YouTube's search is horrible. No, I don't want "related results" that are completely unrelated to my query, neither results from my country when I specifically type in English and my whole UI is in English and I never watch non-English content while logged in.
I'm sure the YT PMs have proof that this improves engagement.
On a similar note, I've started noticing the third video in the "related videos" section on the right-hand sidebar is usually a new video with _extremely_ clickbait and inflammatory titles - sometimes with little connection to the topics I usually watch.
They're extremely distracting so I've set up a uBlock filter for these:
`www.youtube.com##ytd-compact-video-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(3)`
This doesn't work 100% of the time, but it's good enough. (in particular, it fails if what I'm watching is a trailer video which makes the 2nd recommendation in the sidebar be a movie recommendation which doesn't fit this rule; as a result it blocks the 4th entry in the list, but oh well)
>> I'm sure the YT PMs have proof that this improves engagement.
...and it probably does in the short term, as you just try to engage more with the software trying ever harder to find what you want. But probably also kills engagement in the long term. Personal experience with this: Facebook post-2020 vs Facebook pre-2015.
Facebook pre-2015 was so magical as I was finally reconnecting with long-lost school friends and childhood neighbors we long lost touch with (pre-email friends.)
Facebook post-2020 is me engaging desperately to see something other than the same 10 repeated posts per day...knowing full well that the magic is still in there, just not visible by default. And then one day I just stopped checking.
Yes there was this one day where you open Facebook and literally every other post is Sponsored. And this Reels thing with some random videos from whatever.
But yeah anyway, do you still know people who actually post on Facebook?
No, but I kind of miss it. My Facebook years were roughly 2008-2011, and they were magical. You’d talk with your friends in a fun, async, low stress manner, look at funny posts, hear about shitty but fun local shows, post literally random bs you were thinking. And people you know would really engage, Unironically and in good faith. I don’t remember a lot of clout farming in those days (MySpace had a decent amount, so I’m sure it existed).
I don’t think any other social media came close to how purely good Facebook was in its golden years. I’d love for someone to write a book on how it declined.
> I'm sure the YT PMs have proof that this improves engagement.
I sometimes wonder if the opposite is true - that the PMs can convince the upper managment that users are staying on the website longer with all those stupid as fuck shit changes, but in reality they are there longer because it's increasingly more difficult to find anything you are looking for
Sort of 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure'
No, they are literally designed so it is difficult to tell where you are and which ways lead to exits, because it increases the amount of impulsive purchases.
Successfully being a PM and successfully managing a product are often at odds with each other. I've seen few do it well. Not really picking on PMs either, as both an SDE and now an EM I deal with similar tensions. Gotta love corpo life.
Do you notice if being signed in affects this? Just set out to try it (not signed in) from the first video that came up when I searched "Linux" and kept clicking the third video wondering how long until I get to Hitler.
Never got there. After a brief detour in some Greek channels I can't comment on, I ended up in a seemingly endless loop of mindfully woke TEDx talks (as in, no political or inflammatory stuff, just different variations of "how to live your life to the fullest", "this is how your brain works", "the secret to to happiness/productivity/communication...", etc.
F*k such PMs, seriously. With all the anti-pattern behavior I see from different companies, these PMs shouldn't stay in their job for more than a day. Let a senior engineer with domain expertise take the position.
I have a curated home page of videos, yet I could search for "WW2 documentary" and YouTube will intersperse after the 5th result some trending video about the Kardashians.
Search has become one of the most dysfunctional features in Google products. I am extremely annoyed that I am paying for YouTube Premium, I might just pull the plug and install a network-wide ad blocker system so I can vote with my wallet.
Network blocking won't help much with the drivel. I suggest using Vanced for your phones/computers and SmartTube for your TV. Auto-skipping sponsored segments, intros, and filler is a real game-changer.
It's frustrating that searches are now "whatever we want to promote to you" instead of real searches.
Something similar happens on Twitter when you search for something in the "Top" tab. It doesn't show you results with your search terms. Instead, it shows something peripherally related to what you searched, but much more popular and engaging.
YouTube's KPIs for promoting videos are totally off base in my opinion. They use click through rates and watch time as key indicators, which can easily be manipulated by bots, which is pretty obvious now as rampant on the platform with popular videos showing millions and billions of views, while the majority of posts (from small creators only get 100 or less views over years on the platform.
On YouTube, you get thrown in a trash bin unless you're able to pay or generate traffic from popularity elsewhere.
