Ask HN: YouTube keeps suggesting vids I marked “not interested”. What can I do?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37562039

by MaxikCZ • 3 years ago

41 75 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I think it started about a month ago, but recently got out of control. I mark ALL videos on my homepage as not interested, refresh the page and see about 20% of videos I just marked suggested again. Or next day, or the day after.

It seems Youtube just decided to ignore my "NOOO" signal.

Anything I can do? Any tampermonkey scripts that will add the video to local blacklist database and hides it from suggestions?

ksherlock• 3 years ago

Turn off watch history for that fresh homepage feeling?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37157835

laweijfmvo• 3 years ago

This has honestly been a blessing and cut down my mindless Youtube scrolling ten-fold. Maybe I'm the minority, but can't imagine why Youtube wants me to close the tab instead of watching more videos.

titzer• 3 years ago

I turned it off more than a year ago and then it started nagging me to turn it back on, to the point it would not even show me my lists without enabling it. Dark pattern.

g1184• 3 years ago

The same thing happens to me. The solution was to use a Firefox extension called YouTube Unhook. So I block everything that distracts me.

bombcar• 3 years ago

you marked too many, and so it ran out of suggestions and so started suggesting ones you ignored

anyway the suggestion queue is getting very bad

greenthrow• 3 years ago

Youtube's recommendation algorithm has gotten terrible. There's a pretty low limit on the number of channels you can block. Additionally, different interfaces won't allow you to mark certain things like Mixes or Movies as "Not Interested" at all.

I have been paying for Youtube Red/Premium since like 2016 and I'm strongly considering canceling it and giving up on Youtube altogether. It's gotten that bad.

My replacement is just supporting the creators I like on Patreon or wherever they choose to put their content for a direct payment.

gremlinsinc• 3 years ago

you'd think they could create a chatGPT like agent that basically knows what you like based on your history and just ask it if it would like this video or not, that would be so easy to implement, LLMs love play acting like they're someone Else.

darrylb42• 3 years ago

Do you subscribe to anything? You may need some positive signals. I have premium so it may work different but suggested is mostly new stuff from channels I subscribe to or channels I have watched. Though mostly I just look for what is new in my subscription list and don't pay much attention to the home screen.

MaxikCZ4• 3 years ago

I am subscribed to loads of channels. Best is when after 3 days of reloading recommendations to find something nice it suggests me a video from subscribed channel (that I have notifications set to "all") from 3 days ago.

Whole 3 days it was unable to suggest me a video I told it I would want to see. Its mind boggling.

Honestly think scraping the algo alltogether and writing it from scratch could only result net positive, regardless of how broken new version would be.

samcat116• 3 years ago

Gonna go against a lot of folks here and say I think the YouTube recommendation algorithm works pretty well for me. Definitely helps if you watch a lot of certain topics to give it some positive signals.

Cpoll• 3 years ago

I bookmark and use the subscriptions page to avoid the algorithmic recommendations. https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

wolpoli• 3 years ago

A slight variation of this: I bookmark specific Youtube channels to only view their content.

throw0101b• 3 years ago

I use the RSS/Atom feed of specific Youtube channels so that I know when new things are posted:

* https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=THE_CHAN...

MrMember• 3 years ago

I have bash scripts set up to download new videos from specific channels using yt-dlp once a day. I don't even have to visit youtube anymore :)

tennisflyi• 3 years ago

This is the only way to use YouTube. Didn't really think people used "Home" or "Shorts." Bad suggestion will still show up in the sidebar though.

kibibu• 3 years ago

I use Home. I appreciate being recommended content similar to the stuff I watch, and it's how I've discovered some of my favourite creators.

nextaccountic• 3 years ago

thanks

Regnore• 3 years ago

If you disable all youtube tracking, your homepage is just a message saying

“Your watch history is off You can change your setting at any time to get the latest videos tailored to you. Learn more”

which is kind of a nice feeling.

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

I just use my YT account on Chrome these days, but watch most videos in another browser without being logged in. Downside, it doesn't remember all my preferences/playlists/etc. Upside, recommendations are limited to my actual viewing choices over the last week or so.

Nextgrid• 3 years ago

Another option is to use RSS readers. Every YT channel page has <link> elements pointing to RSS feeds, which means you can paste channel URLs into any RSS reader and subscribe to them through that.

kazinator• 3 years ago

How can that be used with Android TV?

