[HN Gopher] DeArrow - Solving clickbait on YouTube
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DeArrow - Solving clickbait on YouTube
Author : zikohh
Score : 112 points
Date : 2023-06-22 20:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dearrow.ajay.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (dearrow.ajay.app)
| qwertox wrote:
| I'd like an extension which filters out all those Short-videos.
| No way to pause, no way to scroll, they are horrible.
| ajayyy wrote:
| https://github.com/mchangrh/yt-neuter/blob/main/filters/nosh...
|
| or if you still want to see them, but with the normal player:
| https://uscript.mchang.xyz/yt/yt-shorts-redirect.user.js
| satvikpendem wrote:
| A combination of Enhancer for YouTube and PocketTube allows you
| to do this, you can auto convert shorts to normal videos you
| can scroll through with the former, and with the latter, you
| can filter out shorts in your subscriptions.
| unforgivenpasta wrote:
| These are the uBlock Origin filters i use for blocking shorts
| ! YT Homepage - Hide the Shorts section youtube.com##[is-
| shorts] ! YT Menu - Hide the Shorts button
| www.youtube.com###guide [title="Shorts"], .ytd-mini-guide-
| entry-renderer[title="Shorts"] ! YT Search - Hide Shorts
| www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-video-renderer [overlay-
| style="SHORTS"]:upward(ytd-video-renderer) ! YT Search
| and Channels - Hide the Shorts sections
| www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer ! YT Channels -
| Hide the Shorts tab www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-
| subtype="channels"] [role="tab"]:nth-of-type(3):has-
| text(Shorts) ! YT Subscriptions - Hide Shorts - Grid View
| www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="subscriptions"] ytd-
| grid-video-renderer [overlay-style="SHORTS"]:upward(ytd-grid-
| video-renderer) ! YT Subscriptions - Hide Shorts - List
| View www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-
| subtype="subscriptions"] ytd-video-renderer [overlay-
| style="SHORTS"]:upward(ytd-item-section-renderer) ! YT
| Sidebar - Hide Shorts www.youtube.com###related ytd-
| compact-video-renderer [overlay-style="SHORTS"]:upward(ytd-
| compact-video-renderer)
|
| I think these were on the uBlockOrigin subreddit, couldn't find
| the post
| balaji1 wrote:
| Does anyone like seeing a video (usually clickbaity title and
| thumbnail) but with super low view count?
|
| I only want to see if such a video is coming from a channel I
| explicitly subscribe to (friends usually).
| hollerith wrote:
| I would use (and contribute to) a system like this for HN
| headlines (where of course thumbnails would not be needed).
| 0cVlTeIATBs wrote:
| This looks great; I'm only worried that this might change my
| habit of specifically avoiding clickbait, so I might no longer
| send that negative signal.
| worldsavior wrote:
| You control your mind. You don't want clickbait? You don't need
| an extension. Control your own.
| linster wrote:
| You'd be a highly effective addictions councillor, especially
| for physical dependence
| ranting-moth wrote:
| Most people are on autopilot most of the time.
| okigan wrote:
| Don't worry, they tryout different titles and will see that
| content matters more than title.
| autoexec wrote:
| Yeah, I do a pretty good job already at avoiding garbage but
| every once in a while I'm caught by surprise. Still, for me at
| least it's not worth sending a list of every video I
| watch/search for to a third party and also cloudflare. If this
| gets popular I could also see it being used maliciously, but it
| is an interesting idea at least.
| unforgivenpasta wrote:
| Since watchtime is a major contributor to the algorithm, it
| might be the opposite if you click out of the video fast enough
| ajayyy wrote:
| Sending a negative signal doesn't seem to be working :)
| shortcake27 wrote:
| Negative signals don't seem to work on any platform.
| Instagram has a "don't suggest posts like this" which does
| absolutely nothing. The only thing which kind of works is
| "Don't recommend channel" (YT) / "Don't suggest posts from
| this user" (Instagram). However, on Instagram this option
| only appears occasionally. In most cases I don't get this
| option, so I need to click through to their profile to block
| them. By clicking through to their profile it sends a strong
| signal to Instagram that I want to see more content like the
| account I just blocked, so my feed starts filling up with
| garbage. Writing this makes me realise I need to quit, but
| it's difficult.
| foxbyte wrote:
| Yeah but don't worry too much about changing your habits, just
| continue to be selective and critical in your consumption.
| Remember that it's all about finding a balance between staying
| informed and maintaining your personal preferences, right?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Good marketing is not inherently clickbait. YouTube already
| solved clickbait in how videos are punished for getting bad watch
| time.
| joemi wrote:
| I agree with your first sentence, but I don't think I agree
| with your second sentence (namely "solved").
| charcircuit wrote:
| More specifically they solved the "bad" form of click bait
| where people click on a video and it turns out to be
| something they did not want despite the thumbnail and title
| being attractive.
