Ask HN: Why is YouTube's recommendation system so bad?

That's why I started Tech Talks Weekly https://www.techtalksweekly.io/

YouTube's algorithm is built to maximize engagement for a broad audience. Especially shorts with animated "jumping" captions and videos that zoom in and out every three seconds providing no useful content most of the time.

I found it really frustrating that almost every tech conference talk ends up on YouTube, yet it's surprisingly hard to discover the ones I'd find interesting.

So I wrote a script that fetches all the talks from the channels I follow each week, groups them by conference, and sorts them by view count. That way, I spend about five minutes a week and quickly find the really good ones.

In 2024, I turned it into a newsletter. I use the exact same script and I just copy and paste the results into Substack. It turns out many people are facing the same problem because it grew to over 8,400 subscribers as of today.

Because for every one person that finds the recommendation system bad there must be ten others that find it so spot on that they spend 8 hours watching and clicking. It's the only explanation that makes sense.

Because google decided to prioritise profit above all, so all their services were made to keep you engaged - more searching, more clicking, more viewing, more time wasting....by giving you bad results, forcing you to work for it and stay on their platforms.

Having your feed full of a thing you've recently watched at least makes sense.

What boggles my mind is videos that have been sitting in my Recommended for a few months now - if I haven't clicked it the first 45 times, I probably won't click it the 46th.

This is how people fall down YouTube rabbit holes for hours. This is by design.

YouTube in 2010 had really cool recommendations. Now it’s just the same old stuff off your watchlist to get you to click ads

I turned off my watch history. Recommendations keep you there for hours.

YouTube's recommendation system is great... for children.

I find that it works much better for music on music.youtube.com

Their income depends on the users clicking on ads.

it used to be a ton better but its just optimized now so we are more likely to click on things we see rather than things that are interesting or relevant. they want us to click so we see the ads lol.