the same crap repeated over and over again no matter how many I mark as not interested. Whatever happened to it several years ago has completely lobotomized the recommendation engine, it's just trash now. I'm hopeful that content creators will continue to trend towards uploading to multiple video platforms so I can find new stuff.
YouTubers have become more professional and post a large number of videos optimized for monetization (trendy videos, videos around 10 minutes long with additional ads inserted in the video, etc.).
In addition, in order to maximize advertising revenue, YouTube tends to place more importance on new click-bait videos that have a rapid increase in views, rather than high quality videos that can be viewed over a long period of time.
That is the reason why many of those clickbait-like videos are the third one on the right side of the screen when a particular video is played.
Specifically, YouTube stops suggesting videos from your channel if you aren't posting weekly. They need to keep posting bad videos just to keep the revenue increasing on the good ones.
> YouTubers have become more professional and post a large number of videos optimized for monetization (trendy videos, videos around 10 minutes long with additional ads inserted in the video, etc.).
That's how I feel about it, too. The quality of the content has gone down because of the incessant urge of popular YouTubers to produce a "clickable" stream of videos on a regular basis. In a way, it feels addictive like porn - you know what you are going to see, it's just that the reviewed product, or the shown environment is different in the new video.
Wrong incentives + lack of mechanisms to find, navigate to and promote interesting content.
Nowadays, people create content on Youtube essentially only for profit (be it actual profit from Youtube or promotion).
That's it. That's what you are selecting from.
There are of course exceptions, but these are rare enough to not dictate the general quality of content.
And if you are dissatisfied with general quality, that's it. There is no catalog where you can drill down and search for stuff that you don't know but you might be interested in. You can only search for things you already know -- and really interesting things tend to be a bit outside of what you already know.
This is almost boringly textbook late-stage "monopoly in practice" playing out. Start with an "edge". Get big because edge. Use "big" to sharpen edge further. Use big (and/or edge) to consolidate market. Once sufficiently consolidated and/or controlled, raise costs.
This is what costs getting raised looks like in a monopoly market. Who's gonna stop them.
Totally agree but I think it's only part of it, other problems probably take par in this:
- spammers are getting better and Google is less able and willing to moderate
- the use of AI without much design around it. It's speculation since who knows how their algorithm works, but from what I've read and the general mindset in ML these days, it's very possible that they just use a recommendation AI with a single target (I've heard watch time, but again, who knows) with little to not design around it. This just does not work, especially if the AI is good at his job. It's a similar problem to decision makers blindly following KPIs, knowing if you did well and choosing criterias can be as hard as taking the decision itself, and an AI can't do that, you can't avoid designing your product.
Ive been thinking for a while that Netflix could. They desperately need to seperate themselves from the competition and they already have the video distribution tech and captive audience to launch a real challenge to youtube.
Because they don't care? They're an ad company and seem more interested in their bottom line than what users feel about their services or having a consistent portfolio. I think right now they're trying to ensure tik-tok doesn't eat their lunch by promoting shorts, whilst also still trying to get youtube to make a profit.
I can't think of a single google service they offer that I really like, they all kind of suck in a variety of interesting ways.
Aggressively clicking the drop-down and "Not interested"or "Don't recommend channel" on bad recommendations has significantly improved my YouTube suggestions.
This is part of a bigger problem of indexing, searching and result recommendations. We used to have to go to forums and threads to find the content we need, but we grew increasingly reliant on NLP search and feed. I remember fondly of the time Orkut was dominant. No recommendations, no feeds, you had to personally go to a community of interest and find threads there. You had to find communities by interacting with people, and that was key to it. The content you consumed was directly tied to your own social circle, instead of being controlled by a central corporation.
We might have to find a way to divorce ourselves from search engines until something comes along to replace them. I see no problem using YouTube and such as a hosting platform, but for finding and consuming content, a more personal approach is needed. I doubt however that the mainstream consumer will sacrifice convenience and content volume for better quality content. We don't have to act as a mainstream consumer though.
I keep reading they are an ad company and that’s fair except they are doing a really bad job. I keep seeing the same ad over and over and over again. Those are annoying loud ads that are more region than preference based. You don’t need some personalized ad system to find out what kind of ad a person watching a video game video would be interested.
