Currently in the US elections are featured in my YouTube feed, and not factual content but rage inducing.
How can I filter that?
-
Watch videos you want to see
-
Click the dots > Not Interested in videos you don’t
-
Enjoy your tailored feed with only stuff you want to see!
My YouTube algorithm is fantastic. I never see politics because if I want to watch a political video, I open it in a private window
I also find that marking stuff with “not interested” works pretty well. Some far right bullshit pops up occasionally but it’s quickly dealt with.
Yeah, with a small amount of effort you can really make your YouTube feed work for you. I have a main account full of engineering, computers, and misc entertainment (sketch comedy channels + Atrioc) and a separate one for my work laptop that’s just music. Both feeds are pretty fantastic but the recommendations on latter is especially good - I’ve found a ton of new artists including some with only a few hundred followers (shout out to folk singer Alexander Guy!)
i forgot about disliking videos and channels! That might fix my problem right away. THank you
It might take some time but if you don’t want to start fresh with a new account, mark everything you don’t want as Not Interested as they pop up until your feed is clean! It’s worth the effort imo
Also, you can tell YT to never recommend a channel. It’s permanent (can’t undo) but well worth the use.
I think if you sub then unsub it resets that block if you do it by mistake
In addition, if you see a video like this, I prefer to select “don’t recommend channel”
Also i find that removing stuff you want to avoid from your watch history helps
I open it in a private window
I’ll try that on my AppleTV. Wait…
Can’t help ya there. Can you at least dislike a video on the AppleTV app?
Yeah I think I can, but I find that unfair to the content creator who may have otherwise created a good video. What I may end up doing is turning off video history, but sometimes it’s useful to easily pull up a video I’ve seen recently.
Wouldn’t that just give you the default slop on the homepage?
I wouldn’t feel bad about disliking a video unless it has like 50 views. It’s just a blip in the sea of reactions
It would show my subscriptions as well.
-
Turn off all history tracking for youtube (disables all recommendations). Rely solely on your subscriptions
This is the only way. I’ve been doing it for years, in part because I absolutely hate catered content based on what I’ve viewed/read. Doing so only increases silos. At least with reddit (RIP)/Lemmy you pick from a potpourri of silos that are don’t change depending on what I’ve read.
I have the exact opposite advice lol
Edit: privacy aside, it does work. YT shows rage inducing content because it wants engagement more than anything. My algorithm is so trained now that it can show me stuff I’ll actually enjoy and want to engage with and therefore it doesn’t bother showing me that crap
Exactly! There should be a browser extension for training YouTube’s algorithm and even other ones. I’ve been very comitted to never feeding that beast after midnight, so I thoroughly enjoy content thatd positive as much as I want.
I think that would give you the worst content on YouTube in your feed…
It literally turns off that feed you’re talking about?
“How do I get rid of political recommendations filling my feed”
At the extreme end - turn the feed off entirely. Then you dont get a homepage filled with political recommendations.
What am I misunderstanding?
Sorry, I thought turning off the history tracking lead to YouTube giving you a homepage full of the top trading videos? Like if you don’t log in with an account?
Hence why I included a screenshot of what my homepage shows. Is that not loading for you? There are problems with different lemmy clients not showing images.
imgur link to the same image https://imgur.com/a/NG4ITcx
Yeah I didn’t realize that’s what your homepage would just be permanently. I thought it was showing a message you get after turning off the tracking, based on the context. I now remember hearing about that changing recently, but it’s definitely not the way it used to work.
This is a more recent change.
If you turn off history you get nothing these days. Or at least that is what I get with firefox and the default ublock. Or maybe google slows loading down and I just don’t wait long enough for them to pobulate the homepage.
It doesn’t matter as I access youtube by subscriptions only. I don’t have time to watch all the videos of interest there, much less scroll for something random.
