I think it’s just quick to hop onto new things that appear, but it evens out fairly quickly. I assume it’s similar to a PID controller tuned to adjust quickly but overshoot, and then come back to level over time. It seems to essentially be a test to see how much of a new thing you’ve watched you’re willing to watch. Once it sees you’re not opening a lot of them it levels out almost as quickly as it started. This let’s it quickly adopt new things you like, but (at least for me) it doesn’t stick around if I don’t engage.
Comment on My YouTube homepage after I watch one balatro video
reddig33@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Yep. The algorithm is way too aggressive. Keep in mind you can remove videos from your watch history.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.win 5 days ago
Agreed. You watch one video and the entire homepage changes.
tyler@programming.dev 5 days ago
I think maybe it’s geared towards people who watch more YouTube. I never have any single topic take over my entire homepage, literally ever. I even watched a balatro video like two weeks ago and I got two tiles on my homepage that showed balatro. But I also watch a lot of YouTube, so any one video doesn’t change much about my watch patterns. Last year my wife decided we were suddenly going to be watching videos about using turkey calls, and we watched about ten of them in a row and then I was getting a good number of recommendations for turkey shit, but still nothing like OP’s homepage.
MrQuallzin@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Same here. My wife and I primarily watch YouTube (mainly let’s play style stuff, but a lot of non-game stuff as well). Looking at my homepage right now, I’ve got a few gaming videos, some Dropout (amazing comedy), some 3D printing and DIY videos.
Over the years, the algorithm has gotten pretty good with its recommendations for us. Watching some niche videos barely affects our feeds.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
I think there’s a sort of perfect storm that can happen. Suppose there are two types of YouTube users (I think there are other types too, but for the sake of this discussion we’ll just consider these two groups):
Type A watches a lot of niche content of which there’s not a lot on YouTube. The channels they’re subscribed to might only upload once a month to once a year or less.
Type B tends to watch one kind of content, of which there’s hundreds of hours of it from hundreds of different channels. And they tend to watch a lot of it.
If a person from group A happens to click on a video that people from group B tend to watch that person’s homepage will then be flooded with more of that type of video, blocking out all of the stuff they’d normally be interested in.
IMO YouTube’s algorithm has vacillated wildly over the years in terms of quality. At one point in time if you were a type A user it didn’t know what to do with you at all, and your homepage would consist exclusively of live streams with 3 viewers and family guy funny moments compilation #39.