Skipping a video to look for a certain scene will trigger double ads and sometimes you will see another set of ads a few seconds later.
If a video is less than 3 minutes long and it starts with unskipable 12 seconds ad followed by another one I don’t even bother.
My general experience with the platform is brands advertising on YouTube gives me repulse instead of wanting to buy something.
It has been one year since I can't find interesting stuff in the recommended section anymore. I also thought about building my own recommendation system using YouTube's RSS feed for each individual channel, Telegram for notifications and some simple logic written in Rust and SQLite (of course) and always running on my VPS, where I manually add and remove the channels I like and I also give them a score to have a priority system. Will probably do this next week, when I'm at sea with my family.
At some point during Covid they seemed to just decide they wanted to abuse users and its been a steady decline since.
My largest use cases were watching DJ sets, music videos, stand up comedians, instructional videos, and life of (random career) videos
Music videos have multiple ads before and after now. The music videos are still watchable but it sucks to put youtube on at a party now.
Life of videos from channels worth watching have started to turn off ads in place of putting in their own sponsored content. Annoying but similar to TV commercials of the past and are always skippable.
But they have started destroying all of the other content I enjoyed. Instructional videos are overly long with the interrupting ads to the point of questioning whether the visual information with more time but easier understanding vs the extra reading becomes a serious contemplation.
But comedies and extended DJ sets are unwatchable. The ML "predicts" natural breaks in language to insert ads into. When it comes to comedies its usually right before the punch line/the laughing, but the developers do not care at all that after the commercial ends and are resuming a second or two after the punch line. Not only is the timing ruined but you often miss the joke entirely. They have not figured out what to do with DJ sets so they just randomly interrupt in the middle of songs. I had ad breaks 3 times within 10 minutes of a 60 minute set today before I switched to AirPlaying my computer with AdNauseum installed.
Anything I think I might want to watch ever again is immediately added to a playlist for yt-dlp. It makes the content watchable again and protects against channels that will delete content so they can add it back later for increased later views or because of fake DMCA takedowns.
> Music videos have multiple ads before and after now. The music videos are still watchable but it sucks to put youtube on at a party now.
If you want entertainment that is not funded by ads, why not subscribe to YouTube Premium? "YouTube and YouTube Music ad-free, offline, and in the background"
Your timeframe is right, but it's not just about ads.
In 2017, Youtube altered search results following the mass shooting at the Las Vegas nightclub "to quell the spread of conspiracy theories". [1]
It wasn't their first time changing the algorithms, but since then, they've applied measures of varying degrees of severity following similar domestic and certain politically sensitive events, like the attack on the Google campus.
In 2018, "YouTube announces sweeping changes to the way it handles breaking news. News videos will now be ranked based on what YouTube deems to be "authoritative." [2]
In 2019, Youtube search again went on lockdown following the act of domestic terrorism on mosques in Cristchurch, disabling the ability to filter by recent across the entire site. [3] This one lasted for weeks and the original function was never fully restored.
Youtube has taken a more active approach to content curation, suppression, and promotion since the Trump presidency, and it's made it a worse resource for academic and informational searches. Once relatively neutral, they've begun to exert a more overt regulation of customers' interactions with content, going so far as qualifying certain media as aligning with certain viewpoints or not, disclosing affiliations with certain groups or political bodies, and minimizing the ability to specifically or organically locate certain non-promoted content.
Youtube start reminding me a video platform from 3rd world country. There was this "look&feel" difference where you have more expensive less-adds and good quality.
That was their competitive advantage. Right now everything desperately optimized for money. That's how platform dies. They don't know how to grow organically. They become no different. Just another video hosting.
Lots of interesting YouTubers have been demonetized for dubious reasons and have simply stopped using the platform.
This has been and always will be the problem with having a "Youtube career". You are completely at the behest of a monolith company run by automated bots that can demonetize you on a robotic whim.
It drives ad revenue. Content quality doesn't matter, only you watching as much ad's as possible.