YT also puts too much emphasis on post titles now, many posters outright clone titles, which in turn botches search results massively. It was a terrible decision YT made to deprioritize taxonomy (hash tags) years ago in order to reduce moderation staff-- Of which, if taxonomy actually worked, feedback could better identify inaccurate and mis-leading content when compared to thumbs down rates... The options for video result sorting have been terribly limited and almost useless as well for ages now.
A big conflict of interest is that YouTube sells and promotes ad-based content boosting to creators, which contradicting-ly makes them more geared towards promoting content that falls under this (paid promotional) category first. It also drives YouTube to lower organic reach for users to drive them towards paying for promotion more year over year... That also encourages the platform to subvert organically good/upvoted content. YT can't logically sell the idea that organic growth is a possibility any more citing the underlying fact that they feature paid promotion without labeling every promoted item of that content as such, it's shocking how they get away with this contradiction of authenticity regularly.
The older engagement methods were far better for YouTube's content quality and authenticity. Now too many users are driven to post repetitive and dragged out videos, with titles based on trends, with decreasing originality and substance.
The current YouTube/TikTok success model is training everyone to conform to a single theme and format, encouraging idea, topic, and content cloning, and into repeating and simply reacting to what popular channels do.
YouTube content will all only continue to get worse and more monotonous if the same ideals on paid promotion continue, and creator success/profit will continue to shrink. (Just my opinion of course).
The irony is that this is exactly the problem of current social media. Everyone can comment on everything in any way they like and there is no way to validate their affiliations, intentions, or sponsorships on scale.
All marketing online now is done through anonymous suggestions because if the way labeled promotional content became overbearing, so much subtle marketing is even embedded in popular YouTube, Other Social, and TV content now that it's insane, really not sure how to counter the deceptive trend because it only gets worse every time people try to call it out.
YouTube’s search is carefully optimized to keep viewers watching video after video, and ad after ad, for as long as possible. That’s why the search returns popular videos, ones that suck in viewers, rather than ones that match your search terms.
I'm actually finding myself watching YouTube less and less because of this. If we were to anthropomorphize the AI, I'd say it's trying pretty desperately to bring me to a "popular cluster".
In my experience, its significantly more aggressive at this than it used to be. The only reason I have a Google/YouTube account in the first place is so I can go to youtube.com and see a list of reasonable interesting videos to watch, based on what I watched before. But in the last few months it keeps pushing more and more "popular" content in there, which is often complete drivel IMHO. I don't even mind if YouTube would show unrelated content, as long as it's interesting, but usually it's not. The entire reason YouTube wins out over regular TV is so I can avoid this kind of stuff.
I've been flagging these things as "not interested" for months now, but it feels like fighting windmills because it has no discernible effect. The effect of all of this is that YouTube is a lot less useful to me than it used to be.
I feel the same way. YouTube is by far my primary streaming platform of any kind (audio or video) and recently the algorithm’s obsession with click bait is making it way less useful to me. This is leading me to watch Nebula and listen to podcasts a lot more. A couple of months ago I noticed a rapid change in the YouTube home page results. There is a channel I watch that uploads four videos or so every day and I always watch every single one immediately. Normally when I open the home page the latest video from that channel is at the very top of the list, and I usually click on it. Then one day it just wasn’t! The channel was continuing to upload and grow in size but the algorithm decided to throw all kinds of low quality stuff at me, to the point I felt like I had been logged out even when I wasn’t. I complained to YouTube on twitter and I don’t know what happened but after about five days of this nonsense things returned to normal, but then began to slowly degrade again. It felt like I had been A/B tested for a new change which then got pulled back and made more subtle. But it is still a bad change!
I don’t know what they’re optimizing for but it certainly isn’t my enjoyment.
Last week youtube decided to start pushing pus / pimple popping videos, and push them hard. I've never shown interest, this was purely the algorithm's idea.
Gross.
I had to install an extension to get it to stop because "Not Interested" and "Don't Recommend Channel" don't work in search results, even though they are turning search results into just another front page :/
I basically use YouTube only without logging in, and rely a lot on the front page for my current interests (channels I want to remember long-term go in my RSS reader). It seems like YouTube always has a channel or two it insists on pushing repeatedly no matter how often I ignore their videos.
Too interesting, too holy shit wow can't believe that, wow. Like sometimes an EE thing yes, then it makes sense, basically a guy talking about an oscilloscope or television then it's part of the show to use a television to talk about it. And only when they link to it externally.
But interesting for its own sake? Rather talk to the men on the street, those guys are interesting, have great stories.
Yeah, I know, line goes up when taking the population average. Must even point in the direction of ads watchers and clickers. Taking into account the shitty videos this cost function promotes, I honestly get a little proud of this algorithm not working for me.
Would be nice for us to have a little more control and transparency over where the AI is taking us, though, specially for us YouTube Premium payers.
