Oh yeah, your feed is definitely in my reader. When I click through to your site, in the URL I pass ?rss_ref=mydomain This way you - and other domains I visit - can know where the RSS-visitor is coming from (not foolproof of course, because your average spammer can also put their domain in the URL).
More important, when you see my traffic your post is definitely read on your website itself (or at least opened to read). There's no background stuff going on in my reader, pulling in feeds without reading them.
My way of reading feeds is more Tinder-style: the latest post from a random feed per time, then another one, etc. I feel irky even thinking about a firehose of content coming my way.
I subscribe to feeds by just copying the human-readable url (right-click on the channel's title). When I embed the videos from these channels only the long videos are embedded, the shorts are not (has to do with a different url for shorts). So no problems here.
I do have a problem with old videos getting presented as new videos. Videos from weeks ago get a publication date of two days ago. Sometimes I just don't know - based on a thumbnail - if I've already seen the video.
Nothing is killed. It still exists, it's an open protocol after all. And I choose to use it, it's pretty fun to calmly follow around 2000 feeds from - mostly - blogs from HN. And cars... I need my car blogs.
Agreed. That nowadays people or even big companies find it outside their core competency to host their blog, have atom/RSS feeds is not because big tech killing it.
How do you curate and keep on top of so many feeds? I have ~10 on my RSS reader and I sometimes have trouble keeping up if I have a couple of busy days
Basically, I get to see the latest post from a random feed. Nothing else. No lists of unread new posts from all the feeds. If I like the title and short summary, I click through to the website or blog itself where I can read the whole thing. There's no FOMO this way, or an information overload. Just one post a time.
Because the whole list of feeds is curated by myself, I know that everything is at least a little interesting. I even made a category with Youtube channels that I like, so I can skip their annoying recommended videos algo.
Next to this basic functionality, I made what I call 'Newspapers'. These are certain topics with a bunch of selected feeds attached, they get checked automatically in the background. When the Newspaper has enough articles, I see a new Newspaper appear. Otherwise it might take months before a feed is shown in the random selection.
Well, my guess is that OPML is underrated. And I understand that, because it's so different from the social media that we are used to. On my homepage (link in bio) you can find all the feeds that I follow, available as an OPML file. It might be of interest to you, it might not (probably a lot of blogs you know from here, at least half of my 2000 feeds).
One 'dream' of me is to have OPML be the discovery-glue between all kinds of individual personal websites and blogs. But this requires critical mass to have enough to discover and explore, and it needs some fun/interesting software way to do that.
Perfect website! Clear texts, clear screenshots, and an about page with a small photo of the person behind it. If I wasn't already using PHPMyAdmin I would definitely consider your product trustworthy. Am I right that it is - sort of - the same functionality as PHPMyAdmin?
I especially appreciate the honesty about the upcoming pricing. Do you plan/want to make it a business?
Thanks for the positive feedback!
It combines administration features and end user interace. The definition of data structure is not very intuitive, and that would be the first and most important thing to fix. I think a lot of people get lost at the definition of their first table....
Haha nice one. As a kid I had these friends in the neighborhood (Netherlands) whose dad trained Malinois shepherds and sold them worldwide to security services and police units.
In my city are four day marches in the summer where also international military participate. Before dawn, all these soldiers walk from the forest - where they sleep - to the starting point. It was customary for us as kids to wave to the soldiers and wish them good luck and ask for some souvenirs/stickers.
One day my friends had their dog with them and we learned the command 'luid' (loud in English, laut im Deutsch) so the dog would bark. Early in the morning, exhausted soldiers that did not even had their morning coffee, very quiet outside, and then the dog would bark them to shock with our little whispers of 'luid'. Good times.
Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike), channels that I would never watch being presented... I should have noted the exact date, but I didn't. I guess it was around two years ago.
Even searching for specific topics is hard. I just know there's enough material on the platform, but in my search results I get so many doubles and channels that I already know. I can keep scrolling, but to no result.
If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!
Agreed. It painfully overfits based on what I've watched. I've watched thousands of videos and it still doesn't understand me at all because it appears to treat every action as equal. As an example, I like watching the Starcraft II streamer uThermal but I'm not really interested in other Starcraft II content creators because uThermal scratches that itch. However YouTube will keep showing me Starcraft II content creators that I am not subbed to and whose content I will never watch.
Of the 30 videos currently proposed to be on front page I'd consider watching maybe 4 of them. To be honest I'm a big fan of the change they made to occasionally show new content because it actually provides some novelty (one of those 4 is of a video from a creator with only 19 subscribers).
The worst is that if you're someone who enjoys multiple niche things and who also interacts with the algorithm (like - dislike - not interested) your account gets marked as content discovery vanguard and it will endlessly feed you videos with <1000 views just so they can get more feelers on if the content is actually good.
Even if you consistently "not interested", the algorithm never ever figures out the overlapping theme is that you (generally) don't like low view count low subscriber count content.
- Of the topmost 4 videos I would consider watching one because I am already subscribed to the channel and even have the particular video in Watch Later (so what's the point?)