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| Fun! In an ideal world it would be better to use ML to recognize
| the faces, arrows, etc. A first pass could blur them. In a real
| ideal world the ML would watch the video and give it better
| titles and thumbnails too! Sadly we live in the real world .
| Maybe in 2030
| el_isma wrote:
| You could generate titles from the subtitles! Even auto-
| generated subtitles are pretty good nowadays, feed it to AI and
| get it to summarize them in one phrase?
| basch wrote:
| Whatever solution needs to be at the network layer to capture
| android tv, Apple TV, Roku, Xbox etc.
|
| Having it be a chrome extension only fixes the problem for a
| computer, not everyone in a household.
|
| And realistically, it would be nice to extend way beyond
| YouTube, rewriting all headlines on all articles with a
| community sourced patch list you can scroll through and upvote
| the best variant of each title. And then rewrite the articles
| to remove repetition. Combine articles that say the same thing.
|
| I can almost imagine a web browser, that when it invests a
| page, uses what it can take from the page to update an internal
| store of that story with new information.
| ajayyy wrote:
| Behold, a perfect training set :)
|
| https://sponsor.ajay.app/database
| simlevesque wrote:
| I really appreciate your work ! How can I donate ?
| ajayyy wrote:
| https://dearrow.ajay.app/donate/ :)
| simlevesque wrote:
| Done ! I can't give much right now but you've saved me so
| much time.
| joemi wrote:
| It's kind of odd to me that the two examples shown on the page
| are from creators who aren't really all that clickbaity, CGP Grey
| and Tom Scott. Their videos typically _are_ what the title says,
| maybe with a slight bit of poetic license, and their thumbnails
| are eye catching but relevant and not too egregious.
| shortcake27 wrote:
| Veritasium has a video about this and I've seen other creators
| like GothamChess and maybe even Tom Scott talk about how they
| have to create clickbait thumbnails otherwise they get no
| views. The YouTube algorithm punishes creators who don't use
| clickbait.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8
| [deleted]
| ortusdux wrote:
| Linus as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA
|
| They claim that they only create clickbait because the
| platform requires it, but that argument is undercut a bit by
| the fact that they use the same playbook on floatplane.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| I think this is a definition thing, because I agree with you,
| but the author's comment below seems to imply clickbait is
| anything that looks flashy. I found this definition when
| googling "what is clickbait" and I like it:
|
| > Clickbait is a sensationalized headline that encourages you
| to click a link to an article, image, or video. Instead of
| presenting objective facts, clickbait headlines often appeal to
| your emotions and curiosity. Once you click, the website
| hosting the link earns revenue from advertisers, but the actual
| content is usually of questionable quality and accuracy.
| Websites use clickbait to draw in as many clicks as possible,
| thus increasing their ad revenue.[0]
|
| In Tom Scott's case, the video thumbnails look flashy but are
| accurate and representative of the video.
|
| I think a good example of clickbait vs non-clickbait according
| to this definition would be Jazza vs NerdForge. I stopped
| watching Jazza because he would put great looking art in the
| thumbnail slightly blurred out, and the actual video would be
| about everything except that artwork. Whereas Nerdforge will
| show a huge piece of beautiful art, and that's what the whole
| video is about.
|
| Just because someone presents their work well doesn't mean it's
| clickbait. And this is an age old problem, it's the reason we
| have the idiom "don't judge a book by its cover". I appreciate
| the effort people like Tom Scott, Sebastian Lague, and
| Nerdforge put into their thumbnails, because a picture is worth
| 1000 words and they use their thumbnails to paint that picture.
|
| [0]: https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/thenow/what-is-clickbait/1/#
| ajayyy wrote:
| This was a purposeful choice to demonstrate the extent of the
| clickbait/sensationalism problem. Both channels have only
| changed their thumbnail and title style in the last few months,
| and previously had great titles and thumbnails.
