HACKER Q&A
📣 exizt88

What Happened to YouTube Recommendations?


There are lots of reports of YouTube recommendations suddenly getting much worse, e.g. on /r/youtube from the past 3 days:

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/sg57kl/a_very_strange_home_page/

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/sg2qnd/weird_recommendations/

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/sfdwyh/algorithm_gone_insane/

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/sfczuh/has_anyones_youtube_recommendations_randomly/

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/sfaaij/horrible_recommendations_as_of_12722_6pmest_any/

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/sexhtp/youtubes_recommendations_are_still_broken_that/

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/settip/anybody_knows_what_in_the_hell_happened_to_my/

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/ses7u7/what_happened_to_my_recommendations/

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/sekomo/i_clicked_something_and_now_my_youtube/

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/se5op4/youtube_recommendations_going_crazy_since/

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/sdmble/weird_youtube_recommendations/

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/sdnykp/youtube_recommendations_broken/

It seems that things got worse 4 days ago, when YouTube made Watch History a requirement for showing any recommendations. I couldn't find any mentions of recommendations being broken in the few days before that on /r/youtube.

Anecdotally, in the past week my recommendations became a mix of awful generic videos, with almost no personalization.

Does anyone know what's going on?

  👤 jstx1 Accepted Answer ✓
Also, deleting your watching history doesn't reset your recommendations like it used to.
👤 sharmi
I have no clue but can anecdotally confirm none of the vidoes recommended for me for the past few days are of interest to me.

It seems to be a pattern with youtube though. For a period, it closely mirrors my watch history and I cant stop. I just pile up all those videos onto my Watch Later.

Then it behaves like I am a stranger.

The cycle repeats.(Shrug)

👤 kleer001
A kind of bit-rot. It's not a directly mechanical process, but the entropy of large institutions. It's the same reason that Gmail sucks now. It's the same reason that higher versions of software gets code bloat.
👤 errantmind
I am not saddened to see these services destroying themselves. They are draining their own moat and opening themselves up for disruption.