Speaking of YouTube, my weird recommendations completely disappeared a month or two ago. No more music I would never listen to or teenager influencer type recommendations. I guess the algorithm changed.
I have recently found videos by two different “doctors”, as in they have Dr in their name and are doing videos on diet, metabolism, etc. I notice another doctor doing videos actually had a flag on his videos from YT saying he was a real doctor, the others did not. I looked them up, they are chiropractors. That is extremely misleading. One of them was just saying generic stuff that was pretty easy to find in a WebMD page, but the other was referring to medical studies. There were videos from other people claiming to be doctors say he took what he read in the studies out of context and was wrong. Both of these guys have millions of views.
I am not anti-chiropractor by any means, but that left a bad taste in my mouth. Although, I supposed they aren’t doing anything wrong, but it is misleading.
I don’t know if this is the right place for this, but Youtube has been driving me nuts for about the last week or so - every time I fire up a video, a couple minutes in the video quality gets downshifted to 480p. If I notice it I just change it back to 1080p or whatever, but if I’m looking away or have it going in the background sometimes it takes a while when I look back going, what the hell, is my vision getting even worse? Is anyone else seeing this?
I’ve always had a ton of trouble with YouTube changing to lower quality for no reasons. I finally found a Chrome Extension called Enhancer for YouTube that was effective in keeping the resolution quality where I want it.
I guess I figured they dropped res when they got busy, because when it used to happen to me, I’d put it back up to 1440p and it would quickly freeze until I dropped it back down.
This was a few months ago though. The only thing I’ve noticed lately is that videos will start at 360p or 480p, and when I raise them back to 1440, they now stay there (or whatever the highest res is that each video allows). Normally when this happens, I have to adjust it every time I start a new video, and then eventually it will just obey my pre-set of highest res possible.
I haven’t noticed it a whole lot lately, but it still does happen, and yes it is extremely annoying having to go in and check your settings when you start every video. I’ll have to check out @Brad_Grenz 's link there if it keeps happening.
Yeah that seems to be working pretty well, thanks. I can set it to auto-select 1080p and if by chance the video doesn’t support that resolution then it will accept the next step down.
I used to complain the YouTube algo was pushing content on me. It seems to have given up on that, and just sends me my “preferred” content. Actually it does this too well, as right now much of YouTube shorts is recycled clips from other scraped clips of scraped clips of ect, so i get the same stupid Peaky Blinders clip set to royalty free dramatic music recycled ten times over on different channels.
No, the real suspicion is that i’m being A/B tested now. The big one is that many, many YouTube ads become unskippable. They used to have an unskippable ad graphic… now it’s just glitches out, the time elapsed doesn’t display and the skip button is an unmarked UI waiting for the ad to finish. It happens on the phone and PC. It feels like i’m being tested to see if i’ll sit through longer ads. It feels like i should click away and start the process over again to prevent YouTube from developing that idea, rather than passively wait for the ad to finish - and in fact doing that usually fixes it. This also feels very A/B because the unskippable ads vary from 15s, 30s, 1 and 2m long, and sometimes it is only one of the two, and sometimes it is both.
The other thing that seems conspiratorially deliberate is the way scrolling and choosing videos in Youtube shorts doesn’t work half the time. Sometimes the first time i click a video, it takes me to the top of the list, and it have to go back and click the video again to make it work. Sometimes the video is linked to a random video, and clicking it again takes me to the top of the list. It feels like YouTube really wants to train me to not pick and choose from the list but actually scroll, one at a time, through a channels Shorts list.
I recently got tired enough of this game google is playing I started using the duckduckgo browser because it’s got something called the duck player that shows no ads and prevents them from collecting viewing activity.
This solves my main two problems with Youtube. The algorithm incessantly pissing me off by throwing recommendations at me based off my viewing. And no ads.
Yeah, here’s another article on it; seems like quite the bit of shenanigans going on.
Ran into this, myself. Also found YouTube would throw its ad blocker message up even when whitelisted in my Firefox extensions, yet wouldn’t have any issues with the same process in Chrome.
Oh for fuck’s sake. Youtube is constantly tinkering with the layout of the navigation sidebar on the web (and indeed the layout on apps on every platform), for no obvious reason. The latest change seems to have put a hard cap on the number of subscribed channels it will show, so mine just stops at the letter N with no way to see the rest.
I’m still shocked that MS didn’t go after Google for the fuckery they did with YouTube on the first-generation of Edge. Performance was drastically different between Edge and Chrome on the same machine.