I've switched to using Yewtu.be, it's a proxy where you can have subscriptions and, for instance, only see new content, chronologically, from your subscriptions. Does make it a bit harder to find new stuff, but at least no spam.
Videos that should be 45 seconds get stretched out to 10 minutes because of the monetization limit. Some we execs at YouTube have been trying really hard to turn YouTube into the wasteland that TV is. This is why TikTok is kicking their ass.
TV has been a wasteland as long as it's existed, because it's an advertising medium pretending to be an entertainment medium. The S.S. Minnow on Gilligan's Island was even named as a dubious tribute to Newton Minow, an FCC head who famously referred to television as a "vast wasteland" in the early 60s.
I can't say I love it when I view one video about some random topic (or worse, my son does - we watch a lot on the living room TV), and then I'm spammed for the next month with related videos. You can tell when the server process is run, as it'll be a day or so later and suddenly everything recommended to me is about (just checked) Chess, for example. Just because I checked out a couple chess videos does not now mean I need 500 Magnus Carlsen clips recommended to me. It's insane.
To anyone complaining about ads, FFS, just pay the money for the subscription. Life is too short. I haven't seen an ad for years.
[+] [-] antioppressor|3 years ago|reply
If I subscribe to a new channel it gets recommended like hell, then it forgets about it.
BUT! Totally irrelevant things that I never watch, is kept on my front page for weeks. Like it wants me to check it or wants me to mute it, but fuck them I'm not giving them any more metrics. If I clear the fingerprints and block the acquiring of these metrics the front page gets filled with new, interesting content. Who the hell understands this? I have also observed that if you have an adblocker enabled it gives you trash all the time.
When the absolutely disgusting, braindead, bottomfeeding "depp vs amber" nightmare was ongoing I had to "mute" the same channels multiple times and then 55 others, because it just slams it into my face. Watch it, watch it, you must see this muck.
The topic of my fav channels represent... I get nothing relevant from them. :DDD
The shorts... was the pinnacle of YTs innovation. :DDDD
Goog is all about control now. Look innovation for somewhere else... well... if you can find any, lemme know........
You can't do shit with godzilla and now he does whatever he wants.
[+] [-] dageshi|3 years ago|reply
Significant downgrade on what it used to be.
[+] [-] c7DJTLrn|3 years ago|reply
Go to the front page right now with clean cookies and you'll see most of the thumbnails have "reaction faces" in them for no apparent reason, usually pulling some kind of exaggerated expression.
Clickbait used to mean that you baited the viewer into clicking, now it means you baited the algorithm into recommending you.
[+] [-] ddmichael|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dorkwood|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Timpy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philistine|3 years ago|reply
SponsorBlock has saved my enjoyment of YouTube and allowed me to subscribe to channels I never would have watched because of their constant self-promotion.
With an adblocker stopping the ads outside the video, and SponsorBlock to stop the ads inside, I enjoy YouTube like never before.
[+] [-] JimDabell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|3 years ago|reply
Or shouldn't have been a video at all.
Lots of people come up with some schtick they don't give a damn about because they see (or think they see) all these other people getting rich on YouTube and TikTok.
And recommendation engines are awful in general. It's a problem that even those genuinely trying to solve it really haven't.
[+] [-] krelian|3 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/technology/youtube-automa...
[+] [-] jaarse|3 years ago|reply
I think YouTube knows this which is why they are pushing shorts so hard.
[+] [-] gherkinnn|3 years ago|reply
Though there is a growing number of anecdotes surrounding (niche|not palatable to SV) channels who’s subscribers don’t get notified despite the bell thing being on, new videos no longer in feeds, and even people getting unsubscribed for no apparent reason.
This is a problem, as I’d sooner give up peanut butter than only be served videos with open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails.
[+] [-] Beltalowda|3 years ago|reply
This used to be the case, but starting a month or two ago I get lots of completely and utterly irrelevant recommendations for things like soccer, hip-hop, "vlog" twats, and other "popular" content that I have absolutely zero interest in and that I can guarantee are 100% unrelated to any of my previous history.
I also started getting a lot of "recommendations" for things I've ... already seen. That started a bit earlier, maybe about half a year ago.
