Ask HN: Why is YouTube's recommendation system so bad? I watch one Steve jobs video all year, happens to be last week. I don't need 30% of recommendations to be related to Steve Jobs from here on out. |
Ask HN: Why is YouTube's recommendation system so bad? I watch one Steve jobs video all year, happens to be last week. I don't need 30% of recommendations to be related to Steve Jobs from here on out. |
YouTube's algorithm is built to maximize engagement for a broad audience. Especially shorts with animated "jumping" captions and videos that zoom in and out every three seconds providing no useful content most of the time.
I found it really frustrating that almost every tech conference talk ends up on YouTube, yet it's surprisingly hard to discover the ones I'd find interesting.
So I wrote a script that fetches all the talks from the channels I follow each week, groups them by conference, and sorts them by view count. That way, I spend about five minutes a week and quickly find the really good ones.
In 2024, I turned it into a newsletter. I use the exact same script and I just copy and paste the results into Substack. It turns out many people are facing the same problem because it grew to over 8,400 subscribers as of today.
What boggles my mind is videos that have been sitting in my Recommended for a few months now - if I haven't clicked it the first 45 times, I probably won't click it the 46th.