zlacker

Turns out, even before you click on "OK" to start watching, it's doing it in the background - my watch history is now full of hours of this junk :(

>>yalema+(OP)
You can click X on them and quickly remove them. If there's truly way too many (you left it open for hours), you can go to your Google's Activity page, filter youtube and delete everything from today with a button.

>>ehsank+v
https://www.youtube.com/feed/history

Good idea to do a full reset periodically anyways to reset your recommendations.

>>hombre+U2
Is it?

When I go to YouTube on a fresh device without being logged in, it's a pile of steaming clickbait and pop-internet-culture garbage. On my account, by contrast, YouTube is full of mostly great recommendations of high-quality content and I can pretty much always find several new and interesting things to watch should I feel like it.

(I watch stuff like Kurzgesagt, Smarter every day, AvE, Rick Beato, Today I found out, Wisecrack, Wendover Productions, Practical Engineering, Vox, Crash Course, SciShow... that's just from browsing my current recommendations. I would guess none of that shows up for fresh accounts)

>>gregma+cd
Clean it of trash and you will receive less trash recommendations. Fully cleaning isn't effective as the average video quality is lower than most HN public would like to watch. Having mostly good videos you like makes it recommend more similar content to you.

>>gregma+cd
The problem I have is that my recommendations are usually full of stuff I'm already subscribed to. Discovering new things is really hard and usually just happens by reading about it elsewhere.

>>ehsank+v
Clicking X on them automatically adds your name and reference to the video into a bucket labelled "investigate further" :-)

>>ignalo+xg
It's not just average video quality, it's that (as far as anyone can tell), the algorithm optimizes for expected value of total watch time, as opposed to optimizing for just the likelihood of watching the next video. Basically, the recommendations behave as though they "hope" that you will go down a conspiracy or outrage rabbit hole and binge 12 hours of garbage.

>>0xcde4+KK
For me it correctly "hopes" I'll go down science rabbit holes, which I do. I'm similar to the person above, I watch a lot of educational content, and I also get suggested great content.

Right now I see the follow up to the guy who build his own VGA card, video of someone building a camera that can see wifi, and a PBS video on the "quantum internet". All great suggestions.