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Is YouTube's business model imploding in slow motion?
They've been pushing more inane bullshit in recommended with zero prompting, and the algorithm just seems totally broken from too many manual overrides at this point. I don't see video ads thanks to Vanced, but the image ads are getting increasingly schizo or just plain weird. Who is actually paying for them any more?
Their personalization obviously isn't working too well either, given all my ads for menopause meds and Israeli flag lapel pins. Do they think I'm a republican congressman with a Bulwark subscription or something?
The just made the utterly incomprehensible change such that when you go to an individual channel's 'video' section, you can ONLY sort by "recently uploaded" or "popular."
There is now no way to do an easy sort by upload date to find someone's oldest videos.
Assuming charitably there was a rational reason for this, I would guess youtube makes more money when a video being watched is new and hot, and/or it is easier on the server to fetch a video that has been watched millions of time or was recently uploaded than to dredge a 5-10 year old video that got relatively few views up from the archives.
But its just a consistent trend of degrading user experience and flexibility in favor of forcing algo-curated content down your throat. With the common problem of overfitting wherein watching 1-2 videos on a certain topic or by a certain creator causes the site to serve you up literal dozens more from said user or on said topic, even interjecting it into search results for other topics.
I thumbs down almost all videos I watch by habit now in order to avoid the algo getting any uppity ideas about what it feels like I should be watching.
What's the benefit to viewing YouTube videos logged in? I don't use YouTube a lot, but when I do, I always use a clean browser session. Modern browsers make this easy with private/incognito mode.
One big advantage is the thing most posts in the thread have been complaining about: The Algorithm (TM)
I'm going to go against the consensus here and say that I actually quite like the suggested videos page. The results are far from perfect but if a video appears on my homepage there's a better-than-even chance that it will be relevant to my interests, vs a roughly 0% chance for videos on the front page in incognito mode. And I don't think the results have got noticeably worse in recent months/years.
Logging in also gives you access to other features, including the subscriptions feed that shows you new videos from channels you've subscribed to, the ability to make comments (yes, youtube comments as a whole are trash, but there are still certain pockets that have value), and being able to give upvotes that at the margin will encourage creators to make more of the sort of content you enjoy.
Interesting. That makes sense.
BTW, YouTube does support RSS. The URL looks something like
https://youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=...where the channel_id is a long string of letters and numbers.More options
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Suggested videos still works, but it's somewhat worse than it was a decade/half a decade ago. Half of the suggested videos are just generic popular ones that are somewhat genre relevant - I'll try to explore some small niche and half the videos will be 5k of kinda-what-i-want and half will be 1M view videos in the nearest popular niche, but you can just ignore that.
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