Has YouTube’s recommended tab lost the plot for you all?

[DooM Bear]

I swear for the last week or so Youtube has completely lost the plot.

 

In the recommended tab, I’m getting a whole bunch of stuff I have and have never had any interest in. As well as that it keeps recommending me videos from some bots channel (channel name is just numbers with a whole bunch of 6’s) that puts up 1 minute long videos of pictures of women with music in the background. 

 

Also, all the ads seem to be get rich quick schemes. I mean, ads are annoying at the best of times but I’m getting real sick nothing but “earn $300 a day from home” ads every bloody ad break!

 

Have I just broken the algorithm with the wide range of stuff I watch or is this happening for you all too?

[mrthejoshmon]

 

 

I dunno man, this video it recommended was definitely well in line with what I want

[Trupiak]

DooM Bear... if I were you i'd be afraid someone logged onto my account from another device. I'd check my watching history and do all the password stuff.
My reccomended secton is more or less accurate, except for the 20% of the content which is stuff I watched already or REFUSE to watch simply because how much they try to push it down my throat every single day. It used to be like that with steamed ham memes or with certain videos I now forgot about (Oh yeah, the "HERE'S WHY AN OLD BUICK IS THE BEST CAR FOR POOR MILLENIALS !!!!". It's been in my reccomended for ever since it came out and I never watched it nor bothered to just mark it "don't reccomend this to me"... I hate clickbaity car reviews. )... Now I get the "hey shitass" minecraft memes.

[kalaeth]

mine seems fine. I clean everything that isn't music from my history and most of the things I listen and don't like, so it only recommends music and it's only recommending music..

 I agree with Trupiak above, check your history and if you see videos you didn't watch there, change your password.

[seed]

Mine is fine, it seems to do a pretty good job in giving me similar shit, mostly related to music, tech stuff, and gaming.

 

As for ads, wait, people still don't use adblockers on PC in 2020??

[Percy T]

I watch youtube videos every day for at least 2 or 3 hours, but sometimes if I watch for too long, my recommended videos become so bland and uninteresting that I just can't watch anymore for a day or two. I've never had that botted channel problem before tho. 

[DooM Bear]

14 minutes ago, Percy T said:

I watch youtube videos every day for at least 2 or 3 hours, but sometimes if I watch for too long, my recommended videos become so bland and uninteresting that I just can't watch anymore for a day or two. I've never had that botted channel problem before tho. 

 

Ahhhh that might be it! Because I’ve been working from home the last few months I’ve been watching / listening to YouTube all day while I work :-P The algorithm has probably shat itself as I’ve watched everything from the channels I’d usually watch and now it’s just chucking shit at me to see what sticks XD

 

There was always some uninteresting / stuff i’ve already seen in the recommended but just in the last week or so it seems to be all garbage after the 2nd or 3rd refresh (once the new uploads from people I subscribe to are gone) :-P 

 

2 hours ago, seed said:

Mine is fine, it seems to do a pretty good job in giving me similar shit, mostly related to music, tech stuff, and gaming.

 

As for ads, wait, people still don't use adblockers on PC in 2020??

 

Hehehehe Na I watch it on my iPad :-P Plus I don’t mind supporting the creators I like with ad revenue (provided they don’t abuse it and smash 10 ad breaks into a 10 minute video :-P) and it’s just the repetition of the “get rich quick” ones that really annoy me :-P

[Doomkid]

Sometimes I click on a handful of videos while asking myself "wtf is this bullshit?" but because I clicked them YouTube assumes I love them. Maybe that's what's happened here as well? Clicking the "Do not recommend similar content" thing seemed to help (or whatever it's called, 3 dots on the video thumbnail)

[HavoX]

I think YouTube has lost their marbles instead... O_o

[Redneckerz]

I get PlayStation 5 ads at the beginning and mid-roll. Funny enough, sometimes they break the video and you see one half with the ad fully displayed and properly scaled, and the other half the actual video glitching in green flashes.

[AinuTheTaken]

No.

[DooM Bear]

1 hour ago, Doomkid said:

Sometimes I click on a handful of videos while asking myself "wtf is this bullshit?" but because I clicked them YouTube assumes I love them. Maybe that's what's happened here as well? Clicking the "Do not recommend similar content" thing seemed to help (or whatever it's called, 3 dots on the video thumbnail)

 

I think that might be what is happening with the bot channel. Clicked on it once as was intrigued as to WTF this random jumble of numbers channel was that kept getting recommended to me.

 

Was a very bad move though as the bot uploads a new video every 15 minutes or so (this is the main reason I think it’s a bot) and no matter how many times I click the “not interested” button, I still end up with 2 of its videos each time I check the page :-P

 

just in case anyone wants to end up in recommended tab hell as with me, the bot channels name is 66666666107. It’s content is NOT SFW and is absolutely shit. You will be able to tell very quickly why I don’t want these thumbnails taking up my recommended tab :-P And just to preemptively defend myself, I don’t view or subscribe to any other similar material (on YouTube ;-P) and have absolutely no idea why it was recommended to me in the first place!

Edited October 28, 2020 by DooM Bear

[Solmyr]

Not to the same degree as your experience, but i had weird recommended videos from time to time, such as videos about torturing and killing rats with elaborated traps, and weird kid videos that feel like an acid trip, such as Hitler dancing with Shrek, and the title seems to be in some hindi dialect.

Also more often, i get commercials in japanese and german, even though i don't speak both languages and spend time on the english and spanish speaking side of Youtube.

[NuMetalManiak]

I don't know if this is what you're referring to, but whenever I listen to an album on Youtube I have a tendency to try to listen to the album in sequence, so track 1 then track 2, etc. And in the recommended section they tend to have either unrelated videos or other songs on the album but NEVER the next one in sequence.

