Grayjay Desktop App

We always been missing good 3rd party search/trending for online videos.

I've been using a youtube frontend called pockettube, where I could make lists(channels) for content I like, without youtube forcing me what to watch.

Example. I have an Art and Food channels with my favorite content creators, I get to see the list in order of newest videos first, totally bypassing youtubes forced interface.

In fact, if people started creating front ends to youtube with real search/suggestion engines, you could find new content and help the less viewed but good content that gets bypassed.

Grayjay is great, since it uses multiple video providers, but you still have to "Know" who to follow. The search "Knowing" part is still word of mouth, random change of seeing a creators video, or the platforms showing it to you. Combine the 2, and it would be unstoppable.

I think if someone came up with a external database of content providers on multiple platforms that allows apps like grayjay/pockettube/etc to find new content, that is the missing piece.

Finding content is so hard.

All YouTube wants me to watch are "OMG YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE WHAT THIS COP DID" content. I have no idea why they want me to watch those videos, I never do and I block the videos and the channels from recommendations but they keep coming ...

All I get are ads for weird suspect drugs and products, just going on these platforms is such a bad vibe.

YouTube has become especially horrific. It seems a couple years ago they gave up on video search- after 5 videos it will suddenly start recommending random videos under “you may like”. If I watch one UFC video I am flooded with recommendations of Joe Rogan, despite my subscriptions all being unrelated.

My experience is that YouTube recommendations are heavily weighted based on my watch history. If I watch a single video on, say, videogames, all of a sudden my recommendations are all gamer stuff.

Fortunately, you can easily edit your watch history. I just go through mine periodically and remove any kind of video that I don't want recommendations related to. Doing that has given me a very dialed in recommendation feed. If anything, it's too dialed in, and I rarely get serendipitous recommendations.

Best thing is, if I search for something it'll give me hundreds of search results. But if I then decide to filter by upload date, whooopsie! there are no search results, sorry!

You watch 2-3 videos on autopilot and Joe Rogan always pops up eventually. With that kind of promotion I dont understand why he's not bigger.

> I block the videos and the channels from recommendations but they keep coming

Part of this is channels opening side or mirror channels that they upload their videos to as well (since you'll sometimes see the exact same video but no ContentID strike) so they can get around people doing that.

Have you tried informing YouTube that you are not interested in Joe Rogan? There are several places and ways to do so in the application, and they seem to have worked for me.

My YouTube recommendations are like 80% RC planes

It's funny eh, the world's largest personal data collection company and they still have no idea what videos you want to watch lol

He’s pretty big. He helped tip a presidential election.

Select “not interested” for those videos. There’s also “don’t recommend this channel”. “Like” videos that you like. Your feed will quickly adjust.

I don’t remember ever getting a Joe Rogan recommendation.

I have (recently).

> it's too dialed in, and I rarely get serendipitous recommendations

Youtube is doing better here for me in that respect than it used to. Once a week for the past month I get a button that asks if i want to see things it doesn't usually show me and I've even watched some of them. It's not perfect, but it does seem like they are trying.

The Grayjay Android app (which I use regularly) has a "Recommended" tab under each video that provides anonymous recommendations based only on the video you're watching. I recall them asking me to opt-in to the creation of a database like this as well recently, but I don't think it's available yet.

Done that, no joy.

Grayjay dev here, the idea is to have a plugin system for recommendation engines in the future. You can choose whichever recommendation engine you like and it will tell you what data will be sent to the recommendation engine in order to be able to make recommendations for you. There will likely also be recommendation plugins that run fully offline for people who care a lot about privacy.

> Your feed will quickly adjust.

It does adjust in some way, but somehow it never picks up on the signal that actually made me like or dislike a video. It's very clear that some video-makers have figured out how to exploit this poor signal reception to shove really crappy content at people. Other video-makers, who aren't trying to dominate youtube revenue, are buried and difficult to find.

TikTok, meanwhile, takes about an hour of scrolling and reacting to cultivate a feed that is very tailored to my taste. It's truly remarkable. If the app gets banned it'll be a huge loss for finding people and content with similar interests.

(I also just don't have the desire to watch an entire 10-minute video packed with filler when I'm trying to relax unless it's very dense, and that's the entire revenue model of youtube. edit: I forgot youtube has shorts now)

It's biased by your watch history, but it's never just that. In my experience (browsing without accounts, in private browsing with no cookies, on rotating IPs), there seems to be a distinct spot in the algorithm for some inflammatory engagement bait regardless of your history. That bait is not dependent on your watch history and is based on your geographic location by the looks of it.

Regardless of what I watch, in the middle of otherwise on-topic recommendations, there will always be one or two videos that are attempts at getting me to engage with some complete off-topic inflammatory political bullshit. Of course, once you click on that, the "regular" recommendation system takes over and feeds you more of that (which is somewhat fine), but the fact that it's trying to suck the user into this in the first place despite no indications the he desires to be exposed to such content in the first place is disgusting.

