Anyone have any idea what’s going on here? Since this morning, every time I go to the Youtube homepage on Chrome on my desktop, I’m confronted with something like this. Direct links to other bits of Youtube work fine, and so does Chrome on my laptop. All relevant extensions are disabled (and are active on my laptop anyway). I’ve cleared cookies and cache to no avail.
That happened to me the other night when making my way to a Tom stream, I fixed it by loading a video then resetting the video size to miniplayer, **then the home screen in the background went back normal, ** then I reset the video to default view, and then closed the video. The homescreen was normal again.
I hope that made sense. D:
Sadly that does not work for me.
It’s very odd. If I pull out the hamburger menu, all the sub options work fine, except for Home, which doesn’t produce the above result, but kind of stalls out having only loaded Recommended.
I have had YouTube weirdness the past few months (I’m also using Chrome), but not like yours. Mine was that certain videos (apparently chosen at random) would show nothing but either a black frame or colored static while the audio played normally. It was maddening. I tried various fixes, but nothing worked.
Then suddenly, a few days later, everything was fine again.
That happened to me a while back. Disabling my ad blocker fixed it.
Edit: meant as a response to Giles.
I’ll keep that in mind, but things started magically working fine again in a few days without having to do anything. I’m using Ublock Origin, and never disabled it, and still have it enabled, and YouTube is working again now, so I’m thinking that in my case anyway, it was YouTube doing something on their end that caused my problem.
Thanks though. If it ever happens again, I’ll give your suggestion a try to see if it helps.
Seems to have fixed itself now.
More Youtube weirdness: what the hell is up with the way search results are displayed these days? I search for a board game and I get 12 relevant results, then a divider and three “Related to your search” results that are for completely different games, then two more results that are for the right game, then a divider, then three “For you” results about one, different game, then a divder, then a bunch of results that are mostly about the game I was looking for. Just give me relevant results, dammit. If you want to show me related crap put it in a sidebar or something.
Ugh, yes. Look, YT, your algorithm helped spawn a new generation of crypto-fascists; give it a rest for a few years with the suggestions, okay?
That isn’t anything new though is it? YouTubes search and recommendations have always been extremely annoying and horrible.
Annoying and horrible, yes, but I think this deliberate interspersing of genuine and fake results is relatively new.
Couple random questions:
I know I’m creeping myself into old man who doesn’t understand remote controls territory every passing year, but a couple of quickies:
- How do I find the “Not Recommended” button anymore? Supposedly you click the 3 dots for a dropdown menu, but while the menu appears I have no option to Not Recommend anything. I’ve trolled the web for this information for some while and it’s just the same information being recycled.
- Why are so many videos being liked automatically by my viewing history? I’m pretty sure at least something like 90% of my likes are ‘false’ likes. I look through my history and see something like 600+ liked videos; I’m so social-media averse that I’ve probably intentionally only liked something around 50 videos in my entire life.
-
What browser and could an extension be blocking it? I have a line that divides the pop-up you are showing, and below that, I have 3 more options, including don’t recommend channel. That is on Mac Safari.
-
A quick look at my like history and it’s spot on. Everything is stuff I have liked.
How are you able to filter on videos you’ve liked? I only see the videos I’ve watched. Is this some sort of add-in you have installed? Could it be the culprit? EDIT: Oh, I see the category for “liked videos” - I will say these all look correct to me. I’m using Edge, what browser are you using?
When I click the three dots I see this:
But note that when you are looking at a banner style list of videos that are in a theme (like when I’m given a row of COVID-19 update related videos) those are not front/home page videos but you can close that entire row and hide it if you aren’t interested. Seeing as the image you shared is all camera related is this maybe a row of camera related videos similar to when I get something on COVID updates?
I’m not aware of any extensions though I’ll check. That screenshot was also with MacOS Safari.
Maybe I’m hitting like accidentally when watching / listening to stuff on my phone. If so the hit rate is pretty high. But i remember seeing liked videos I explicitly did not intentionally like. I feel pretty confident that not every false like is a misclick but I’m willing to entertain the thought.
Ok that’s helpful. I tried looking for Not Recommended on the iPhone app and I get it as an option only when I’m on the main page. When I get home I’ll try it on the browser.
I have had problems with my ad blocker blocking things I don’t want it to block. Although in this case, I would think it would block the whole menu, not just half of it.
Just discovered something weird clicking through to Bridger’s channel. For whatever reason, he has a bunch of recorded live streams are in the “Live” tab that do not show up in the “Videos” tab. Is this common? Have I missed a bunch of streams on different channel because of this?
Got fed up with this and searched for a solution, turns out this works great:
That does seem a lot better. I still get totally unrelated “Previously Watched” videos in the middle of my searches, but at least it’s removed those “Related” bullshit results.
Now if there was only a way to do that for their mobile app…