Again, another case of, I should pay attention to my own warnings about 2024. Something weird I've been noticing lately you can probably imagine how autistic my youtube feed looks in comparison to the average normie but perhaps it's due to me clicking around movie clips or something occasionally the stupid algorithm has decided that means I consent to having all of these normie channels shoved in my face.
Among the weird channels I've been recommended are these cringey recap channels which are the laziest content ever and literally just jump cut clips and a robot voice doing summaries of movie plots. It was getting spammed so bad at me that I ended up making liberal use of youtube extension to block the offending channels.
Now I'm even being recommended normie shit like commentary channels among other things and youtube WON'T FUCKING LEAVE ME ALONE. I think this is classic youtube tinkering of the algorithm in order to try and shove mainstream channels in your face in an effort to 'de-radicalise' you except in typical incompetent programmer fashion it's recommending all the other crap along with it including television related stuff which I've gotten a bit of.
This is a bit like if I wanted to watch anime online and instead of recommending me anime to watch it just spams Breaking Bad and shitty cop shows in my face, all this is going to do is piss me off.
Look, to make youtube functional, you need certain add ons.
Ublock Origin for ad block
Clickbait remover gets rid of arrowed thumbnails and RANDOM capitalised words like that.
Return Dislike because of course YT removed it.
Sponsor block skips segments in videos where people shill ads. Don't let them waste your time.
Enchancer for Youtube is out of date due to YT changing the site so much but it still has a bunch of basic features like double speed playback
But you want either Blocktube or Channel Blocker for YT. I hate those annoying Gamespot "expert rates firearms in videogames" vids because they always get traction. Just block the channel and bam, all gone.
It's insane what you have to do now to even use YouTube. It should just... Ya know, work. I only use freetube now but I used half these addons also before. It's a damn shame youtube became so fucked.
Just to add to this, I set bookmarks on my phone and pc to go to youtube/feed/subscriptions instead of the YT home page. While they still unsubscribe me periodically from wrongthink channels, at least starting from my feed shows me the most recent videos from channels I'm subbed to.
Also, I do basically the same thing on Rumble and click there first before going to YT. A lot of times I get my fill of "time wasting" on Rumble before even going to YT. Win-win.
I'll add to this list:
Unhook, to remove as little or as much of YouTube as you want. You can completely remove the sidebar recommended videos, the home page, the post-video page, etc.
Marking this comment so that I dont forget Clickbait Remover. Thank you..
For several months I've been getting extremely low-view videos from channels I've never heard of in my recommended videos, only tangentially related to what I'm watching. A few times recently I've gotten "X person reacts to [extremely popular thing] for the first time," like LotR or The Matrix. I have never watched these styles of videos in my life. I routinely get obscure MSM channels like "WBCB 12 News" on Styx videos, for cities I have never visited, let alone lived in. I don't watch MSM on youtube, anyway.
I have also occasionally gotten some idiot Leftist's video attacking the channel of whoever I'm currently watching and it's filled with buzzword comments and projections. I have no idea why it's considered relevant other than the name in the title, but the audience overlap can't be enough to be algorithmically connected otherwise.
My greatest frustrations come from watching one video about one specific thing, then being inundated with the entire user's catalogue for days afterward. I feel bad blocking the channel outright, but there's no other way to make them stop flooding my feed.
Ever since I started seeking out videos of Christians answering hard questions about things like "Why does God allow bad things to happen" and "Can you explain this contradiction in scripture," videos that mock Christians have been popping up in my recommendations from time to time.
(On a side note, I never click on videos with stupid titles like "This atheist got absolutely DESTROYED by these five words...")
Well that just makes sense because the same keywords are going to be in Christian content and anti-Christian content.
I was just about to reply to 1776 and mention the same thing.
I have been watching a lot of Christian couples and organisations recently, and now I've been recommended a fat land whale who is single, overweight, and a gender studies alum, berating Christian couples for their views on relationships.
The depressing part about it is that the people berating Christian couples get waaaay more views than the Christian channels. So YouTube is purposely promoting degeneracy and shadowbanning people promoting celibacy, healthy living, waiting until marriage to have sex, and raising normal well-adjusted children.
It's fairly sick stuff and basically you can see how the establishment wants to completely ruin the West.
I think I broke my algorithm thanks to me watching some vtuber clips, I think that's taken the space of whatever normie shit they'd try to peddle me so I mostly get conservative stuff and irreverent humour and then vtuber stuff which right now is a lot of Phase Connect which if you know the talents, ain't in the normie sphere...
Pippa's always appreciated in the recommended. Or some lemon stealing whore :)
Yes, and I can only press "Don't recommend channel" so many times.
Any time I see trash videos/channels creep into my recommendations, I immediately click the do not recommend channel button. It really does help.
I started blocking most female based channels. But now I'm getting far more female channels being recommended (very small channels so it's blatant pandering).
Oh yeah.
Part of it is the algorithm sucks. I clicked on one news story about the fire in Hawaii and ever since You Tube has suggested local tv news articles from across the US.
There was a time for awhile a few months ago when viewing Nerdrotic, Clownfish, etc would immediately recommend renting the movie/related movie they were knocking.