Watching hobby channels every now and then is very refreshing. I wish YT would recommend me more of those

For you. My recommendations are tech videos, documentaries and good music. I find YouTube to have a great recommendation engine. I do use ublock origin.

The problem is it never stops recommending stuff. So if I say to never show me some channel (because maybe it’s irrelevant to me), then it just fills that spot with the next slightly more irrelevant channel.

Pretty soon all the recommendations are way far off what I would ever watch, because of course i don’t want to watch everything YouTube has. There is a point where there is nothing left that I will ever wanted to watch.

Their goal is not to show you videos you want to watch!

Look into DeArrow https://dearrow.ajay.app/

Cuts down a ton of crap and shows you thumbnails and titles of things for what they really are.

I've been using DeArrow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36273890 it calms down the thumbnail clickbait on YouTube, I feel like I enjoy YouTube more by watching less.

Be interesting if someone makes a nice recommendation engine (search) that does trending of real videos by views/votes, not fake hand picked curated trending like yt.

Seems like people are finally annoyed at being controlled on what they are fed while they consume content. Thats what i like about grayjay, it embraced that freedom of the original internet, not letting corps control what you, putting the control back into the hands of the viewers.

I toyed with an idea for a patreon clone, that would allow users to post a thumbnail to their video, and underneath quick links to other hosting providers. So the main choice is upto the creator, but also allow users to choose a different content streamer. I always hated how these services controlled creators too. What stores they can use.

The idea of a "plugin" or provider, creators could pick their merch store provider even. Such ideas of opening a system to different companies, making competition.

Grayjay dev here. What you suggest you can already do in the Grayjay Android app. Support has not been added in the desktop app yet. Harbor is the app you can use to claim that you own a specific account and then you can configure for example which Merch to show. It supports the largest storefronts if you input an URL it will automatically scrape that specific page and cache the results. You can however also input a JSON.

While the YouTube algorithm could be better (e.g. its recency bias is much too strong), 99% of what it recommends me is in line with stuff I watched or liked before. So, I don’t know what to tell you.

Maybe your interests are shared by a lot of people who also like crappy stuff? Just joking, but there must be some reason for the difference in experience.

There is strong incentive for youtube creators to create this kind of "clickbait" content (and especially clickbait titles and thumbnails) which perpetuates that situation regardless of whether the algorithm explicitly rewards it. As long as engagement is a factor and creators are rewarded for it then it seems like what you observed is kind of unavoidable.

Agreed.

The most insidious thing is when you see kids hooked on it. Not only are they fed the same garbage content and ads, some of it is actually harmful, like Elsagate. Some of those videos are still available on the site, and more get added all the time.

We can argue whether parents should let their kids use YouTube, and if the YouTube Kids app works well enough to protect them from this, but at the end of the day we're just data mines and not customers, so nothing besides public outrage and regulations could improve this. It's also an incredibly difficult problem given the amount of videos uploaded every day, but I'm sure Google could solve it if they had good reasons to.

I don't mean usual, on-topic clickbait consistent with the watch history. I mean that in the middle of said on-topic clickbait, one or two of the recommendation slots are always explicitly allocated to a broader, regional-level pool of inflammatory political clickbait completely unrelated to watch history.

So for example, I could be watching some niche technical videos, and my recommendations would be more of that for the most part. Except that on an English-speaking-country IP address, I'd also get some inflammatory Trump-related video among the usual recommendations. On a French IP I get the French equivalent, and so on.

So either consumers of various niche content (in unrelated fields, from retrocomputing to farming or vehicle repair) also all happen to be into political trash in various languages so much as to outcompete other on-topic videos in the recommendations, or the recommendation engine has an explicit feature to push inflammatory crap in addition to "organic" recommendations. I strongly suspect it's the latter.

How do I tell it to not show me any short clips with all caps font on them like it’s a news headline?

My completely unsubstantiated pet hypothesis about this is that it's cheaper and easier to cache the same click bait for everyone instead of different well tailored recommendations.

No idea about who Joe Rogan is, maybe because I'm not American and because I use YouTube via NewPipe on Android, almost never inside a browser on my laptop and anyway never logged in with my account.

NewPipe doesn't need an account. I can subscribe to channels, bookmark videos and save them to playlists. It's all I need.

Not having an account has the disadvantage that I don't have a common list of videos across my devices. I could export and import but it's too inconvenient. I just share videos to the other device if I have to, via KDE Connect.

On your desktop please try Freetube. You can also import your NewPipe backup (history and subscriptions) Freetube will also allow you to have different profiles, that you could use one per device and regularly import their backups.

A strong recommendation for the crafman, he's the Bob Ross of crafting.

I do have Freetube but I forget to use it. I developed the instinct of reaching to my phone or to my tablet when I want to watch a video. The only source of videos on my desktop would be technical stuff embedded in pages from HN but videos are too long (as in time) compared to text so either I read the transcript if available or I skip to the next interesting post.

Considering his content is auto recommended to billions of people, should be bigger.