I suggest turning off recommendation if you dislike what they suggest
My YT landing page is completely blank and need to go "subscription" tab to see newly uploaded vids from the ones I subscribe to
It's quite nice not having to view all kinds of random stuff YT wants me to see
This doesn't help when searching. I'm looking for specific things as often as I'm clicking on recommendations.
What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck". Particularly the overwhelming hoard of AI slide-shows masquerading as reviews.
This isn't possible on Youtube right now. The automatic tools for detecting LLM-generated content have far too many false positives. And obviously no one is going to pay an army of people to curate the content. The best thing right now is to rely on the reputation of individual channels that you are personally familiar with.
Youtube's automatically applied label will be worse than useless unless they've made some remarkable breakthrough, which I doubt. They'd be better off just using creator-applied labels, and of course if they would label anything that Youtube itself contaminated with automatic translations or its ilk, that would be good too.
Maybe they could hand out lifetime bans to people who upload untagged AI music? Obviously that wouldn't eliminate the problem, but I could see it helping.
I would support a law that requires all AI generated content to be tagged, labeled, or watermarked as AI.
> This isn't possible on Youtube right now.
Well, theoretically you could build a service providing blocklists, and users could subscribe to such blocklists with a browser extension blocking accounts. Basically Sponsorblock or Blocktogether for Twitter, with individual users flagging accounts for slopaganda, content theft, rage / engagement bait and other issues.
Unfortunately, it's way, way too likely that you'll run into some sort of bot detection on Youtube's side and I've seen more than enough horror stories about people getting fucked over and getting their entire Google account perma-banned with no way of recovery.
There is https://aisloplist.com/ that works pretty much like you have described.
It's clear that YouTube doesn't want you to have much influence over your feed. You can't even ban specific channels from being shown to you, which would be the simplest thing to implement, and other knobs that previously existed were silently removed.
Since Google does nothing that isn't based on metrics, we can deduce that they have data to show that giving people settings to focus the recommendations on what they want reduces total watch time. We'll only get an AI filter if it turns out that AI slop offends people so much that they disengage with YouTube altogether, which outside of HN and similar bubbles, I don't yet see happening.
> You can't even ban specific channels from being shown to you
Yes, you can. Click the video's 3-dot menu > Don't recommend channel. Though I have noticed that this only blocks them from showing up in the feed, not in the recommendations sidebar. I also have to run uBlock to hide shorts, already-watched videos, subscriber-only stuff...ain't saying the YT experience is good, not by any stretch of the imagination.
> What's needed is a global "Hide AI Dreck".
As a German, I couldn't think of a more appropriate usage of the word "Dreck".
It's a bit of a shame, given the brilliance of the the word "dreck", that we've somehow ended up with "slop."
Yeah, just let me hide all the AI content. Far too often I stumble onto something that looks interesting, and halfway through I realise it's not really saying anything. It's just AI drivel designed to capture my attention and hold it for a while.
When I used to use YT, i used https://untrap.app/, it was a great improvement.
If you think you can't quit youtube, I used to think that way, and then i did it by deleting my account and using libredirect for invidious. my usage went to just a few minutes or 0 per day.
I'm not particularly religious but I did give up Twitter for lent as a test of my self control.
I highly recommend everyone occasionally do this with social media as it was somewhat eyeopening how much better I felt overall. This was mostly due to not being exposed to the doom scrolling you can eventually get pulled into (despite efforts not to).
I did miss feeling like I was "plugged in" to the stream of news/memes etc though.
YMMV but def recommend.
A nicer way that also works on mobile is turning the watch history off. C
> If you think you can't quit youtube
Just stop paying for Pro. I made it less than one day with the ads.
Why don't you have an adblocker for your whole browser?
I do. I don’t have a browser for my television, though.
Makes sense. I wont name the ad-free modded youtube apps for android tv that take out ads.
I have quit most other social media, but yt is still there. I give this a try.
Good luck!
Or just use Channel Surfer.
https://channelsurfer.tv
I suggest stopping any and all interaction w/ the algorithm. Get a library card and be intentional about your media consumption choices.
It's a nice thought but it ignores that there is so much interesting, informative media on youtube that just does not exist anywhere else, at all.
I've already got more interesting, informative books on my to-read list than I'm going to have time to finish in my lifetime, so I think I'll be fine without youtube.
This is exactly how I consume YouTube as well. I do keep the side recommendations on since they mostly contain music or videos I've already watched, which I don't mind.
I'm now experimenting with hiding thumbnails too, and honestly I've been liking it a lot. It's a very curious feeling how my eyes can no longer latch on to something visually appealing, and instead try to look for information in channel names.
I use Unhooked on desktop and UnTrap on iOS for this. Both work flawlessly, and reduced my YouTube usage to almost zero.
Their recommendation engine has surfaced awesome obscure content I would have never found otherwise so I value it.
Stuff like random recorded conference talks with 3 views. A super enthusiast in Latvia.
It does recommend crap sometimes but on balance I like it.
I love how passive aggressive the page becomes: "You turned off recommendations...we won't show you anything else on here either!"
It's somewhat deceiving practice IMO although it could simply be my insecurity.
Along with the empty page, it says "Your watch history is off" in bold then says "... change your setting ... to get the latest video tailored to you"
It sounds as if I'm missing out on latest videos which, technically true, but I wonder if that wording is necessary. It could've just said "Update the settings here to get recommendations". But of course for-profit companies need to make profit :)
Yeah exactly, they could have made their service useful by showing your subscriptions instead. Yet, they decided to enshittify for people who want choices.
Just a small reminder that we aren't wanted ;)
Same for me. Godsend. It also switches off showing me a follow up "short" after I watch the one I want to watch.
Likewise. The page is youtube.com and then just /feed/ without anything else there. That's the blank page, thank goodness they've not ruined that yet :)
This ^