I'm going to lose my mind if I keep getting recommended dozens of videos that are too similar to ones that caught my interest.
I don't understand how this is a problem on a massively popular content delivery and monetization platform. Why is it that my feed is absolutely stuffed full of samey videos if I watch ONE that I had a slight passing interest in? I want to watch DIFFERENT videos, not the SAME videos over and over with minor differences!!! It's just absolutely blowing my mind, I'm not some AI who only watches videos about one game that I may or may not want to play or have any kind of long term interest in. They just stay stuck in my feed for WEEKS unless I dislike each one (dozens of videos) and force Youtube to stop recommending me those channels (dozens of channels). Even then, it keeps showing me them.
***It's like they don't want me to watch videos that make them and their content creators money.***
I have been watching this happen for YEARS. Youtube is literally shooting itself in the foot with poor UI, search, and suggestion algorithms, and keep doubling down on making it worse and worse.
An example, I watched a few mandelbrot zoom videos a few weeks ago, and every time I opened Youtube since then my front page has had 2-3 of them. Combine this with a dozen other videos and topics I briefly looked up or clicked on by curiosity, and my feed is entirely filled with videos I have ABSOLUTELY no interest in watching. I only want to watch a few of each of these categories a year, at most! I don't get how Youtube messes this up **SO** bad!
I'm tired of the inane repetition! I'm going to go crazy, if I haven't already! I HAVE to speak out about this, because it's so *comically bad*. I would GREATLY prefer to have the Youtube frontend from a decade ago. I'd rather be limited to seeing only popular & recent & totally random videos on the front page than this AI/algorithmically-driven garbage chute.
To make this not SIMPLY a rant, I will list a few small things that would make Youtube IMMENSELY more usable from a user's perspective.
- Let us search through all the categories, not just click on recommended categories. Yes, I mean **ALL** categories. I can't find anything new if you only recommend me categories of videos that I'm already being recommended on the same page, because I've already searched or watched something similar. It's circular; it's nearly pointless. As a user, I have almost zero control over what categories are visible to me, aside from manually editing an extremely long watch history. What I'm picturing is a WEB of categories, a DIRECTORY - if you look up Nuclear Reactors, you should have links to related categories like you would on a Wikipedia page, such as Nuclear Fusion, but also tangentially related concepts. The AI happily lumps in Minecraft mods with technical engineering videos, and that's rarely useful. Being able to subtract subcategories from a search would be an awesome addition. - "Explore" doesn't give me any satisfying degree of control. It takes me at least half an hour to find anything of note; this section of the website thus goes largely unused by me. "Trending" is an extremely limited and narrow form of "popular" + "recently uploaded", and can't really fulfill the job of either. I can't tell you how much I would prefer to just have a browse/search page with some filters. Which brings me to... - Filtering & searching. How do I find 720p, 1080p, 1440p, and 4k content, aside from typing it into the search field and hoping for the best? How do I search for music videos, by genre? How do I find a video that had "Cows" in the title and I remember was about 6 minutes long? The answer is I can't seem to do any of these things, because the existing filters are needlessly narrow. "Duration" is by far the most needlessly oversimplified. How could it possibly hurt to provide the option to input a range of times? Maybe I only want to watch hour+ playlists and documentaries, but there's seemingly no way to accomplish this. The platform is SEVERELY lacking in search tools, meaning Youtube's greatest strength, hosting thousands of terabytes of videos, is largely non-browseable and thus non-useful. (If there ARE ways to add filters, there NEEDS to be usage instructions SOMEWHERE on the website! I haven't found any!) - Over-reliance on algorithms and AI - bring in an option of simplicity. I feel like this should be self-explanatory, but I'll explain anyways. I'm not a robot. You can't assume that just because I watch one video about astronomy that I suddenly want to watch dozens of videos about astronomy, and want to watch them for weeks on end. A simple user-adjustable preference/weight SLIDER for each category I'm (involuntarily) subscribed to would make a WORLD of difference. Even better, I would like to choose the categories myself!
TL;DR - Youtube is failing to be a platform that is enjoyable to use. It's no longer a tool with the usefulness it once had. If they made just a few key improvements, people would have a much easier time finding the content they enjoy, and thus content creators would get more views, and thus Youtube would make more money. The interface is simply highly inefficient as it is now. ***I AM LITERALLY AFRAID OF WATCHING VIDEOS WHILE SIGNED IN FOR FEAR OF THEM BEING STUCK IN MY FEED FOR MONTHS***. It's one of the worst methods of content delivery I have ever seen in my entire life, and I REALLY hope someone gets a clue and pushes to make Youtube into something that benefits humanity instead of sucking our time away and causing frustration. We came here to watch videos. Help us find and watch the videos we want and need to see. That's the premise.