My YouTube Home feed has more than 50% of the videos from channels I'm not even subscribed to, while many subscribed channels simply do not appear on my feed.
The shift in recent years in social media from "telling the system what you like" to "system telling you what you like" is troublesome. The fact is we know what we want, and not watching a certain channel for a few weeks doesn't mean we will never want to watch it (that's what the Unlike or Unsubscribe button is for!).
I argue that there are two types of content that one watches: funny, quick, one-off content, and actually interesting, lengthy, in-depth content. Examples of the former includes (and these are directly from my YouTube feed right now) Microsoft Sam Beatbox Duet, 1996 Pontiac Grand Pix Recall: interesting for when you are relaxing, but I basically don't want to see anything like it anymore after watching it. Examples of the latter would be: The Impact of 6GHz on Network Design, PS5 Slim First Look and TEARDOWN!!, or I Visited the Most Depressing Town in Singapore.
Suggesting new content is great to help discover new channels and give visibility to new creators, but there is a limit to it: there is a reason a user decide to subscribe to a channel instead of just watching it and leave, and since the algorithm does not know how the user liked it or not (who cares about the like button anymore??), it is idiotic to suggest this much new content to a user just because the user fell for two clickbaity videos two times in a row.
Going back to the two types of content. Please, only ever suggest a few of the first type, and never the same topic over and over. For the second type, please, prioritize what we literally said we liked, instead of filling my entire feed with train videos (yes I like trains, but I also like many other things that I literally told the algorithm by subscribing).
Thanks for listening. After seeing the 20th Burger King Pokeball recall advertisement parody being suggested just because a few weeks ago I felt bored and watched a few in a row, I decided that I have to write something about this.
