[UN-SOLVED!!!] YouTube's 'Recomended' recomendations now suck AGAIN.

[rdl]

Don't sign in and don't allow their cookies and you'll get mostly random stuff recommended every time you go there.

[BrianHG]

Don't sign in and don't allow their cookies and you'll get mostly random stuff recommended every time you go there.

Thanks but I want the old system back, where recommendations followed my subscriptions and varied with each refresh of the page.  But, now, even channels I've been subscribed to have not turned up new episodes in quite awhile, or even at all.  The system is now fundamentally flawed.  I'm subscribe to, example, CBC news here in Canada, and, not 1 new video has come out news related in months like it used to.  Yes, I know going to my subscriptions page list the new stuff there, but, it's like the recommendations now almost avoid most or all of my subscribed 'topics' in general.

[bitseeker]

The Subscription page is better, which is why I never use the home page. However, it doesn't always show you all new videos from channels you've subscribed to. So, YouTube introduced the "bell" button. Great! It wasn't enough to show interest by subscribing to their channel. Pffft! I haven't bothered to use this Band-Aid. If they can't get things right in the first place, I'm not going to compound it with another layer of "broken."

Anyway, I start at the Subscription page and, if I notice that I haven't seen a video from someone in a while, I go to their channel page to see what I've missed. If I can't tell, then I guess I wasn't that interested in that channel. YouTube has been, and probably always will be, broken.

We need competitors... 

[BrianHG]

We need competitors... 

I second that...

[BrianHG]

Here is the way to fix youtube's lousy recommendations:
1. Write down all your subscriptions.
2. Delete your gmail account and youtube login.
3. Create a new Gmail/youtube account login.
4. Re-subscribe to all you channels with your new account.
5. Now, refreshing your 'Recommendation's' page will give you all new videos like youtube used to do around 8 months ago.

I don't know why this works, or makes a difference, but, for now, my youtube recommendations appear to function like the way they did since over 5 years up until around 8 months ago.

I'll keep you guy updated once the bug appears again.
I only found this thanks to another bug where for some reason, yesterday, youtube only supported 360p and 720p playback video modes on my g-mail login account.

[jh15]

I get this same ugly face on the amazon prime main menu, think it is amazon originals.

[bitseeker]

Here is the way to fix youtube's lousy recommendations:
1. Write down all your subscriptions.
2. Delete your gmail account and youtube login.
3. Create a new Gmail/youtube account login.
4. Re-subscribe to all you channels with your new account.
5. Now, refreshing your 'Recommendation's' page will give you all new videos like youtube used to do around 8 months ago.

I don't know why this works, or makes a difference, but, for now, my youtube recommendations appear to function like the way they did since over 5 years up until around 8 months ago.

If it starts going awry again, try deleting your viewing history. A fresh account may have effectively done that.

[BrianHG]

Here is the way to fix youtube's lousy recommendations:
1. Write down all your subscriptions.
2. Delete your gmail account and youtube login.
3. Create a new Gmail/youtube account login.
4. Re-subscribe to all you channels with your new account.
5. Now, refreshing your 'Recommendation's' page will give you all new videos like youtube used to do around 8 months ago.

I don't know why this works, or makes a difference, but, for now, my youtube recommendations appear to function like the way they did since over 5 years up until around 8 months ago.

If it starts going awry again, try deleting your viewing history. A fresh account may have effectively done that.

I tried that a week ago.  Then I got stuck stupid 'Gaming' always forcibly ending up on my main page and a few days later, my video playback resolution had only 2 modes on every video, only 360p and 720p.

Also, the problem seemed to start when Youtube began feeding me 2 sequential video adds every time.  Now with this new account, I only get 1 add per video.

[bitseeker]

Interesting. I look forward to your further findings.

[BrianHG]

Interesting. I look forward to your further findings.

I now get an infinite list scrolling down my recommendations, including a column to re-play viewed videos.  I never had this in 5 years of using YouTube.  The recommendations have always been limited to around 2-3 pages, and recently, 1.5 pages.  Something in YouTube changed or happened between some internal update they had a number of months ago, corrupting my account information, regardless of my watch history, or clearing that history.

[bitseeker]

Well, I guess that'll be a good use for my very old Google Apps account. I can make lots of new accounts. If I need a new one annually, that'll last me until I'm dead and gone. Winner!

[BrianHG]

It's been 3 weeks so far and my fix appears to still be working fine.  I think Youtube has somehow messed up my old account setting at 1 point in time, then went downhill from there.

[bitseeker]

Well, that's a bit of good news.

