You can disable your watch history and then you only get related videos to the current video as far as I can tell. It does remove all of the videos from the home page, but I've been using youtube like this for 6 years and I don't mind it one bit. I have an alternate account with watch history enabled and I look at the home page every once in a while (obviously my history is very stale), it doesn't seem like anything of value was lost and I definitely never have to see a Mr. Beast thumbnail on my normal account.
A highly beneficial side effect is that it disables the main YouTube shorts stream. You still get some shorts for your subs and such, but the bottomless heroin feed if Shorts is gone, and good riddance.
You can remove shorts under YouTube’s time management settings > daily limits > shorts feed limit, you can set the max allowed time to 0 min and the effect is they all disappear.
Oh interesting, I just have a userscript that completely excises shorts from youtube, seems like a neat side effect though. Always a jumpscare to use youtube on someone elses computer and see all the shorts, ads, and sponsored segments. We had TiVo like 30 years ago, this is a solved problem.
This is one of the things a comprehensive interoperability mandate could enable.
Require monopolistic companies that have a frontend/backend architecture to publish the interface docs and to not obstruct third party commercial alt backends/frontends.
Its a bit like carving up monopolistic firms along the joints (interfaces) defined by the software architecture, and team structure. Just less extreme; the firm isnt actually split, it's just required to allow "fair competition by third party architecture components"
This would really improve googles software, we might get e2ee google keep or gmail with pgp.
(I have not worked out the details of this, it might not be feasible)
It feels like I stumble upon gems in spite of their UI and have been trying to spend less time there to avoid the timesink otherwise. If it's not saved on my watch later / in my subscriptions or recommended to me credibly, it's probably a waste of time.
No, you soon realize it’s promoting the same ‘niche’ videos to a large cohort. You and half a million people worldwide have that video recommended from the same unknown Russian indie rock band
Consider that your experience isn’t universally applicable to everyone.
As a lifelong musician, I find it to be a great resource for discovery. I really lean into curating what I do and don’t want to see and it delivers amazing results frequently.
It’s also a nice counterpoint to recs I get from other sources: streaming services, friends, strangers, and good ‘ol fashioned digging.
Sure it would. No matter how many people see, say, Shpongle on their timeline, they're never going to be mainstream. No one is going to be talking about 空夜coo:ya in the same conversation as Taylor Swift or Bruno Mars. Being slightly more visible in the algorithm for a brief period isn't going mainstream.
And even if that were the case, again, so what? If Youtube makes good non-mainstream music more popular, that's still a good thing. That's exactly what one should want a recommendation algorithm to do.
I’ve thought about doing this. I mostly use YouTube for cooking and home maintenance. Give me the pasta making video shot in a commercial Italian kitchen with captions, and a grizzled old handyman demonstrating how to caulk the shower.
These exist. They should be discoverable. They used to be. But in 2026 the search results skew towards dubious influencers and AI schlock.
It misses the point. The video that is most valuable to me isn’t necessarily popular, is not the authors real job, but they actually know what they’re doing and explain it well.
You wouldn’t even need a full UI, just a big curated directory of useful stuff.
Every few years, I think Yahoo's old attempt to have real people build a phone directory of the web wasn't such a bad idea. And I occasionally wish Google still worked by seeing what other people thought was a worthy web page on a topic. My algorithm for finding worthwhile content is similar: I try to visit the community of interest and see what they like. There is no substitute for the human element in evaluating quality.
Interestingly, tragically, YouTube seems to have gotten the message that I like long form informational videos, and serves me ones with intriguing titles that are clearly written, illustrated, and read by AI. I seem to be training it to deceive me, which is not a good thing. In fact, I had trained it so well to push my psychological buttons that I recently had to leave entirely, which is surely not what anyone wants.
A side effect of Reddit/Twitter/etc having captured most of the population/eternal September might be that a
web directory has become feasible again. Ignore social media, ignore AI, ignore paywalled sites. What's left and high enough quality might be manageable to maintain a directory for.
Easier said than done, obviously, but the point is that the worthwhile web isn't so big anymore.
Every now and then someone shares a small web link here (Kagi is one aggregator). It’s like survivors picking up the shards of civilization after the apocalypse. Of course such a project can remain viable and useful as long as it remains niche, which is virtually guaranteed as long as there’s no money in it.