So now it's about a third forced stupid stuff, about a third things I've already seen, and maybe a third that's useful. I've been flagging things as "not interested" quite aggressively in the hopes it would improve, but I've seen no difference. I think they just changed the way recommendations work to always fairly aggressively mix in "popular content". If I wanted to watch random mindless nonsense then I would turn on my TV: I use YouTube to avoid all of that.
YouTube is slowly turning into a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser; I think very soon it will start offering me a cup of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
[+] [-] shapefrog|3 years ago|reply
It makes me worry about the future of humanity, as the clean slate is what is popular in your location.
> open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails
Dont forget to add a large amount of money to the title my $$$$250,000 computer.
But it f'ing works - I am really not sure what is wrong with people. Oh and now I get 2 ads every single video, its barely worth it ...
[+] [-] lloydatkinson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JetAlone|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] o_m|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway4aday|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisRR|3 years ago|reply
How does the algorithm not get that I have probably watched 10,000 ads for Tiktok, I am not installing that shit! Stop trying!
[+] [-] AraceliHarker|3 years ago|reply
In addition, in order to maximize advertising revenue, YouTube tends to place more importance on new click-bait videos that have a rapid increase in views, rather than high quality videos that can be viewed over a long period of time.
That is the reason why many of those clickbait-like videos are the third one on the right side of the screen when a particular video is played.
[+] [-] lozenge|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluetomcat|3 years ago|reply
That's how I feel about it, too. The quality of the content has gone down because of the incessant urge of popular YouTubers to produce a "clickable" stream of videos on a regular basis. In a way, it feels addictive like porn - you know what you are going to see, it's just that the reviewed product, or the shown environment is different in the new video.
[+] [-] solarkraft|3 years ago|reply
This is why we need user-controlled recommendations. I want that shit blocked.
[+] [-] rr888|3 years ago|reply
This sounds like TikTok, and likely trying to compete with them.
[+] [-] twawaaay|3 years ago|reply
Wrong incentives + lack of mechanisms to find, navigate to and promote interesting content.
Nowadays, people create content on Youtube essentially only for profit (be it actual profit from Youtube or promotion).
That's it. That's what you are selecting from.
There are of course exceptions, but these are rare enough to not dictate the general quality of content.
And if you are dissatisfied with general quality, that's it. There is no catalog where you can drill down and search for stuff that you don't know but you might be interested in. You can only search for things you already know -- and really interesting things tend to be a bit outside of what you already know.
[+] [-] popcorncowboy|3 years ago|reply
This is what costs getting raised looks like in a monopoly market. Who's gonna stop them.
[+] [-] mulcyber|3 years ago|reply
- spammers are getting better and Google is less able and willing to moderate - the use of AI without much design around it. It's speculation since who knows how their algorithm works, but from what I've read and the general mindset in ML these days, it's very possible that they just use a recommendation AI with a single target (I've heard watch time, but again, who knows) with little to not design around it. This just does not work, especially if the AI is good at his job. It's a similar problem to decision makers blindly following KPIs, knowing if you did well and choosing criterias can be as hard as taking the decision itself, and an AI can't do that, you can't avoid designing your product.
[+] [-] unsignednoop|3 years ago|reply
Ive been thinking for a while that Netflix could. They desperately need to seperate themselves from the competition and they already have the video distribution tech and captive audience to launch a real challenge to youtube.
[+] [-] glcheetham|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|3 years ago|reply
The obvious answer is "because they've measured how much money they make, and found lower quality feeds result in higher revenue."
That might be counter-intuitive, but the other options like "the devs can't fix it", or "they don't know it's bad", etc are much less likely.
[+] [-] superchroma|3 years ago|reply
I can't think of a single google service they offer that I really like, they all kind of suck in a variety of interesting ways.
[+] [-] timrichard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepdriver|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JetAlone|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solarkraft|3 years ago|reply
Maybe they didn't understand the reasons - I hate clickbait thumbnails and titles.
[+] [-] gchamonlive|3 years ago|reply
We might have to find a way to divorce ourselves from search engines until something comes along to replace them. I see no problem using YouTube and such as a hosting platform, but for finding and consuming content, a more personal approach is needed. I doubt however that the mainstream consumer will sacrifice convenience and content volume for better quality content. We don't have to act as a mainstream consumer though.
