Normally, I use YouTube very little (watch a couple videos a month). However, I’ve been in bed with an injury for some time now, which has led me to watch quite a bit of YouTube. The thing is, I subscribe to a small handfull of channels that I enjoy content from, but after a relatively short time I had watched pretty much all the new content from those channels.
Now, I would expect that the YouTube algorithm, which is supposedly designed by competent people to get me to stick around, would be able to suggest some decent content to me based on my subscriptions. However, the past week, I’ve opened YouTube only to find the same old videos being suggested over and over. Even worse: Whenever there’s something interesting-looking from a channel I don’t recognise, it always turns out to be some shitty AI voice over some generic animations or footage.
I know for a fact that thousands of hours of content are created on YouTube daily, but it genuinely feels like there are maybe five creators out there that are making anything worth watching. It’s either that, or the YouTube algorithm is just complete crap at suggesting creators that are in any way similar to what I’m already subscribing to.
What’s going on here? Why does it seem like there’s no real content out there?
As a “funny” side note: What’s with the “aggressively American” AI narrator-voice? I’ve heard it before, but thought it was some dude until I realised it’s the same voice in a bunch of unrelated videos. It reminds me of the Discovery-channel “action-narrator”-voice from back in the day, but now it’s showing up in all kinds of crap videos.
On desktop there’s a vertical triple dot button under videos that allows you to tell the algorithm that you’re not interested in that video or the entire channel. I assume there’s something similar on mobile. That somewhat reduces suggestions like the unwanted video in future.
When you refresh, you’ll see a different page of videos. If you do this to enough videos, you might start getting recommended videos you’ve already watched. You can give that as a reason for not being interested, so you can make those go away as well.
Speaking of which, you can also remove videos from your Watch History to prevent the algorithm from using those as examples. That’s often another way to effectively banish a channel where you only watched the one video.
Be aware that (as far as I know) the only way to undo directly telling YouTube you’re not interested in a channel is to completely erase your Watch History. Maybe finding and watching a few videos of theirs might also work, but I haven’t yet found the need to put that to the test.