this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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suggestions are kinda the whole point of YouTube.
don't care if they're algorithm-based but they DO work (unlike for example example the twitter feed.) youtube suggests me some good shit and awesome new small channels all the time
i enjoy my YouTube subscription feed quite a lot. I've had watch history off forever and never really clicked on their suggestions.
the issue with the subscription feed is that
it makes it harder to find new channels to watch
it doesn't stop showing channels you don't care about anymore automatically like the algorithm feed
gives all channels the same value - i like some stuff more and some stuff less.
subscription feed prioritizes channels which release more videos (quantity over quality), which causes it to quickly fill up with clickbait and low-effort content unless you carefully watch your subscription list
(tbf, I'm not a privacy extremist, i don't care about first party tracking if it's actually used to provide a better service. "personalized" ads (and other third party stuff) can go fuck itself though)
Yeah. These are pretty much the reasons I've enabled watch history despite privacy concerns.
I'm not really in the market for new channels, but occasionally I'll sub to one when a channel I like refers one. Good channels tend to recommend good channels.
I just unsub.
I don't sub to enough channels to matter, just enough to have 1-2 hours of decent content every day, a bit more if there's a big event or something.
Unsubscribe fixes that.
If my channels were available elsewhere, even if that elsewhere charged a nominal fee, I'd leave YouTube. Imo, most of YouTube is trash, especially the top channels, so I'm really not interested in whatever their algorithm thinks I'll like. I like medium sized channels that produce high quality content make most of their money from merch and Patreon, not the clickbait nonsense channels that whore themselves out for views and sponsors.
Some favorites:
Each of those are generally high quality and have minimal nonsense (intros/outros, long sponsors, etc).
Then it should give me suggestions without watch history turned on. You can log out and go to the front page and it shows you trending by default, but you have to navigate there manually while logged in. YouTube never suggests new small channels to me, it suggests the same shit over and over, and usually there is a bunch of terrorism manosphere pipeline garbage because Google happens to serve that content to the local area and that's most of what they have on me for Demographics.
Another solution would be to just keep history for the session and delete it afterwards.