I know there was quite a bit of controversy surrounding YouTube’s recommendation algorithms, but I can’t seem to find a better alternative. What are the ways y’all find videos that are of interest?
I know we could use RSS and subscribe to our desired channels and get a better experience than YT’s own subscription system, but what about channel/video discovery, those that you’ve never seen before? Is there a better way to find a video that might be interesting to you without kneeling before the almighty algorithm? Half of the recommended page on YT seems irrelevant to me, but I can’t seem to find a better alternative.
One thing I really want are open source recommendation algorithms. Like lemmy introduced scaled but I wish there was an option to just apply your own choice of algorithm. I don’t even know if thats possible lol but I’d love that on like newpipe.
I know this is only tangentially related and doesn’t answer your question, sorry.
Old school way : using the search bar
Eh, that’s fully enshittified too nowadays.
I use FreeTube on desktop to follow my favourite YouTube channels, and I’ve found the related videos section to be quite good in occasionally suggesting videos from channels I’m unfamiliar with. I also have a Nebula subscription, so I find content creators from there as well.
I do admit that sometimes I’ll login to my old YouTube account and check what their algorithm is suggesting. I just copy/paste the URLs into FreeTube.
I only watch what’s in my subscriptions. Now and then I’ll add something new to see if I like it or remove something I don’t enjoy.
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The old fashioned way was you asked people. Post a video of one of your favorites in a videos community and ask what people who like it what channels they also recommend.
I find that Piped has a fairly decent “algorithm” for suggesting videos if you are already on a video. For example, “trending” doesn’t do anything for you, it’s effectively the same as not being logged in. Feed, once you have your subscriptions, is the same but for your channels.
But once you’re on a video of one of your channels, the suggested content is pretty good. If you go to SEA or PBS Space-time you get other space videos. If you go to electroBOOM or Practical Engineering you get other electrical/device type videos, game channel and videos and so forth. And it’s pretty spot on, whether your watching let’s plays or reviews or philosophical discussion around it, it usually keeps it fairly in line with whatever that channel/video topic is on.
It’s not perfect, like if you want the full broad spectrum algorithm. However, it’s good enough for me as I tend to find that if I’m in a specific rabbit hole anyway I’m not really trying to find the diverse content, but continuing down what I was looking for.
