It's so hard to find new content and I'm getting sick of it
2d 16h ago by sh.itjust.works/u/StarvingMartist in youtube
I posted this on reddit but those fuckers removed it immediately
Never have I ever used a platform whose algorithm is so "sticky" that I've exhausted my entire roundup of channels and shows, and it keeps getting harder and harder to find new stuff. Big part of this is how YouTube doesn't have categories, especially on mobile.
And before anyone says it, yes they do have a category sidebar. Shopping, Music, Movies & TV, Hype, Live, Gaming, News, Sports, Courses, Fashion & Beauty, Podcasts, Playables. That's it. That's the whole list. You want to find new cooking channels? Good luck, there's no cooking category. History? Nope. Science? Nothing. Your only option is to go into "Gaming" and get served the same giants with 10 million subscribers you've already seen a hundred times.
Like, I just want to find a channel that makes videos about woodworking or obscure history or literally anything I haven't seen before, but YouTube keeps shoving the same 8 creators in my face because I watched one of their videos two years ago. The recommended page is just stuff I've already seen and stuff I actively don't want to see.
And the search is somehow even worse. You search for a topic trying to find something new and instead of relevant results it just shows you the same channels you always watch. Search "game reviews" and the top results aren't new review channels you've never heard of, it's the exact same guys already clogging your recommendations, plus videos you've already saved to watch later. You're not finding anything new, you're just being shown your own watch history back at you.
Other platforms figured this out. Spotify has genre pages, radio stations, discovery playlists. Even TikTok, for all its problems, will occasionally show you something you've never seen before. YouTube just assumes that if you liked something once you want to see it forever, and if you've never seen something before that's because you don't want to. There's no way out of it unless you already know exactly what you're looking for, which kind of defeats the whole point.
And yes I know you can delete your watch history. That's not a solution. That's a band-aid.
**I just want to find new topics** who else has this problem?
I’m not sure but some how I get shown a lot of feeds of people with less than 100 subs. I remember commenting on some guys video and him being so excited he was recommended on search.
Do you spend time with and interact with smaller channels as a significant portion of your time on youtube? Do you subscribe to them?
I’m almost invisible to the larger channels.
I usually find new channels by looking at the sidebar recommendations on subscribed channels.
I also only view my subscriptions page and turned off YouTube history.
When I run out of YouTube content I just stop watching. I am also old.
If I find a channel I like immediately subscribe , I'll be honest idk if commenting will much affect the algorithm. I have YouTube and podcasts for my background noise, I'm quickly depleting my choices on YouTube though, but I think that's ridiculous considering the amount of content, purely a fault of the algorithm
You might want to wipe your watched history to have it start fresh.
I actually talked about that in the last paragraph
I don't have any good advice, so I will just list some unorthodox ways to discover new videos:
- Use filmot.com. It allows you to search for channels by keyword among other things.
- Search for specific topics on YouTube by putting the search term into double quotes, sort by popularity, and scroll down. I found lots of hidden gems that way.
- YouTube lets you filter search results for playlists. Since many users put their favorite videos into playlists, this is a good way to find older, unusual, and unlisted videos.
- Search for
site:youtube.com OR site:youtu.beon your favorite subreddit - Search for youtube.com on Lemmy. You can filter by community and add more keywords.
- Install the FreshView browser addon to hide already watched videos on YouTube (probably does not work on mobile).
You know how on your recommendations page/feed, there are little category badges near the top you can click on to restrict what's being shown? If you click on the right angle bracket one enough times, there should be one that appears that says something like "New to You". For me it's often the very last badge in a clearly auto generated list of things I have recently watched.
I think that is the closest you will get to an existing feature that actually looks for new things, short of looking up random words in a private browsing session on a new device on a separate internet connection.
are these badges always present in your feed? I've noticed that they often just disappear, which makes me refresh the page a dozen times.
Hard to say; I don't usually use them.
Wait you don't want to see meme compilation shorts with a hot girl in the thumbnail and the comments filled with. "Pass the ball...", "Smash, Next" or the classic "Would, Raw".
Ok, so here's a short of 5 cat videos with a ranking on the side from 1-10.
Oh you don't like that too, maybe you'll love this fun video game fact with an AI voice over. (Spoiler: The fact is that an voice actor also voiced another character in another game)
Also No? Maybe a viral video clip with a guy at the bottom pretending to watch it and just nodding along.
Ah I get it, youre not interested in shorts... now I catch your drift.
Are you interested in finding out that YOU'VE BEEN DOING/USING X WRONG THE ENTIRE TIME. Here's the first guy to ever read the user manual for a spatula and now has to make a 30:41 long video about it.
Or maybe a video essay about a game/movie, or even better a retrospective (everybody knows retro is always better, nostalgia amarite).
Oh, you just want a review. How about this one. Here's a guy that for the first 5 minutes complains how bad and woke this new game is and then followed by an hour of cut down gameplay from an 6 hours stream of him playing it.
Or maybe...
I could literally go on forever.
Instead of deleting your watch history, check what shows up as recommended on the sidebar by private browsing, or browsing via Invidious. For better results, try searching for somewhat specific topics - like "roasted chicken recipe" instead of a generic "cooking". Sometimes going 2 recommended videos deep can yield some good finds.
1: Build up a good list of subscribed channels.
2: Set https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions as your default youtube bookmark.
That will show you only channels you're subscribed to, in chronological order with the most recent first. No recommendations, no algorithm.
(I'm sure they'll disable this if too many people start using it, but for now, that's how you make finding things on youtube bearable.)
And if your subscriptions page is turning up dry, you need to explore some and subscribe to more good channels ... or go crazy and explore Peertube instead or something.
I mean, this kinda makes OP's problem worse. I'm all for the subscription feed (>90% of my watch time is on channels I'm subbed to), but it'll only ever show you channels you've already watched. If I'm looking anywhere else like OP I don't want it to show those channels.
But I wanna find new channels 😭 I listen during work so I spend a lot of time and feel like I deplete my pool of content so easily! I would love to find new channels, ( for example my fiancee loves cinema sins and I've found I love it too but if I hadn't had that outside influence I know my algorithm would never have suggested it)
Maybe I'm being too picky??
It's just all crap, popular videos and channels invade your feed because they're popular. If you like obscure stuff you're gonna have to dig and subscribe, dig and subscribe and as mentioned above use your subscription page after.
Discovering leans too much on popular over your interests IMHO
If you like cinema sins, check out cinema wins (same idea but positive), also make liberal use of "Don't show me this shit channel again" available under the 3dots on each video. I swear my blocked channels list is prolly 3x the size of my subscribed and some days I can still exhaust my list.
You know what could be a fun experiment, a post where we can share some or all of our subscribe lists, using the oldest algorithm there is "Word of Mouth". I'd contribute to that
Maybe I’m being too picky??
If you were too picky you prolly would have kicked yt to the curb already :P
Too bad you can't set your home screen in the apps (mobile or set top also Nvidia shield or Google tv) to a url like that
I watch yt within the TV app more than anywhere else, and it is easy enough to go to subscribed but would be nice if you could set that to the default page