Every once in a while it will try to slip in leftist streams
I mostly use incognito mode, so it only remembers me by my IP and forgets after a day or two. For me it's mostly clickbait, so I suppose you could say it's normie shit. I do get a bit of Breadtube shit when I search for Manosphere content, but I know all the names and the garbage is easy to spot.
Someone recommended me unhook on here and it's excellent for getting rid of channels you don't like and never seeing them again as well as blocking any other trash youtube tries to spam up on your feed. That's what I'm using regularly now, I also like no playlist autoplay.
Hell, sometimes I like listening to music on youtube, was listening to an Xcom 2 track and because it happened to be named 'New World Order' fucking youtube pops up one of those stupid messages about New World Order being a conspiracy theory and links you to a wikipedia page. This has been in place for awhile though and has been since the early days of the covid lockdowns where they would spam messages about misinformation on channel descriptions.
It's probably going to get so much worse.
Same here, I've been doing incognito mode all the time since 2016 and almost never looked back unless absolutely necessary. Whenever I visit the site, it says that my youtube search history is off. I use the Freetube app to keep track of channels.
Yeah I get that a lot, as well as commie breadtuber stuffthey negatively seed this shit into your feed and search results no matter what you’re looking for, kind of like how porn sites do it with blacked and incest shit.
You can identify the Breadtube crap just by the length of the video. Those faggots love to hear themselves talk.
there is freetube where you can import your subscriptions and you dont even need an account there. Not so sure if the recommendation are different to native youtube tho.
Pretty easy to just break youtube how you want with extensions these days. I'm just kind of ranting because I knew they would get annoying I admit.
I just use invidious and a VPN, I don't keep up with that many channels and I don't like my data being mined. Plus, fuck ads and all the other gay YT bullshit. (though spookily enough, if I stay on the same VPN node for long enough and watch certain videos they can predict who I am through it even through invidious, their abilities to track and identify people are no joke).
Funny enough I've been getting obscure twitch-style game streamers recommended to me more often, to the right of whatever I'm watching. By obscure I mean they'll be live with 0-5 viewers. I've checked in on a few of them but they are usually boring.
I once watched part of a video of a particular high-subscriber YouTube personality who does nothing but play other peoples' videos and comment on them real-time. Now they show up in every single recommended video list and I can't seem to make them go away even if I click on other personalities' videos.
I figure it's a combination of YouTube wanting to appease the ad buyers and the fact this personality has hundreds of videos (even though YouTube recommends the same 4-5 videos constantly).
Which one was it? Some of them are particularly hilarious with how blatantly they're just lazy in how they produce react content. I know that SniperWolf is one of the most used examples but yeah there are others. I would say even Asmongold and Hasan Piker fall into these categories. Asmongold does totally normie takes the majority of the time and Hasan just streams his chair.
I'm not sure why you say "even" there. They are the worst.
I think there are people that are determined to catch them up, it's early days yet. Although allegedly Asmongold and other streamers have been involved in some sort of possible charity scam now I've mentioned those two.
https://kiwifarms.hk/threads/twitch-their-competitors-r-livestreamfails-live-streamer-community.168457/page-58#post-17467354
I actually don't know how mods/admins feel about kiwifarms links but it provides some proper context here.
Rumble young man, Rumble
lol preaching to the choir, I use Rumble a bit, but mostly that seems to be a normie gateway to red pill content among other things and it's got quite a bit of mainstream conservative political cringe in it. I watch youtube to chill and use it for research. Using stuff like Unhook makes youtube a lot more bearable so I just make sure to block these weird channels that are popping up when they do.
I even disabled the end title cards that recommend you stuff because that's pure cancer as well.
Yeah I have sponsorblock pretty much turned on fully. I dont want to see your intro, outro, injected shilling of a product, nothing. It's amazing how you can see when it skips over something with zero awkward cut missing even a word.
Just awkwardly edited in the sponsor shilling, sometimes mid sentence.
I just don't pay any attention to the recommendations lol
I have foster kids, so anything not response, Mr beast, or eating poo is nice. They also like scary vids, but only the jump scare part.
What you are describing reminds me of a complaint I heard from friends in Utah and North Shore Oahu. There is a big broadcast from the top church leadership talking about dealing with things and scriptural understanding. Within a week of watching, they always get videos about how their faith is horrible and should be hated.
So it's part of the search program.
What is this Youtube you speak of?
A site that is useless without at least a dozen extensions.
Yes and no.
See, ever since youtube started bitching about ad blockers, I've started running it in private mode browser windows only.
The thing about recommendation systems is that they're trained by all users collectively. If you suppose that a specific demographic starts using private mode en masse, well, their contribution to the recommendations is going to be eroded out as well
Think of recommendations like dirt paths. They only remain paths if you keep using them.
Here's an effort post to show you how to block these channels without needing any plugin fuckery. Hover over the video in the sidebar, click on the three dots that come up, click "Don't recommend channel." Can confirm that it works.
https://i.postimg.cc/y8jJxFyJ/youtube.png
No that option doesn't always work and I swear there are even channels that youtube will probably allow to completely bypass that because they're those kind of people. A lot of the times I want to block stuff like mainstream channels that get spammed all over your feed depending on what you search for and things like that. Or shitty channels that don't get blacklisted by youtube even though they'll go after smaller channels for politics if they say one wrong thing.
Nope, never have and likely never will. I see only the material I'm interested in. I don't even get shorts or shit like that.