YT wants to keep you watching YT, so:
- stop watching rage bait videos
- watch only videos you want on your feed
- thumbs up videos you want more of
- “not interested” videos you dont want
- hide users that post rage bait material
- 66 😈
Hide no longer works. The only thing it does is stop them from showing up in the comments of videos you post.
I kept seeing a commenter in a genre of video I watch, and wanted to get rid of them, but there is no way to block or hide a user except to remove them from the comments on your channel.
Stop clicking on them. YT shows it to you because it has seen you open them and watch a chunk of the video. The algorithm is dumb and can’t tell whether you watch because you like it or hate watch them. It just knows you make engagement and revenue whenever it shows you that, so it does it more.
This isn’t true. I’m constantly getting recommended all kinds of crazy right wing video nonsense and I have never clicked on a single one nor has the only other person in my house. They are picking up on something else or just pushing those videos in general.
Some seemingly-innocuous channels just happen to appeal to fascists and become arbitrary entrances to the right wing YT pipeline.
I’ve noticed Big Think, Sabine Hossenfelder, lots of economics videos, and lots of less-reputable science channels tend to spur a rash of neocon content.
This so much. Years ago I’ve had it push Moon landing denial videos in my recommendations, even though I’ve never watched videos on conspiracies or anything of the sort at the time. The closest I got were pop-sci channels such as Vsauce, Numberphile… It’s just trying to hook you onto the garbage content and garbage ideas because they have good and loyal viewership.
deleted by creator
Yeah… Somebody is clicking them
When a video pops up that you find upsetting or irrelevant, click on the “Not interested” option. You’ll have the chance to provide feedback on why you don’t like the video. This helps YouTube understand your preferences better and refine future suggestions.
And you can also block entire channels. Some channels are better blocked.
To keep YT under control: Firefox is my web browser, with the uBlock Origin extension installed. So, all Shorts/Suggestions, ‘News’ and ‘Related content’ are now automatically removed from YT '(easy to achieve with uBlock Origin when using Firefox).
😍🥰 Firefox + uBlockOrigin
And whenever Google/YT suggests me some turd content, I dislike it and ask it to not suggest the channel/content anymore.
In the end, my feed is mostly made of stuff I enjoy watching, with so little noise that it can not be considered an issue.
Keep ignoring the videos and choosing “don’t recommend this channel”, eventually they will diminish.
My shorts feed cleaned up eventually like this.
Safest way is to block chanels. It’s a bit of a constant work, but at least I avoid falling twice for the same idiot.
Stay within your sub box. If you want to watch recommended, stay within the video you are watching right now.
This is my personal advice as well. I completely turned off my watch history thus making YouTube replace my home page with a search bar. Whenever I want to watch videos i just go to my subscriptions
I watch gaming and science stuff and my feed is filled with gaming and science stuff.
Personally I prefer not to be fed by the algorithm. I bookmarked ‘subscriptions’, check for new ones and if there aren’t any I go do something else.
Use a different YouTube client. Free tube for the desktop, new pipe for Android.
That way you control your feed completely and your recommendations. You don’t get to see the rage algorithmic baiting
Use Newpipe.
On a video in a video list page there should be a “…” menu next to the title. It has options for “hiding” the video and “don’t recommend channel”. I can’t comment on how effective those are, but they might give the algorithm some hints about what you want to watch.
In addition, if you have stuff on your watch history that you don’t want to see more of, you can go to https://www.youtube.com/feed/history and remove them. Allegedly that stops them being used to decide what videos are recommended.
this is radical suggestion, but maybe dont use youtube? its working for me.
I like the idea. Can you elaborate, please? Did you stop, or did you never start? Do you use something else instead? How do you wind down or get a quick laugh?
so, i just stopped going directly to youtube and switched to doomscrolling a meme-excessive feed [for humor]. youtube still pops up in fediverse feeds, and i will watch some things from there, but i’m not going directly to the domain.
ive never really appreciated video on the web. i prefer to stream locally. the few youtube videos i want (usually obscure vhs copies of old shit), i have my kid download into out media center.