[CAM-7EA]

I’ve had this issue for years. Rumor has it, the site is totally fucked up since they merged G+ and now that it’s no longer a thing, the site is all screwy even more so. They won’t fix it because it would require shutting the site down entirely to do heavy maintenance because it’s that messed up. They also won’t admit that their algorithm is messed up and claim it’s a feature. It is a feature, sure, but it doesn’t work anymore for a long time now. All my suggested videos when watching a video are all videos I have already watched. My home page shows crap I will NEVER watch and pressing not interested doesn’t do much at all really. It used to not be like this and was a lot better, and I was able to find new music much easier with YT in the past but now it is a bigger chore than it use to be. 
 

Another thing I hate is the BREAKING NEWS tab. You can click “not interested” and it will show back up again not long after. It’s annoying. I don’t go to YT for the news and all the BS that goes with that. I go there to get away from that! So there should be a way to keep it from coming back for good. 

 

Youtube needs to fix these issues before it pushes more people away. They focus so much on the comments section and video player that they have screwed everything else up that made the site great in the first place.

 

Remember when you were able to

actually make your account look unique from everyone else beyond just a fucking banner image? I miss that stuff. 

[seed]

38 minutes ago, NuMetalManiak said:

I don't know if this is what you're referring to, but whenever I listen to an album on Youtube I have a tendency to try to listen to the album in sequence, so track 1 then track 2, etc. And in the recommended section they tend to have either unrelated videos or other songs on the album but NEVER the next one in sequence.

 

This I can relate to as well. Sometimes they give me the next track, but more often than not they recommend something similar.

[Jello]

12 hours ago, mrthejoshmon said:

*Seal Video*

I dunno man, this video it recommended was definitely well in line with what I want

I hardly ever watch anything on Youtube anyway, and yet this video was highly relevant to my interests as well.

 

But yeah, just looking at my recommended list real quick, it all looks pretty much in line.

[cambreaKer]

mostly i see channels i subscribed to, but then i see some random shit that i don't care about and never will, like those "lofi hiphop beats" videos, or boring news, or cooking with gordon fucking ramsay, or random ass shitty amongus videos, oh and how could i forget FUCKING "RELAXING" RAIN SOUNDS 10 GODDAMN HOUR LOOP! jesus fucking christ i couldn't care less about that shit

 

oh and i use adblock so i don't get to see all those amazing ads y'all get

[Dimon12321]

I don't like YT on my phone. No matter if I refresh the page, I get the almost the same set of videos over and over =(

Not to mention, I have to skip 4 ads in order to watch a single video and there are a lot of disguised ad videos in the recommended feed.

[HLRaven]

No matter how much I try, telling youtube to stop recommending me this content or not showing me this ad, It never seemed to work

 

Thank god for adblock

[DSC]

8 hours ago, Solmyr said:

and weird kid videos that feel like an acid trip,

NO OH NO NO NO NO!!!!!!! NOT THESE VIDEOS

Seeriously, please everybody listen to me, never watch that crap if you've just eaten... Actually, scratch that, just don't watch them... You could show 'em to the pope itself and even he would abandon God...

[HQDefault]

Eh. I guess my feed's gotten a little weirder lately, but it has been reccommending more stuff from smaller channels at least, which I appreciate.

 

I don't appreciate the MASS ABUNDANCE of hololive stuff it keeps wanting me to watch. The eekum bokum thing was cute but it's just been nuts lately.

[NeedHealth]

if i visit youtube in the browser on the cell i get recommended full burmese films.

 

I am not burmese.

[Murdoch]

15 hours ago, mrthejoshmon said:

I dunno man, this video it recommended was definitely well in line with what I want

 

Adorable seal pupper 17/10 would say aww again.

 

My feed is fine - history stuff, tech stuff, movie stuff, mod stuff, soundly reasoned music recommendations, debunking conspiracy nuts, random silly things, and adorable animals.

 

However, a couple of months ago Google Play Music recommended the new Kanye West album to me. Seriously Google? You know more about me than I do and THAT is what you recommend? I thought we were friends dude.

 

 

[Lila Feuer]

Yeah the algorithm is broken, and like most problems in popular media platforms it will never be fixed. This is the best millions / billions of dollars will buy the public!

[Beginner]

Recommended videos section in videos has annoying tendency to re-recommend videos that I've watched already, sometimes even the videos I have just clicked away from. That typically occurs when watching several videos from the same uploader. Though most of the time it's doing alright-ish job at keeping me in my small bubble of interests as it automagically suggests new uploads from the users whose videos I regularly watch... until I manage to click on a video of some popular uploader or of a topic that's gaining popularity then it will suggest me that for several days (at least) even if I click on that "Don't recommend these videos" option.

[xvertigox]

On 10/29/2020 at 2:17 AM, Doomkid said:

Clicking the "Do not recommend similar content" thing seemed to help (or whatever it's called, 3 dots on the video thumbnail)

 

You can also go into your YouTube history and delete videos which will stop the algo from recommending videos based off those.

[ReeseJamPiece]

The YouTube algorithm is just trying to get as much cash as possible from us. If you don't pay for the product then you're the product. It'll recommend stuff nobody cares about like Fifa card pack openings or Jake Paul videos because that generates the most ads. Companies don't want to waste their ads on videos that only have niche appeal, even if it's good content, so they put them on crappy videos that kids watch. YouTube doesn't give a damn about it's content creators, it's proven that time and time again. It's shitty but hey YouTube is a monopoly in the webvideo business so greedy practices are expected.