|
| Edit: To clarify, when I say "clickbait" here, I am using it as
| a neutral term referring to any materials used to convince
| someone to click on a link. I understand that it is kind of a
| loaded term and it is not used anywhere in the extension itself
| because of this.
|
| The title of this post seems to be taken from the satire title
| on my YouTube video demo. If you install the plugin and view
| the video from there, there is a better title. It was meant as
| a demo of the extension.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| Looking at Tom Scott now I don't really see it. Most of the
| thumbnails seems to be him next to the object, an arrow
| highlighting it and a short fact about it. On the contrary,
| seeing the submarine in the thumbnail with this plugin kinda
| spoil the ending of his video.
| progbits wrote:
| He's retroactively changed thumbnails to match this new
| style.
|
| Edit: this video shows the old and new styles:
| https://youtu.be/CcyTzhrN6bM
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| I like more descriptive titles! Don't know if I agree about
| the thumbnail though. Replacing a "You won't believe what
| they do here!!" with "A tour of X facility where Y is
| produced plus an interview with Z" is much better. It's more
| expressive, easier to find what you're looking for, and
| overall a definitive improvement for the viewer.
|
| However, I'm not sure a random screenshot, or any still frame
| from the middle of a video is a better replacement for a
| custom thumbnail.
|
| The only benefit I see of something like that is to
| explicitly reduce irritation of stupid thumbnails, not to
| improve your ability to find content you care for. And if you
| get emotionally worked up enough because of stupid youtube
| thumbnails that you must change them to something that's
| obviously just as random, you might need more meditation.
| It's just youtube, it's not worth it.
| ajayyy wrote:
| The plugin supports replacing only titles if you prefer.
| Nathan2055 wrote:
| While I'm just as annoyed about the clickbait problem as
| everyone else, it is worth noting that it's hard to blame it
| on the individual YouTubers. If you don't follow whatever the
| algorithm demands that given week, you're unlikely to get
| very many views at all. Even subscription notifications are
| fed into the algorithm now, and YouTube has been proven to be
| perfectly willing to not send out notifications for videos it
| seems unworthy. This even affects subscribers who turned the
| bell on, a feature that was supposedly released to mitigate
| the first time they implemented that change by supposedly
| offering an "always force notifications for this channel's
| uploads" option, but YouTube's guidance now says that the
| bell only guarantees receiving all _notifications_ generated
| by a channel while also stating that not all _uploads_ will
| generate a notification.[1]
|
| Linus Tech Tips famously ran an experiment several years ago
| (and I believe have rerun it a few times since then) and
| determined that, even though they hated doing it, videos
| which used clickbait titles and thumbnails got consistently
| got 20% higher engagement than ones that didn't use
| clickbait.[2] I've also heard anecdotal numbers even higher
| than that, and there's a knock-on effect as YouTube tends to
| promote channels with consistently high performance way more
| frequently (this is why big Game Theory uploads instantly and
| consistently show up in everyone's recommendations).
|
| This isn't a complaint about your tool at all, don't
| misunderstand me. I just wanted to point out that most of
| these big channels are their creator's primary business, and
| it's gotten very difficult to be successful at YouTube
| without resorting to algorithm tricks like these.
|
| [1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3382248
|
| [2]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA
|
| Edit: Ah, yeah, I missed your "It's no one's fault. It's a
| system that creates a race to the bottom." text on the page.
| You already probably know all of this.
|
| I will add an addendum in response to "Many have even started
| going through their entire backlog, changing old titles and
| thumbnails to be more attention grabbing and vague." because
| I actually know how that got started.
|
| About a year or two ago, the late great Minecraft streamer
| Technoblade ran into an issue where it turned out that one of
| the community-made thumbnails on one of his videos had used
| traced art. He quickly sourced a replacement piece and
| updated the thumbnail, but then quickly noticed something
| interesting happen: YouTube treated the thumbnail update
| almost like a new upload, and that video showed back up in
| people's recommendations, accordingly with a massive bump in
| views. He tried this with a few other videos, sometimes
| changing the title as well, and got similar results.
|
| Other YouTubers began to copy this strategy, and it was
| ultimately discovered that updating the title or thumbnail
| caused Google to "re-crunch" the video in terms of the
| algorithm, and applying the most popular current title and
| thumbnail styles were led to a serious increase in
| recommendations and views, even if the video was several
| years old by that point. Many YouTubers began to abuse this,
| updating their videos with "modern" metadata stylings, and
| since then it's become standard practice for big YouTubers
| and has led to a serious increase in growth for them.
