I'm mainly interested in computer science, engineering and professional race driving.
What I get recommended are videos about the second world war and car crash compilations. Every three to four months a video that is actually interesting shows up.
And the recommendations when watching a video is even worse. I'm watching video about voting systems and all the recommendations are car crash compilations.
I must have been sorted into a very stupid pool of viewers.
If you tie it to a Google account you can tune them by watching videos on topics you are interested in, as well as flagging videos & channels with "Not Interested". Their algorithms are definitely eager to find you a flood of content you'll enjoy. The hard part is seeding it with high quality channels.
IMO it's too eager. I watch 1 video of dashcam crashes, and my recommendations get polluted with them. Same with 1 video of tennis. The algorithm seems designed to keep eyeballs in the app. This lead me to switch to NewPipe on Android, where the "front page" of the app is customizable, so I just leave it to "most popular videos in $country", they all happen to be music videos and not have click-baity titles.
My best guess is it's designed to recommend the higher ad paying videos, I can only imagine dash cam videos are extremely monetized. I would wager it's not about keeping you watching, but keeping you profitable, it's not their fault the people uploading exploit what people will watch for hours, just their benefit.
I think this is a recent change (over the past couple of years?) in their algorithm.
Every now and then I will watch a video which will cause my recommendations to be flooded with nothing but stuff like that video, and videos from series that I have been watching regularly for years get buried.
It's recommendations aren't bad per se once it's gotten to know you, but at least for me it doesn't provide much in the way of discovery of new content: it's mostly digging up related material from the archives of people I already follow or are aware of, or short clips/compilations.
90% of the time they are spot on. But watch a few historically accurate videos on WWII and it'll start recommending videos from Holocaust deniers. Or watch some moon landing documentaries and you'll start getting videos peddling moon landing conspiracies. It's infuriating.
YouTube search prioritises video content, not the creator - for most of my searches I couldn't give a wotsit about who it was that made the video, just what it contains.
I was wondering what features will exactly make it the proper YouTube competitor, and I had the same feeling about it being more or less extended stories.
On the other hand, YouTube seems to be set on making every other platform more attractive at the moment, so let's see how it plays out.