- Shorts appearing again and again after I explicitly remove them, taking up valuable space
- Below some random videos half of which I am already subscribed to so I can see them in Subscriptions - no need for duplicates
- The other half in large part is of doomerism, although I don't watch that content
Their last video search changes have been the worst thing they've ever done, I can never find anything I actually search for, its pretty obvious its to shove ad stuffed videos in your face, and hide old videos they cannot monetize, but holy crap. There's even some youtube channels where both the video and audio I used to listen to is completely FUBAR'd so somewhere in YouTubes infra, old videos are hinging on a hard drive that's dying in production.
The videos in question are niche as heck, maybe 400 people would recognize them, if even, old 2000s forum parody song of other forum members, out of how many billions online? So yeah, ultra random channel from 2009.
The recommended videos next to the current video and generally awful now. But my YouTube usage almost exclusively starts on the first row of videos they show when I'm logged in. They're almost entirely recent uploads from the channels I subscribe to and what most often. I subscribe to too many channels to keep up on the full feed of uploaded, but YouTube seems to do a good job highlighting the subscriptions I'm most interested in.
Admittedly, I rarely "browse" YouTube looking for new things. I typically find new channels either from other sources (reddit, Twitter, etc.) or because one channel mentions another channel.
Now that you mention it. First row is usually best for new interesting videos. After that, I usually click on the subscriptions page and discover some new interesting stuff from the last couple of days.
It's the tyranny of the marginal user. How I wish YouTube (and generally other platforms for user-generated content) would have fine-grained search and filtering controls that let me specify exactly what I want, no recommendation algorithm trying to guess what I actually meant. But such a feature won't attract and retain the least interested people, so we'll never get it.
> Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
Either I'm doing something very right, or everyone else is doing something very wrong, because my front page of YouTube is fine.
Most of my front page is videos about games I play or have played (Factorio, Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Cities: Skylines, and more), dash cam compilations (Which I watch a lot of), and various videos from channels I'm subscribed to such as Kurzgesagt, Chubbyemu, ElectroBOOM, LockPickingLawyer, Engineering Explained, Veritasium (Just discovered Newcomb's Problem and I'm a solid one-boxer) and more.
I never see Mr Beast or any of the other channels people complain about recommended to me. Every recommendation is relevant. YouTube knows me well.
Somehow, it just seems some people use YouTube in such a way that YouTube can't figure out what you like, and so you just get a default recommendation.
* General DIY/inventions: DIY Perks, Uri Tuchman, Stuff Made Here, Colin Furze, Applied Science, Breaking Taps
I think it's actually not too bad at surfacing this stuff. They also have a "New to You" button you can click.
My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.
Thanks!
I know a couple of 'em, will check the rest.
Indeed not hard to surface, but a handful of channels is a drop in the ocean of all the videos that must have been uploaded and are at least nice to watch and informative. Sometimes I get these rare gems inside my recommendations; a small channel with a couple of very interesting videos, maybe not the best or slickest productions, but definitely of interest. I guess the algo strongly favors a regular upload rhythm.
I can subscribe to these channels, but I can't even find them in my subscriptions. There's no overview, and sometimes I subscribe to channels that I know I already subscribed to (the channels themselves also experienced this unsubscribing behavior and made this known in their videos).
> My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.
> I can subscribe to these channels, but I can't even find them in my subscriptions. There's no overview
You can just click "subscriptions" on the left to only show videos from channels you are subscribed to, and then there's another button somewhere to show a list of your subscriptions.
> a handful of channels is a drop in the ocean of all the videos that must have been uploaded and are at least nice to watch and informative
The YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better - sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched, but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop.
At the same time, YouTube is an incredible resources; a civilizational achievement. It's a library of an enormous amount of knowledge, often presented in an engaging manner and well summarized. You can learn an enormous amount of things on YouTube.
I wish we could have one without the other, but all those videos servers don't pay for themselves, and the good stuff doesn't come without an enormous amount of subpar video content, and the stuff that pays is rarely the most useful.
I try to never engage with recommendations or the home screen, but it's hard especially when I'm tired or otherwise low on willpower.
Ideally I could get a YouTube app that's just a search box and can handle links that I click from other sources. I don't know if that exists and if it does, Google has a strong incentive to shut it down.
> The YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a
> horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's
> collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better -
> sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched,
> but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop.
I stopped having that issue when I was subscribed to the pages I enjoyed watching and watched that content. Without that its just going to throw you random popular content.
my personal recommendation is to browse from new personality (aka, log out and clean cookies or privite session I guess)
you'd be surprised both how different recommendations can be, and how fast algorithm recognizes that it is you and starts giving all the same stuff again
but still, that's the best way of discovering new things that I've found
> all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike)
What is with the thumbnails?!? I mean, I know what's with them- content makers have found a technique that works, and are beating that dead horse until it stops coughing up money. [1]
I guess my question is- what is with the median Youtube viewer? Are they just completely governed by their id? Does it not register that they're falling for the same bait every single time? That would bother me, but if people realize they're being manipulated and are fine with it, I guess that makes me the old man yelling at clouds. Oh well, I've been called worse.