It’s incredible how too much money corrupts everything it touches.
Some of my best work has been done as a labor of love. I do have the vague impression that we as a society have taken a wrong turn in selling the sacred. I am not in favor of collapsing society down to hippie communes or anything, but it does seem to me that we told better stories back when stories were freer.
I sometimes imagine gathering up some number of like-minded electrical and software engineers, and founding some sort of monastary in which everyone was fed and taken care of and built the best technology they could, as a gift to humanity. I do wonder if the day's robber barons would find a way to shut us down, of course, but I still remember a bright and optimistic time when technology was made to serve people, not to oppress them, and it seems to me like a bright expression of human spirit that oughtn't to have been sold.
People have the illusion that they choose, but they don't, when you know the number of videos uploaded and the millions of videos with high view count, you quickly understand that you are in an echo-chamber.
Life is too short to hang out with people you don't like.
If I were a vampire I'd have no problem spending a few decades studying the Torah o learning Sanskrit but as it is one has to efficiently manage one's time.
I find youtube's interface so incredibly frustrating and hostile. Even when I know what I want to watch, I find it very hard to actually get to it. On their Roku app, search for The Daily Show, and try and watch the latest clips. It doesn't show them in that order and browsing the clips is frustratingly hard. Their web interface, especially mobile, is equally as bad.
I've given up on trying to use youtube's interface and now just rely on recommendations + rss (via freshrss) or tubearchivist to keep me up to date and organize the videos.
What particularly annoys me is that the sidebar used to show videos related to the video I'm watching. Nowadays perhaps a quarter of those links are relevant, the rest are useless shit.
And then youtube has the gall to suggest that if I want useful links there, I should turn on browsing history. You don't need history to suggest related videos!
----
Google ads went though a similar decline ten or twenty years ago. Google Adwords used to be related to the page they were showing on, and not based on your behaviour.
You can still manually switch to a "Related" tab. On the mobile app, you scroll down a bit and the tab header appears. In the browser, there's probably a way to automate it with an user script.
I've tried doing a google AI search for some youtube video subjects, and get interesting results. It does not seem to integrate my youtube viewing history or subscriptions, so far as I can tell. Like any AI search you have to compose the prompt carefully, but if google AI has access to the titles or description of youtube videos that may be a path to searching success?
I was really hoping that the article would end with a tool or new interface to explore YouTube. But I guess the author only is building one but didn’t realise anything yet.
There is no technical solution to a social problem, rather the level of abstraction is wrong. Keep hammering these companies with regulation until the evil people leave due to lack of infinite free money.
We need Jerry and David's Guide to Youtube Videos! Bring back yellow pages, web directories, and other listing services. The "algorithm" is an anti consumer pattern scheming to maximize the publisher experience at the cost of the user experience. I wish I could just easily search for videos and filter by date ranges, length, views. That would let me avoid all the terrible AI slop!
Google already ripped off curators once to build PageRank, the first of the modern AI unpaid content thefts. They’ll just do it again if you bring back listing services. Either you paywall these new indexes like Consumer Reports, or you get insta-sherlocked by AI agents — and now that Google is scanning print books for training data, you can’t even escape them by releasing it as a print catalog. If I were trying to do this, I’d circulate a list of good channels indexed by call numbers to librarians and politely ask them to keep it behind their counters when they share it around to other librarians, so that they have an advantage over the bots.
This complaint is factually false. Click on the ask button and you get a Gemini chat instance that can recommend qualitatively similar videos with a description.
Running with the c compiler example why not go the forge hosting the project, look at the contributors and forks, scrape all their socials and download their profiles/videos.
If you want to know if this is just an accident of the design, or a purposeful trap, just know that it is no longer possible to browse while not logged in!
If you log in, you get the personalised funnel.
If you don't log in, you get a blank page and a search box.
That's evil.
It's tantamount to censorship, of the worst kind, deliberately sending all viewers directly to their own personal echo chambers without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
As a random example: I now get only Australian news channels recommended to me. I have to go to heroic lengths to see the BBC or any US source, let alone something more out there like Al Jazeera.
The blank page is what you'd get if you cleared your Watch History. I use this to watch a new-to-me topic/channel or just a video that I know I'd only watch once and don't want in my recommended history in Incognito mode(although you could just remove that video manually from history too).