Thanks I tried it out and the setting is called "Hide Inapt Search Results" (it's on by default but it also disables recommendations everywhere by default so you might need to disable the other options).
I'm old enough to remember when YouTube search results about political or current events weren't curated or weighted toward mainstream media takes.
Searching for an 'unperson' will always return zero results nowadays.
Edit: I guess that is just for Facebook now but my point stands. The results for certain searches are manipulated manually whether easily noticeable or not.
This. There's a lot youtubers from my country who has crap content presented in a cringey way.
Like, if I search for "second order vibrations in internal combustion engine", I get hundreds of people explaining it in local languages I don't even speak, in a way that's targeted at college students cramming for finals (think equations on a notepad without explaining what physically goes on).
Makes me wanna leave this place. That would be funny, isn't it? Emigrating because local YouTube content is cringe.
(I turned off all tracking things that can be turned off from their UI, but I suppose they can still figure out where I'm from unless I use a VPN).
One of the craziest things about YouTube search I don't understand is how you'll search for the name of someone, and their channel won't show up in the first results. Sometimes, often really, it won't show up at all, and you'll have to figure out other ways to phrase your queries. You kind of need to go with a long channel name that can be abbreviated like "Bob65's Engineering tricks", so people have the full name as a fallback, in case "bob65" doesn't work.
Feels like they really want you to subscribe and engage with the "related" videos instead of the real deal, which sucks for channel owners, especially if it's channels who profit on being weirdly intrusive and hostile towards said channels or people.
youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/For you/)
youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/New for you/)
youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/People also watched/)
youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/Previously watched/)
youtube.com##ytd-horizontal-card-list-renderer:has-text(/People also search for/)
At the same time when I want to find a song it often is enough to somewhat be phonetically in the realms of song's text or mention a characteristic object from the video clip if I saw it and it will often be the first result.
> neither results from my country when I specifically type in English and my whole UI is in English and I never watch non-English content while logged in.
Google in general is annoyingly insistent in localizing results. It used to be that google.com gave you english results and you would go to google.ccTLD to get a local experience. Then they changed it to google.com being localized by default (even though my browser is set to english) but you could click a link to go back to the english version from the home page. Now they even hide that link when you go the the home page via the google logo (why????) and you have to explicitly go to google.com/ without a hl query parameter. And of course the english results are still localized somewhat (e.g. it'll show the local Wikipedia anlong with the english one, even for articles that have fuck all to do with location).
There is a way to avoid "related results". Search from the command line using a simpler HTTP client to retrieve the first batch of results and use the public API to retrieve subsequent results as JSON into a results file. Using this method I can retrieve the full number of possible results, e.g., hundreds or thousands, not simply the first batch, e.g., 15, 25 or whatever. I call this "continuation" searching. No Javascript is required.
When people use highly complex graphical browsers and Javascript to make these requests it is sometimes triggered by a "button" at the bottom of a page called "more results" or something similar. Alternatively the requests may be triggered automatically when down scrolling, producing what some people call an "inifinite scroll" effect. Javascript is usually what produces the annoyances people experience. It is also used for tracking and telemetry.
The token for the public API to retrieve the next batch of results is the results file. Using a simpler HTTP client, I can (a) search YouTube very quickly and comprehensively entirely from the command line, (b) download videos without ever visiting a YouTube page in a graphical browser and being exposed to annoyances, tracking and telemetry (c) switch from retrieving via search string to retrieving via channel name, (d) mix the search and channel results into a single results file, (e) output a TSV table from the results file. Currently I include the following fields in the TSV table:
YouTubeID Title ChannelName Duration SearchString/ChannelPath Search/Channel
The last field is just an indicator of whether the result is from a search or a channel.
Videos are browsed and selected using a TSV table instead of an HTML search results page.^1 Because I am interested in videos of a certain duration, including "unpopular" videos with low view counts, I have found this is an optimal search method. No distractions. YouTube wants people to view popular, low quality, "viral" videos, e.g., "fake news", extremism and the like, because this "content" is optimal for their advertising business model. Hence automatic "recommendations". This is what makes YouTube search so horrible. Advertising as a "business model" for websites can influence design and have very harmful downstream effects.
1. The HTML pages for videos are where the "recommendations" come from. Thus I never see the recommendations as they are not part of this search/retrieval method. I could extract them from the HTML into a table if I wanted to see them, but I choose not to. I only extract the video download URLs from the pages for the videos.
It's really odd, everyone said search was the main reason to put videos on YouTube instead of self hosting/with a CDN. I guess all they have now is inertia, kind of like the cable companies had.