I noticed that the Shorts pedaling is causing a major deterioration of the service and it started a few years ago.
At some point I looked too long at a thirst trap and now all I get is OF girls jumping on trampolines and stuff like that, despite spending literal days of time on longer form content for every second I've glanced at that stuff. They just really want me to interact with their Shorts doomscroll. It certainly has the scent of enshitification since Shorts.
> Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want”
I’ve seen it on social media too, notably Facebook.
Yup, that's exactly the youtube problem. It's really terrible for finding new interesting things. If you don't already know exactly what you want to watch, you'll never discover something new you might like.
Spotify sucks too with this. Theres certain artists where if I create a radio station from a song/album or whatever, I will know what like 20 of those songs in that generated station will be. Maybe 8-15 artists and the same 1-3 songs they pick from that artist for that given sort of radio generated call. The feature is good for a toe dip into discovery but you hit the bottom of its depth almost immediately. Sometimes it changes the generated playlist, but hardly. Feels way more siloed than actual FM radio. I might have to start building my own playlists again and do old fashioned discovery, which was almost a part time job evaluating discographies and studying genre history.
>Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want”
Worse than that, at times my home page feed has been 5-10% "Here's a video you've already watched all the way through. Want to watch it again?" recommendations. Like YT can see I've watched the video - why are so many videos I've watched being "recommended" for me?
It optimizes for binging. Most people watch one channels content as a single session letting autoplay take over. So if they think you are now on a new channel, they will show that channels videos.
If you scroll down on suggested videos after watching something, it is pretty easy to see how it works. Just keep scrolling and eventually it does start to cycle in a loop of only a few unique options.
How do I turn on my brain and find a video of an up and coming DJ that makes all their music in another language but mixes it with music that I really like without a recommendation engine showing that people who like similar music to me enjoy them as well?
There's a lot of content on YouTube besides just how to videos and often times top results from a direct search are not always teaching styles that I like.
Don't talk to me like that. My post does not invite this kind of reaction.
> Turn off the feed and turn on your brain.
Don't suggest I don't use my brain, please. For this purpose I built my own feed reader (as part of all kinds of social functions for my website system, link in bio), which I also use to scan for new videos on Youtube's channels that I follow. It works great. Sometimes I want to discover new channels and go directly to Youtube.
> Think about what you want to learn and search for it.
This is exactly what I said in my OP. I searched for topics on Youtube to discover new videos and channels, it's hard and doesn't work.
Then... why are you using it? I used to get some degree of infotainment out of it but then it became this. Here's an idea: I had a need for some custom metal machining (aluminum). I just looked up some local companies and found a guy who was happy to work it into his shop. I've had some other needs, and just wound up hiring some guys to teach me (stick welding). It's not free, but there is incredible value doing it the old way.
I use it as tv, but then topics I like that are not on tv.
You must be reading my mind, because I recently let some lasercutting shop make some aluminum for a hardware project that I'm doing. I have all kinds of projects on https://www.theredpanther.org - partly (or should I say mostly) inspired by Youtube.
So for me it works both ways, I get inspired, make something of my own, share it on Youtube. That's why it is such a nice platform. I even meet people through Youtube (fawowa scene is big in neighbouring Germany, for example) and I regularly leave comments and get comments.
On the other hand, the algorithm pushes me certain ways that I don't like. And it makes me sad knowing there are thousands of people making nice videos that I want to see but will never see, because Youtube's algorithm favors what they want to show, not what I want to watch (although their algo must be more than smart enough to give me hours and hours of good content). I have to take the bad with the good, I think.
The home page isn’t great. I think what he ment was use the subscription feature, which you seem to do.
I sometime forget that feature exists, but I have channels I like that seem to only show up when I pull up subscriptions and never make it to the “home page suggestions” (I guess my own personal algorithm?).
This doesnt help. Youtube is weird. On one hand, the majority of watch time is Beast brain rot like content but on the other hand, there is genuinely amazing creativity happening. The issue is discovery.
Youtube cannot help with discovery because it does not increase watch time. It is far more likely that an autoplay of a “safe known” video will be watched then something new.
Me too. Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality from one day to the other a couple of years ago.
The comparison with sociopaths is a good one. On the surface all human behavior, but if you lift the veil even a little bit it becomes clear there's no substance, no conscience, etc.
Read up on Cluster B personality disorders (borderline, narcissism, sociopaths/psychopaths) and you see the similarities. Love bombing, gaslighting, a shared fantasy, etc. It's very interesting and scary at the same time.
More important, when you see my traffic your post is definitely read on your website itself (or at least opened to read). There's no background stuff going on in my reader, pulling in feeds without reading them.
My way of reading feeds is more Tinder-style: the latest post from a random feed per time, then another one, etc. I feel irky even thinking about a firehose of content coming my way.
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