This makes it easy to somewhat steer the algorithm, I just open and scrub through a few videos of the same "kind" that I'm interested in and this then makes the youtube homepage a bit wieldy. This still populates unrelated videos but at a lower rate.
I never log in, ever. It's blank until I open a bookmarked YT channel or two then it's all the things related to that channels user base. If I start with news I get propaganda. If I happen to start with an emergency preparedness channel then I get almost entirely AI hype conspiracy videos which tells me what that company thinks of preppers. If I start with one of the popular influencers then I get all the jack-ass type content. If I start with geo-politics then I get financial investment grifters. If I start with movie reviews I get 100% fake AI generated movie review channels for movies that do not exist. About the only topic I can start with that will stay mostly related and on-topic without much AI yet is firearms. I am just guessing that maybe AI botters are afraid their AI will generate something firearm related that will get them kicked out of the algo.
Regardless of what content I start with I get lots of shorts with women in seductive poses and minimal clothing with pure click-bait titles. Once in a while if I start with a comedian then I might see a short suggested to me of a comedian but with cringy music added to what they are saying so I am not falling for that a second time.
Basically the main page is useless to me. I just rely on really old bookmarks which means I will rarely ever see new channels unless one of the people I already watch talks about them and maybe that's good enough. Thankfully some of the people I watch are also on Rumble.
You can disable your watch history and then you only get related videos to the current video as far as I can tell. It does remove all of the videos from the home page, but I've been using youtube like this for 6 years and I don't mind it one bit. I have an alternate account with watch history enabled and I look at the home page every once in a while (obviously my history is very stale), it doesn't seem like anything of value was lost and I definitely never have to see a Mr. Beast thumbnail on my normal account.
A highly beneficial side effect is that it disables the main YouTube shorts stream. You still get some shorts for your subs and such, but the bottomless heroin feed if Shorts is gone, and good riddance.
You can remove shorts under YouTube’s time management settings > daily limits > shorts feed limit, you can set the max allowed time to 0 min and the effect is they all disappear.
Oh interesting, I just have a userscript that completely excises shorts from youtube, seems like a neat side effect though. Always a jumpscare to use youtube on someone elses computer and see all the shorts, ads, and sponsored segments. We had TiVo like 30 years ago, this is a solved problem.
shorts can be removed using the filters icon at the top right
How to add channels under the same email address: Click on your profile picture > switch account > view all channels > create a channel.
It's a pity YouTube doesn't let people built innovative interfaces to this treasure trove.
It's so frustrating that their interface is so very bad for discovery and exploration.
Ding ding ding
This is one of the things a comprehensive interoperability mandate could enable.
Require monopolistic companies that have a frontend/backend architecture to publish the interface docs and to not obstruct third party commercial alt backends/frontends.
Its a bit like carving up monopolistic firms along the joints (interfaces) defined by the software architecture, and team structure. Just less extreme; the firm isnt actually split, it's just required to allow "fair competition by third party architecture components"
This would really improve googles software, we might get e2ee google keep or gmail with pgp.
(I have not worked out the details of this, it might not be feasible)
It feels like I stumble upon gems in spite of their UI and have been trying to spend less time there to avoid the timesink otherwise. If it's not saved on my watch later / in my subscriptions or recommended to me credibly, it's probably a waste of time.
Youtube is actually really good for finding new, non-mainstream music in my experience.
No, you soon realize it’s promoting the same ‘niche’ videos to a large cohort. You and half a million people worldwide have that video recommended from the same unknown Russian indie rock band
Consider that your experience isn’t universally applicable to everyone.
As a lifelong musician, I find it to be a great resource for discovery. I really lean into curating what I do and don’t want to see and it delivers amazing results frequently.
It’s also a nice counterpoint to recs I get from other sources: streaming services, friends, strangers, and good ‘ol fashioned digging.
So what?
Either it appeals to my interests or it doesn't. Why should I care if a million other people get it recommended as well?
Well it won't be 'non-mainstream' for one
Sure it would. No matter how many people see, say, Shpongle on their timeline, they're never going to be mainstream. No one is going to be talking about 空夜coo:ya in the same conversation as Taylor Swift or Bruno Mars. Being slightly more visible in the algorithm for a brief period isn't going mainstream.