[+] [-] irusensei|3 years ago|reply
Skipping a video to look for a certain scene will trigger double ads and sometimes you will see another set of ads a few seconds later.
If a video is less than 3 minutes long and it starts with unskipable 12 seconds ad followed by another one I don’t even bother.
My general experience with the platform is brands advertising on YouTube gives me repulse instead of wanting to buy something.
[+] [-] Asdrubalini|3 years ago|reply
EDIT: grammar
[+] [-] Larrikin|3 years ago|reply
My largest use cases were watching DJ sets, music videos, stand up comedians, instructional videos, and life of (random career) videos
Music videos have multiple ads before and after now. The music videos are still watchable but it sucks to put youtube on at a party now.
Life of videos from channels worth watching have started to turn off ads in place of putting in their own sponsored content. Annoying but similar to TV commercials of the past and are always skippable.
But they have started destroying all of the other content I enjoyed. Instructional videos are overly long with the interrupting ads to the point of questioning whether the visual information with more time but easier understanding vs the extra reading becomes a serious contemplation.
But comedies and extended DJ sets are unwatchable. The ML "predicts" natural breaks in language to insert ads into. When it comes to comedies its usually right before the punch line/the laughing, but the developers do not care at all that after the commercial ends and are resuming a second or two after the punch line. Not only is the timing ruined but you often miss the joke entirely. They have not figured out what to do with DJ sets so they just randomly interrupt in the middle of songs. I had ad breaks 3 times within 10 minutes of a 60 minute set today before I switched to AirPlaying my computer with AdNauseum installed.
Anything I think I might want to watch ever again is immediately added to a playlist for yt-dlp. It makes the content watchable again and protects against channels that will delete content so they can add it back later for increased later views or because of fake DMCA takedowns.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
[+] [-] andsoitis|3 years ago|reply
If you want entertainment that is not funded by ads, why not subscribe to YouTube Premium? "YouTube and YouTube Music ad-free, offline, and in the background"
https://www.youtube.com/premium
[+] [-] ricardobayes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martythemaniak|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] washadjeffmad|3 years ago|reply
In 2017, Youtube altered search results following the mass shooting at the Las Vegas nightclub "to quell the spread of conspiracy theories". [1]
It wasn't their first time changing the algorithms, but since then, they've applied measures of varying degrees of severity following similar domestic and certain politically sensitive events, like the attack on the Google campus.
In 2018, "YouTube announces sweeping changes to the way it handles breaking news. News videos will now be ranked based on what YouTube deems to be "authoritative." [2]
In 2019, Youtube search again went on lockdown following the act of domestic terrorism on mosques in Cristchurch, disabling the ability to filter by recent across the entire site. [3] This one lasted for weeks and the original function was never fully restored.
Youtube has taken a more active approach to content curation, suppression, and promotion since the Trump presidency, and it's made it a worse resource for academic and informational searches. Once relatively neutral, they've begun to exert a more overt regulation of customers' interactions with content, going so far as qualifying certain media as aligning with certain viewpoints or not, disclosing affiliations with certain groups or political bodies, and minimizing the ability to specifically or organically locate certain non-promoted content.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/10/05/youtube-alter...
[2] https://mashable.com/article/youtube-announces-changes-break...
[3] https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-restricting-search-newzeal...
[+] [-] criticism010|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] maxdo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orangepurple|3 years ago|reply
This has been and always will be the problem with having a "Youtube career". You are completely at the behest of a monolith company run by automated bots that can demonetize you on a robotic whim.
[+] [-] boesboes|3 years ago|reply
I've switched to using Yewtu.be, it's a proxy where you can have subscriptions and, for instance, only see new content, chronologically, from your subscriptions. Does make it a bit harder to find new stuff, but at least no spam.
And the search seems less spammy too, not sure.
[+] [-] xnx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbg721|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russellbeattie|3 years ago|reply
To anyone complaining about ads, FFS, just pay the money for the subscription. Life is too short. I haven't seen an ad for years.