Syonyk• 3 years ago

Stop using YouTube.

Or just use one of the various youtube downloader forks that actually works well to watch stuff you care about, and ignore the referral engine entirely.

I'm quite serious - this isn't a snarky response. You've evaluated that a product is actively ignoring your wishes. So why continue rewarding it with attention?

aldousd666• 3 years ago

They don't provide a fungible service. There's nobody else providing the same service. It's ok to be unhappy about a service you're getting and still using the service, especially when there's no alternative. TikTok is certainly no help.

manquer• 3 years ago

There are two components here, the video streaming/ content database has no equivalent peer for sure, however the general app UX has plenty of alternatives and is pretty fungible.

One can consume Youtube, without shoddy recommendations, annoying shorts or intrusive ads if you wish. Most of the peers are legal and comply with YT policy as well.

tredre3• 3 years ago

I'm quite serious - this isn't a snarky response

No, you are being quite snarky. It's clear OP wants to discovery content and wants to be suggested stuff. Telling them to stop using it without suggestion ANYTHING even remotely close to a substitute isn't a solution. It's snark.

cheeze• 3 years ago

Totally agree. This is the standard HN response that is frustrating, because it completely ignores the fact that _the user wants to use youtube, there is no viable alternative, and they are annoyed with a specific feature.

This is the equivalent to "don't like how Windows handles X? Just use Linux bro!

AshamedCaptain• 3 years ago

But youtube simply doesn't have a decent recovery and/or recommendation system. What do you want to do ?

danaris• 3 years ago

Words have meaning, and "snark" isn't just "giving someone a response that absolutely does not fulfill their request."

Snark is very much about tone, and it is absolutely possible to give a response like the GP with no snark whatsoever. If they give their answer with absolute sincerity, it may be rude, and it may be unhelpful, and it may even be arrogant (it may not—those are all very context-dependent)—but none of those things make it snarky.

irusensei• 3 years ago

Speed running games. Not interested plus I abhor the idea of skipping a good game in 10 minutes but YouTube really wants to notify me when someone finds a glitch to skip from Kalm to Junon.

mianos• 3 years ago

I have a similar problem with youtube music premium. It keeps adding songs that I thumbs down to my liked song list.

It even added a few songs I thumbs downed to my seasonal favourite playlists.

It feels like I must have insulted a developer once and they do this just to annoy us. Or, there are no career advancement opportunities in fixing broken stuff at google. It certainly seems more commercial and quality is rapidly fading as it grows.

snailmailman• 3 years ago

I haven't (yet) run into this issue on youtube, but I encounter it on Youtube TV all the time. Every time I open the app, if I scroll down a little bit it has a suggestion for two shows I have zero interest in watching. Every time I see them, i select "don't show me this again" and it will show me them again as soon as I refresh the page.

phantom784• 3 years ago

If you happened to watch/click on a video that you don't want recommendations for, go into your history and delete them, and then you'll stop getting recommendations for similar videos.

anderspitman• 3 years ago

You can start investing in open platforms and services that get better, not worse, over time. Centralized tech doesn't result in less pain. It's just amortized over eternity.

netsharc• 3 years ago

The "Improve YouTube" extension[1] used to be able to hide the sidebar, and even hide the whole homepage except for the search. Today I noticed YouTube seem to have changed something and the extension is no longer effective.

Seems like a style-modifying extension and adding the CSS rule div#secondary { display: none; } still works. Although it also hides things like live chat and transcripts...

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-%F...

e-clinton• 3 years ago

Others similar to you really like that content, so you must’ve mistakenly thumbed it down.

jjoonathan4• 3 years ago

Ugh, it's absolutely awful. The skin condition / holes / maggot videos are the worst. I didn't even watch one by accident, but I do sometimes watch ASMR videos and I think that's the keyword roping these in. It was bad enough to push me into actually flagging them, but of course that does nothing to stop the recommendations so they keep popping up in my feed.