And even if that were the case, again, so what? If Youtube makes good non-mainstream music more popular, that's still a good thing. That's exactly what one should want a recommendation algorithm to do.
I'm trying to see the problem here and I can't.
I’ve thought about doing this. I mostly use YouTube for cooking and home maintenance. Give me the pasta making video shot in a commercial Italian kitchen with captions, and a grizzled old handyman demonstrating how to caulk the shower.
These exist. They should be discoverable. They used to be. But in 2026 the search results skew towards dubious influencers and AI schlock.
It misses the point. The video that is most valuable to me isn’t necessarily popular, is not the authors real job, but they actually know what they’re doing and explain it well.
You wouldn’t even need a full UI, just a big curated directory of useful stuff.
That's why they have kept trying to shove stupid cards in between videos going "ask for videos any way you'd like!" with a stupid AI chatbot.
No.
Fix the goddamn video search in the first place, I don't want to talk to some asshole chatbot to find a video.
Then the cards between videos telling me about YouTube Playables.
Goddamnit, this is a video site, not a goddamn game site.
Every few years, I think Yahoo's old attempt to have real people build a phone directory of the web wasn't such a bad idea. And I occasionally wish Google still worked by seeing what other people thought was a worthy web page on a topic. My algorithm for finding worthwhile content is similar: I try to visit the community of interest and see what they like. There is no substitute for the human element in evaluating quality.
Interestingly, tragically, YouTube seems to have gotten the message that I like long form informational videos, and serves me ones with intriguing titles that are clearly written, illustrated, and read by AI. I seem to be training it to deceive me, which is not a good thing. In fact, I had trained it so well to push my psychological buttons that I recently had to leave entirely, which is surely not what anyone wants.
A side effect of Reddit/Twitter/etc having captured most of the population/eternal September might be that a web directory has become feasible again. Ignore social media, ignore AI, ignore paywalled sites. What's left and high enough quality might be manageable to maintain a directory for.
Easier said than done, obviously, but the point is that the worthwhile web isn't so big anymore.
Every now and then someone shares a small web link here (Kagi is one aggregator). It’s like survivors picking up the shards of civilization after the apocalypse. Of course such a project can remain viable and useful as long as it remains niche, which is virtually guaranteed as long as there’s no money in it.
It’s incredible how too much money corrupts everything it touches.
Some of my best work has been done as a labor of love. I do have the vague impression that we as a society have taken a wrong turn in selling the sacred. I am not in favor of collapsing society down to hippie communes or anything, but it does seem to me that we told better stories back when stories were freer.
I sometimes imagine gathering up some number of like-minded electrical and software engineers, and founding some sort of monastary in which everyone was fed and taken care of and built the best technology they could, as a gift to humanity. I do wonder if the day's robber barons would find a way to shut us down, of course, but I still remember a bright and optimistic time when technology was made to serve people, not to oppress them, and it seems to me like a bright expression of human spirit that oughtn't to have been sold.
People have the illusion that they choose, but they don't, when you know the number of videos uploaded and the millions of videos with high view count, you quickly understand that you are in an echo-chamber.
Life is too short to hang out with people you don't like.
If I were a vampire I'd have no problem spending a few decades studying the Torah o learning Sanskrit but as it is one has to efficiently manage one's time.
I find youtube's interface so incredibly frustrating and hostile. Even when I know what I want to watch, I find it very hard to actually get to it. On their Roku app, search for The Daily Show, and try and watch the latest clips. It doesn't show them in that order and browsing the clips is frustratingly hard. Their web interface, especially mobile, is equally as bad.
I've given up on trying to use youtube's interface and now just rely on recommendations + rss (via freshrss) or tubearchivist to keep me up to date and organize the videos.
What particularly annoys me is that the sidebar used to show videos related to the video I'm watching. Nowadays perhaps a quarter of those links are relevant, the rest are useless shit.
And then youtube has the gall to suggest that if I want useful links there, I should turn on browsing history. You don't need history to suggest related videos!
----
Google ads went though a similar decline ten or twenty years ago. Google Adwords used to be related to the page they were showing on, and not based on your behaviour.