|
| Once again, it's an algorithm problem and not an individual
| YouTuber problem, but that's what started the most recent
| trend of editing the metadata on old videos rather than just
| applying it to new uploads.
| joemi wrote:
| I guess I haven't noticed any difference, and what I see on
| their channels today isn't what I consider clickbait. IMO
| it's at least a step or two from clickbait.
| ryanschaefer wrote:
| CGP Grey and Tom Scott have both changed their thumbnails from
| their previous style to new more "click-baity" ones. I'm not
| saying it's wrong, it's just what creators have to do nowadays
| to keep up with the state YouTube is moving toward. I think
| this is why the extension author chose these two as an example.
| Zetice wrote:
| Artifact (a news platform mobile app) tackles this problem with
| AI regenerating the article's title if you ask it to (and
| reporting the ask back to its servers to save others).
| globular-toast wrote:
| This starting to annoy me too. It's not just shitty channels.
| Even good channels are doing it because the analytics tells them
| to.
|
| General patterns:
|
| - "I <verb>ed the <superlative> thing in <place>"
|
| - <thing> vs <other thing>
|
| - Boobs/cleavage in thumbnail
|
| - Stupid face in thumbnail
|
| - Large amounts of money and/or other numbers
|
| I'm going to try the plugin.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| - You've been doing [obvious simple thing] wrong!
|
| - NEVER do this (thumbnail of doing something clearly
| correctly)
|
| - 12 things you NEED to know before you [buy/do something
| trivial]
| kuhaku22 wrote:
| Unfortunately, this approach cannot solve the clickbait problem,
| because it is baked into the videos themselves. If someone is
| using clickbait for their videos, the video itself is very likely
| to be low quality. The rise of clickbait has led to content
| creators doing things like exaggerating reactions,
| misrepresenting things for views, putting on overexcited voices,
| etc.
|
| It's just the same as how the creator's previous work,
| SponsorBlock, can only put a bandaid on things, because ad
| incentives lead to creators padding out their videos to 10
| minutes, causing the videos to be needlessly long and rambling.
| Not to mention videos where the entire content itself is an
| advertisement.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _the video itself is very likely to be low quality_
|
| This is incorrect, lots of educational channels use clickbait
| because otherwise they simply won't be as successful and would
| not be able to sustain themselves. Veritasium does a video on
| exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
| jxramos wrote:
| 3:01 they had to decrease the importance of subscribers
|
| That explains a lot of the experience recently, I was
| thinking about my old subscriptions and why they haven't made
| a poke in a while.
|
| I wonder can I make my browser redirect youtube.com to
| actually open https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions ?
| jxramos wrote:
| found a SO post on the subject here
| https://superuser.com/questions/351771/can-i-get-my-
| browser-..., apparently firefox has an extension to support
| this workflow.
|
| Looks like a straightforward browser extension
| implementation too for a content script to inject this meta
| tag for select urls
|
| https://www.w3docs.com/snippets/html/how-to-redirect-a-
| web-p...
| kruuuder wrote:
| > If someone is using clickbait for their videos, the video
| itself is very likely to be low quality.
|
| I disagree. There are many creators that produce content that I
| consider high quality that use clickbait thumbnails and titles.
| If they don't, they have a disadvantage because of the metrics
| the YouTube recommendation algorithm uses.
| gunshai wrote:
| Veritasium is a good example of this.
| kruuuder wrote:
| Yes, they also made a video about this specifically.
|
| Other examples are Rick Beato and LTT.
| ajayyy wrote:
| Here is a reply I made in the past to a similar complaint
|
| > It's not just the Linus Tech Tips or the Mr Beasts of the
| world doing algorithm optimized titles and thumbnails now. Even
| really great channels like Tom Scott, CGP Grey, and Kurzgesagt
| are falling for the trap now.
|
| > And I don't blame them! That's what's needed to survive on
| the platform these days. It's a race to the bottom.
|
| > DeArrow hopes to solve this. DeArrow puts everyone on a level
| playing field. There is no race to the bottom since no one is
| allowed to be algorithmically optimized. It pauses the race,
| and let's the true best videos rise to the top.