EDIT: Here's an example, but if my recommendations are jammed up with this shit after watching 0 of them I can only imagine what happens if you watch one intentionally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIkRLRP3gaI

MaxikCZ4• 3 years ago

Id appreciate a screenshot instead of youtube link, I dont want to bring this plague on me as well.

kledru• 3 years ago

it is only logical that maggots take over at some point

freedomben• 3 years ago

If you aren't already, I would make sure you're liking/subscribing to things you do want to watch. The algo to me seems primarily driven by thumbsups.

In YT Music especially, this has resulted in some really fantastic recommendations. Being someone who doesn't like most "popular" music (not simply because it's popular, I just think most people have bad taste :-D), I've never had a good experience with music discovery in services until now, and it's gotten on point for me.

joshSzep• 3 years ago

YouTube music has been really great for me as well when it comes to discovery.

red-iron-pine• 3 years ago

my theory is that the unpaid algo is optimized to make money, and that usually means shoveling sponsored shit at you with low effort. paid customers actually get the functional algorithm.

wvenable• 3 years ago

I don't mind YouTube's recommendation algorithm because it helps me find new videos and channels to watch but it seems to constantly recommend videos I've already watched. In fact, when marking a video "not interested" you have the option to say it's because you've already seen it before. Are people constantly re-watching videos that this is a thing? Can't YouTube tell the difference between a music video and a long form video on a niche subject?

MaxikCZ4• 3 years ago

I have a tampermonkey script that hides all watched videos from recommendations. First I tried to mark all those I watched "not interested because I watched it", and hoped the "we will tune your recommendations" would actually tune them. Instead it just kept falling in, so I had to find other solution.

At least marking videos "not interested" worked till now, but I just cant anymore. It's like they want to push me away.

xahrepap• 3 years ago

Reading through the comments of other people having similar problems makes me question if this is at all related to the specific issue. But I think it's worth bringing up anyway:

When I first started using PiHole, the default filters were filtering out all of the YouTube tracking domains. Which makes sense. However, these are the same domains that the history tracking uses. So it would never remember that I saw a video or how far into it I got.

Perhaps the Not Interested gets similarly blocked by tracking filters?

jjoonathan4• 3 years ago

I have no pihole or adblock and I have been intensely flagging a particular genre of video (pus / holes / maggots) but it keeps popping up in my feed.

solardev• 3 years ago

Lol really? I don't think I'd ever seen a video of that sort recommended to me. (Knock on wood)

Is it possible someone in your household is playing a prank on you?

taberiand• 3 years ago

The algorithm probably sees you as an excellent content filter signal for videos it's uncertain about.

brokenmachine• 3 years ago

Holes? Like, literally, holes?

soupfordummies• 3 years ago

Just in time for the beginning of Halloween season, join us for the spooky tale of jjoonathan's Youtube feed becoming haunted and possessed by disgusting horrors! A ghost in the machine?

Tune in Friday at midnight!

KomoD• 3 years ago

The only thing I've found to really work is clearing my entire watch history, subscriptions, comments and likes

MaxikCZ4• 3 years ago

Scary. What if it will keep doing what it does, but the rest will be the most common denominator of videos they push onto new people? That would actually be worse than it is, and I thank you for the lesson that "it could be worse"

alrs• 3 years ago

The youtube algorithm is very aggressively trying to get you to watch dumb shit, and you are correct that there is no way to opt-out.

It's best at present to not engage with recommendations at all, and instead start following the RSS feeds of the channels you enjoy.

jwells89• 3 years ago

I don't have any suggestions to offer, but have found that the quality of my YouTube front page has degraded considerably in the past few weeks. Sometimes removing videos from watch history can jostle things to make it resemble its past self but it likes to drift, which is frustrating.

timeon• 3 years ago

For few days my YouTube front page was just blank page with search bar and some other button. It was so refreshing. Unfortunately those random videos are back.

Alphaeus• 3 years ago

In my experience, blocking entire channels rather than individual videos is much more reliable. Clearing out related videos from your watch history also helps a lot.

timbit422• 3 years ago

I use the web browser add-on, "Channel Blocker", to block channels. It puts an X next to the channel name. Clicking it permanently removes that channel's videos from every YouTube page.

I use, "BlockTube", to block keywords in video titles and channel names so those videos never show up in searches.

I use, "Unhook", to remove recommended videos from YouTube pages.