[BrianHG]

  WTF is going on.
Now every recommendation is crap, even after clearing out an account, the recommendation turn back into crap within 1 hour!

What do I do now?

[MagicSmoker]

Count me as another person who has gotten increasingly frustrated with the terminally stupid youtube recommendations. I don't have a good fix for it, but I did stumble on a workaround/kludge while desperately searching firefox add-ons for such: install the Channel Blocker extension and you can at least permanently stop getting served the same recommendations over and over again no matter how many times you go through the tedious process of clicking on the 3 vertical dots, clicking on "not interested" then clicking on "tell us why" and then clicking a 4th time to check the box for "not interested in this channel."

Another, somewhat more malicious but just as tedious method that works on a per video basis, if not per channel, is to report a video as spam (or violent or whatever). I try to reserve that for the clickbaity crap like, "Blah blah did blah, and then THIS happened..."

Oh, and is it just a US thing, or do people in other countries also repeatedly get recommendations that are in a language different from what you specified in your google account settings? I don't know why Google/YT thinks I can understand Russia or Polish, but it seems pretty convinced of it.

[AndyC_772]

My YT recommendations are generally pretty sane, but over the last few weeks something very odd has started happening.

The 3rd recommendation is, sometimes, completely random. Not the others, just the 3rd result, as if that position in the list is controlled by a completely different algorithm. It's often in another language, including languages that use character sets that I can't even recognise, much less read and understand.

Part of me thinks there's just a software bug involved, like an integer overflow or uninitialised pointer, meaning I'm getting a completely random result. Another suspects that someone at YT thinks I "should" be broadening my horizons, and that this can be achieved by suggesting one extraordinarily irrelevant video amongst others that make sense.

[SiliconWizard]

I never really even bothered looking at the recommendations. And yes they are crap, and very much like Amazon's recommended products. Same crap, very similar algorithm probably.

[bitseeker]

It sounds like YT may be profiling to see who may be receptive to non-English content.

I've long given up on YT recommendations and their home page. I just use the subscriptions page. I also don't use the bell. Why should I do extra work (and get unnecessary notification of every video, which creates more work for me) because YT can't do things right?

If I feel that a channel I've subscribed to doesn't seem to have posted in a while, I'll go check their channel's page for anything I may have missed. No notifications necessary.

[BrianHG]

Ok, I see the above point, but, even with my subscriptions, I would like to see new youtubers who I haven't subscribed to yet who may have content I'm interested in.  This is how I originally found EEVblog and other interesting channels.

As of now, not 1 single new semi-interesting hit which I would even bother clicking on has come about in weeks.

[bitseeker]

Makes sense. It's certainly broken. I guess I've just become apathetic to YT's troubles. YouTube, Google, Alphabet, etc. are supposedly full of smart people. If they can't figure it out...

I may have simply joined the Grumpy Old Guy, "Get off my lawn," club.

[AndyC_772]

It sounds like YT may be profiling to see who may be receptive to non-English content.

If that were the case, wouldn't it make sense to offer content that was at least on a similar theme to other content in which I already have shown an interest?

The last odd recommendation I had was, I think, a religious video with just a few hundred views - so, not a popular video in its own right, and nothing at all in common with the videos I usually watch. Other times it's suggested videos aimed at babies and toddlers.

It's almost as though it's trying to pick out the videos I'm least likely to ever see otherwise.

[SiliconWizard]

That's deep learning! https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub45530

Probably too deep to be figured out by mere humans...

[nali]

I don't know if it has any relevance but Google's tracking seems to be getting smarter. For example I was looking for a relacement shower door recently so plenty of Googling including the Shopping links. Within an hour or so my wife mentioned that she was getting adverts in her Facebook feed for shower doors...

Now aside from the household IP address there is nothing in common between our systems. I use a Win 10 desktop, she  uses an Android tablet. I don't and have never used FB, I don't use her tablet and she doesn't use my PC. I do get random and generally useless suggestions in my YT, maybe they're being triggered by links in some of the crap she continually scrolls through in her newsfeed or whatever they call it?

[bitseeker]

It sounds like YT may be profiling to see who may be receptive to non-English content.

If that were the case, wouldn't it make sense to offer content that was at least on a similar theme to other content in which I already have shown an interest?

Apparently, making sense is not a factor.

[bitseeker]

I don't know if it has any relevance but Google's tracking seems to be getting smarter. For example I was looking for a relacement shower door recently so plenty of Googling including the Shopping links. Within an hour or so my wife mentioned that she was getting adverts in her Facebook feed for shower doors...

I'd call that targeting less smart. It targeted the wrong person.