You can still manually switch to a "Related" tab. On the mobile app, you scroll down a bit and the tab header appears. In the browser, there's probably a way to automate it with an user script.
I've tried doing a google AI search for some youtube video subjects, and get interesting results. It does not seem to integrate my youtube viewing history or subscriptions, so far as I can tell. Like any AI search you have to compose the prompt carefully, but if google AI has access to the titles or description of youtube videos that may be a path to searching success?
I was really hoping that the article would end with a tool or new interface to explore YouTube. But I guess the author only is building one but didn’t realise anything yet.
I created skipvids.com as a new type of interface check it out
Turns out quality is a subjective metric which is hard to quantify.
There is no technical solution to a social problem, rather the level of abstraction is wrong. Keep hammering these companies with regulation until the evil people leave due to lack of infinite free money.
We need Jerry and David's Guide to Youtube Videos! Bring back yellow pages, web directories, and other listing services. The "algorithm" is an anti consumer pattern scheming to maximize the publisher experience at the cost of the user experience. I wish I could just easily search for videos and filter by date ranges, length, views. That would let me avoid all the terrible AI slop!
Google already ripped off curators once to build PageRank, the first of the modern AI unpaid content thefts. They’ll just do it again if you bring back listing services. Either you paywall these new indexes like Consumer Reports, or you get insta-sherlocked by AI agents — and now that Google is scanning print books for training data, you can’t even escape them by releasing it as a print catalog. If I were trying to do this, I’d circulate a list of good channels indexed by call numbers to librarians and politely ask them to keep it behind their counters when they share it around to other librarians, so that they have an advantage over the bots.
Just use rss feeds like feeder.co and pipeline it into whatever app you want
This complaint is factually false. Click on the ask button and you get a Gemini chat instance that can recommend qualitatively similar videos with a description.
Running with the c compiler example why not go the forge hosting the project, look at the contributors and forks, scrape all their socials and download their profiles/videos.
Is this a serious suggestion? Gave me a chuckle at least
If you want to know if this is just an accident of the design, or a purposeful trap, just know that it is no longer possible to browse while not logged in!
If you log in, you get the personalised funnel.
If you don't log in, you get a blank page and a search box.
That's evil.
It's tantamount to censorship, of the worst kind, deliberately sending all viewers directly to their own personal echo chambers without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
As a random example: I now get only Australian news channels recommended to me. I have to go to heroic lengths to see the BBC or any US source, let alone something more out there like Al Jazeera.
The blank page is what you'd get if you cleared your Watch History. I use this to watch a new-to-me topic/channel or just a video that I know I'd only watch once and don't want in my recommended history in Incognito mode(although you could just remove that video manually from history too).
This makes it easy to somewhat steer the algorithm, I just open and scrub through a few videos of the same "kind" that I'm interested in and this then makes the youtube homepage a bit wieldy. This still populates unrelated videos but at a lower rate.
I never log in, ever. It's blank until I open a bookmarked YT channel or two then it's all the things related to that channels user base. If I start with news I get propaganda. If I happen to start with an emergency preparedness channel then I get almost entirely AI hype conspiracy videos which tells me what that company thinks of preppers. If I start with one of the popular influencers then I get all the jack-ass type content. If I start with geo-politics then I get financial investment grifters. If I start with movie reviews I get 100% fake AI generated movie review channels for movies that do not exist. About the only topic I can start with that will stay mostly related and on-topic without much AI yet is firearms. I am just guessing that maybe AI botters are afraid their AI will generate something firearm related that will get them kicked out of the algo.
Regardless of what content I start with I get lots of shorts with women in seductive poses and minimal clothing with pure click-bait titles. Once in a while if I start with a comedian then I might see a short suggested to me of a comedian but with cringy music added to what they are saying so I am not falling for that a second time.
Basically the main page is useless to me. I just rely on really old bookmarks which means I will rarely ever see new channels unless one of the people I already watch talks about them and maybe that's good enough. Thankfully some of the people I watch are also on Rumble.
> That's evil.
No. It is the normalization of evil.
> without even the possibility of ever being exposed -- even accidentally -- to alternate viewpoints of any kind!
This is the point. The point of circus, is not to stimulate your intellect, but to keep your intellect busy. Different opinions are dangerous.
[dead]