I use, "YouTube-Shorts Block", to block shorts.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

I switched to FreeTube, which is a desktop client that can watch Youtube videos. By removing the YT homepage altogether, it has the pleasant side effect of removing those annoying suggestions, which I agree are badly implemented.

TheAceOfHearts• 3 years ago

The state of YouTube recommendations is absolutely terrible, I wish it was possible for someone to build a third-party recommendation system to compete with them. The most frustrating part of YouTube recommendations is that it keeps suggesting videos I've already watched, and which I'm not interested in the slightest in rewatching. It reminds me of years ago when Amazon would recommend more of the thing you had just bought.

If I add something to my Watch Later list, it keeps recommending that video, but it never surfaces older entries.

Recommendation systems in general feel so limited in how much user input they allow as well, I wish we had more knobs to twist. There's definitely whole categories of videos and content that I'd love to blacklist.

It definitely feels like an area with potential for improvements and optimization, but I'm not sure if YouTube's APIs are sufficiently flexible for anyone to build a competitor. And even if you could build a competitor, it would probably end up getting shut down or incapable of being monetized.

Something cool about Blue Sky is that they actually allow you to build customized algorithmic timelines. You're not locked in to a single opaque recommendation algorithm. Would love for this feature to be available on YouTube.

fuzztester2• 3 years ago

The state of YouTube recommendations is absolutely terrible

$ echo "The state of YouTube recommendations is absolutely terrible" | sed 's/recommendations //’

35235829082• 3 years ago

Yep, I'm having the same issue.

It's extremely frustrating given the amount of really triggering content that keeps being recommended to me (anorexia, body horror, pus, holes, etc)

DamnInteresting• 3 years ago

I really wish there was a robust way to block channels on YouTube. There is one YouTuber (Simon Whistler) that I check in on a lot--not because I enjoy his content, but because he is a parasite. He did paid voice work for me for years, but then one day I discovered he had started working with a competitor, and together they were systematically poaching my entire catalog of non-fiction content. They started releasing videos covering the same obscure topics with the same details, sometimes even using my original artwork without permission. It's been going on for years now, across multiple channels and hundreds of videos. What he's doing is (mostly) not illegal, but goddamn is it slimy.

I keep an eye on his channels to catalog the egregious poaching, but as a consequence, YouTube thinks I'm his biggest fan, and keeps recommending his videos. I am tired of seeing his smug, parasitic face in my sidebar. What a scumbag.

timbit422• 3 years ago

There is a web browser add-on called, "Channel Blocker", that will block every video from any channel you block. It puts an X next to the channel name. One click permanently removes all that channel's videos.

You may also be interested in another web browser add-on called, "BlockTube", which lets you block videos based on keywords in the video title or channel name.

tompt• 3 years ago

I recently noticed that Youtube has been adding videos to my watch history that I didn't watch. Not just random videos, but ones the algorithm keeps pushing that I'm not interested in.

I know I didn't watch them, but there they are on my history page. It feels kinda icky and I don't know how to stop it.

friend_and_foe• 3 years ago

They're not going to stop. They don't care what you want to see anymore, they care what they want you to see.

All you can do is either abandon the algorithm entirely, or live with it.

You can abandon the algorithm with tools like RSS, invidious, and suggestions elsewhere in this thread such as bookmarking channels. This very much limits discoverability, but discoverability is broken with these algorithms anyway and the only way to have real discoverability nowadays is to engage in online communities where people share videos, so it's not really a loss.

whhuh• 3 years ago

How about FreeTube? It saves watch history locally, you can set your homepage to just your subscriptions, and IDK if it's just me, but the recommendations are really related to the video I am watching / clicked on, just like early YouTube.

singularity2001• 3 years ago

my current solution reinstall YouTube on iOS whenever I miss-clicked a bait video. manually search for the few topics that interest me afterwards.

ManlyBread• 3 years ago

You can do nothing. This feature has been broken for ages and YouTube doesn't care. Your best bet is to remove the homepage via some browser plugin and make it redirect you to the Subscription page instead.

fuzztester2• 3 years ago

IME YouTube keeps recommending videos I've seen, within minutes after I finish seeing them.

Both your issue and mine seem to be part of their brain-dead algorithms, maybe ML-based.

Ask HN: YouTube keeps suggesting vids I marked “not interested”. What can I do?

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