|
| While a niche extension of course can't remove all bad
| incentives, it still brings out the videos that actually are
| good themselves, ignoring the branding they were put in.
| CodeCompost wrote:
| Didn't work for me.
| godelski wrote:
| > It's no one's fault. It's a system that creates a race to the
| bottom.
|
| This is another way to say that it is a market of attention with
| individual actors acting (nearly) independently but with similar
| convergence.
|
| In a way, that makes it everyone that is a "buyer's" fault. Which
| unfortunately means this will not appeal to most people (doesn't
| mean it isn't useful). But we've converged to selecting click
| bait videos over non-clickbait.
|
| Cliques are a weird thing. People have them memorized and will
| roll their eyes at you if you repeat them, but this is the
| epitome of "judging a book by its cover." Repeat it all you want,
| but there has to be a hook. And anyone properly marketing their
| work intentionally wants you to judge the work by the cover.
|
| As a bigger issue, I think YouTube fails for "explorers" and
| concentrates too much on "exploiters." Referring to exploration
| vs exploitation strategies. ML models will typically do this.
| Especially because most people are "exploiters."
| atum47 wrote:
| I spend most of my time on youtube asking it to "not recommend
| this channel". But even youtube is decreasing in quality theses
| days, regarding recommendations. God forbid if I search for
| something, the next day 30% of my recommendations is about that
| topic.
| kolja005 wrote:
| I do this as well. My experience was that after doing it for
| long enough, none of the videos being recommended were of any
| interest to me. This made me realize that roughly 90% of my
| YouTube usage was viewing content I didn't actually care about.
| I concur with others that using browser extensions that get rid
| of recommendations and only show the search bar is the
| healthiest way to use YouTube, at least for me. I get some FOMO
| when doing this, but I've found that reiterating to myself that
| my natural inquisitiveness should be enough to still find
| interesting content on the platform when I want to seek it out.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Same thing if you click a YouTube link from a friend. I only
| open them in private windows now because otherwise it wrecks my
| recommendations, even if I tell YouTube to forget I watched it
| or to not recommend it etc.
| progbits wrote:
| Removing it from watch history will have effect on
| recommendations, but not immediately.
|
| But yeah for a random "guilty pleasure" garbage video I use
| incognito too, it's just faster.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I added a whole bunch of stuff to Watch Later last week
| because, obvs., I wanted to watch them later. Since then, those
| exact same videos have been front and centre every day in the
| "FOR YOU" list. I mean, well done, I guess, for thinking I
| might want to watch videos I've specifically indicated I want
| to watch?
| Tildey wrote:
| This infuriates me. I know the video exists, that's why it's
| on my watch later.
|
| It's like adding an item to your cart, and then having an ad
| for it at the top of every search result.
|
| Another thing I hate is if you watch a video from a playlist
| (or the "podcasts" tab on a channel), and go into your watch
| history to continue the video, you can't. It just shows a
| link to the entire playlist
| kbenson wrote:
| I think I've interpreted your comment three different ways
| _so far_ , and gotten additional insight each time. Well
| done. :)
| Bellend wrote:
| I am convinced that music.youtube.com upvotes and downvotes are
| irrelevant. I have been frequently using "Discover Mix" for 3
| years. It seems pretty simple, I like dance music with no
| lyrics. I have downvoted maybe a few thousand songs. I get the
| usual snackbar. "We will tune your recommendations".
|
| What really gets my goat is when I flip back to the browser to
| see something I have already previously downvoted since there
| is a "thumbs down" highlight. Whatever algorithm is being used,
| it doesn't have the ability to not play something that has
| previously been disliked.
|
| Why I find this amazing is because if you told me to write a
| "Discover Mix" algorithm, the first or last step of that is
| going to be the only thing I really know. Filter out the manual
| dislike clicks.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| music.youtube.com can't even play a playlist on shuffle
| correctly. I have a list with ~600 songs in it. It always
| just picks like 14 random ones and loops through them for
| ever.
| Nathan2055 wrote:
| It's bizarre, because I understand why YouTube recommends
| heavily disliked videos or just things that you personally
| are likely to dislike. Anger leads to massively increased
| engagement, as Zuckerberg famously discovered.
|
| But music? Most people don't listen or engage with music they
| dislike, and just skip to the next track. They can't even
| serve additional ads that way, at least as far as I know.
| Unless they're trying to inflate some made-up "total streams
| started" metric or something, it doesn't make any sense to
| avoid filtering out disliked tracks. It's purely a net
| negative for them.
| mxfh wrote:
| The could have added an option to block channels from
| recommendations ages ago, it's by design. Especially negligent
| with the amount of kids on the platform.
| Zetice wrote:
| Decreasing in quality relative to what? Is something you're
| using blowing YouTube out of the water with its
| recommendations?
| asciimov wrote:
| YouTube of a few years ago, back when discovery was more
| important than monetization.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| I think when people say that, which I have said before too,
| we usually refer to previous experience with YouTube. Same
| when I criticize Google's search quality for example. It's
| compared to how I found it before.
|
| Sure that's a bit difficult to quantify. Like for example,
| there was a period where discovering new channels that were
| right up my ally was something that happened once or twice a
| week. YouTube would just recommend a really interesting video
| from a channel I have never seen before, then I'd discover a
| lot of content that I really enjoy.
|
| Recently, I needed to cruise Reddit and other random sites
| for recommendation. Then maybe every few months I'd come
| across a channel that's 6 or 7 years old that's exactly the
| stuff I watch all the time, and some how I never saw it
| before despite searching for very similar terms before and
| finding nothing I was interested in.
|
| For example, I just discovered a channel called asianometry.
| He's been making videos that are exactly the kind of stuff I
| wanna listen to when I'm walking the dogs, but some how I
| came across it by a complete accident through Reddit.
| Zetice wrote:
| Ah.
|
| How do folks who compare YT with itself justify the
| explosive growth YT has experienced in that timeframe?
| Nathan2055 wrote:
| If there's an option on whatever YouTube interface you're
| using, try to select the "Related" section of the
| recommendations on a video.
|
| At least in my experience, that list seems to be running
| the old algorithm that actually pulls videos related to
| what you're currently watching, and doesn't utilize the
| _awful_ "personalized" algorithm that just recommends that
| same three videos over and over again.
|
| The worst part is that the existence of that feed in some
| versions of YouTube means that they're totally _capable_ of
| offering the classic 2014-era recommendations that people
| really liked across the board, they just...don't. For some
| reason.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| huh, interesting. Thanks. I never noticed it before, but
| at least on desktop I can see the option. It doesn't seem
| to be on iOS as far as I can tell.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Relative to Youtube 10 years ago. It's constant
| enshittification[1]
|
| [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-
| doctorow/
| atum47 wrote:
| Relative to itself. I truly discovered YouTube back in 2016.
| It recommend me Ben Eater building a computer on a breadboard
| for instance. Great stuff. Now a days it recommends good
| stuff once in a while, most part is irrelevant to my taste or
| the content i watch on that account (i have two, just so
| content don't get mixed up)
| unforgivenpasta wrote:
| I've done this to the point of getting less than a half page of
| recommendations, only autogenerated "Mix" playlists with music
| from 5+ years ago or almost exclusively videos from a channel i
| recently watched or subscribed to.
|
| I installed a channel blocker[1] extension to block channels
| from ever showing up.
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-
| clean...
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Do you want recommendation? I use Distraction Free YouTube
| which simply blocks the main page, leaving only the search bar.
| When a video is playing, it blocks out the sidebar as well. As
| a result, I don't see recommendations anymore at all, just my
| subscriptions.
| worrycue wrote:
| > God forbid if I search for a something, the next day 30% of
| my recommendations is about that topic.
|
| Wipe your search (and watch) history - assuming you meant
| YouTube Search (which is getting worse by the day but I
| digress); Google Search at least for me doesn't affect my
| YouTube recommendations at all.
| high_pathetic wrote:
| I've been using this
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-...
| extension for quite some time. Works wonderfully.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| I also use this (but for Firefox) and I always forget quite how
| obnoxious the "real" thumbnails are until I see YouTube on
| another device -- it's the same disorientation as seeing a
| browser without an ad-blocker, or an OEM Android or Windows.
|
| So I guess I'm also in the "why and how do other people put up
| with so much crap" camp :)
| nfriedly wrote:
| This is awesome! I expect there will be a ReVanced patch shortly.
| halfjoking wrote:
| Can it undo fake Anime eyes?
|
| https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nzlSBBVpbS4/maxresdefault.jpg
|
| I actually like 'Pitch Meeting' videos - but their thumbnails are
| the worst.
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(page generated 2023-06-22 23:01 UTC)