this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
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No Stupid Questions
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Youtube is pretty much unusable now, more than half the videos are low effort Ai slop, and the rest is just irrelevant, leaving the real content buried deep down in the algorithm.
Edit: I forgot to mention that I don't use an YouTube account and haven't used for years for privacy reasons. I'm mostly speaking about using the search function without an account.
YouTube has a great algorithm, in that it mostly seems to show you stuff you actually want to watch, and let's you say you don't like stuff.
You can train it with a little effort to show you what you want.
You just can't make the shorts go away, even with premium!
You can on mobile with modified client and I belive there's browser extensions that remove shorts on pc
You can use uBO on shorts to make them dissappear.
For Android, 7 helieve revanced has an option for that.
They added a shorts limit though. It prevents you from watching more than 15 minutes of shorts a day. Experimentally afterwards it seems to recommend slightly fewer shorts in your feed.
Used to be I'd scroll through the suggested videos, and find new content creators based on my interests.
Now? I don't trust clicking on a new unheard of youtuber channel. 90% of the time it's just AI crap.
Maybe it's just my algorithm but I don't think I've been presented any slop videos. Surely not long videos, right?
If you use it with an account and have watch history its really quite good at recommending relevant stuff.
I think it also depends on what you're searching for though, like if I search for a guide on changing fork seals on my motorcycle the results are pretty much fine.
To get YouTube to work you need to curate your watch history. Any video you regret watching should be deleted from history so that it won’t be used for recommendations.
If your history is filled with these bad videos then you’re better off wiping your history entirely. Then start from scratch watching only videos that really interest you and your recommendations will all be based on those.
Like the internet itself, there is a TON of great content on YouTube. The trouble is finding it! For me, the internet has been gradually reverting to the situation I remember from the mid-90s (before Google existed). There were lots of search engines but they were pretty much all bad. I relied a lot on word of mouth (and site-to-site links) to find things.
Stop using the algorithm. Take your existing known likes and go search them out for their collaborators. Search out creators not single videos on a topic.
Try FreeTube, turn off all recommendations and subscribe to the channels you like. It's great.
I just use NewPipe and subscribe to my favorite channels. The algoslop tab remains unclicked.
It's gotten so bad the past year especially. I often open an incognito tab to look something up or watch a video without affecting my recommendations, and every time I do, the logged out YouTube recommendations are worse and worse. Genuine bottom of the barrel fuck shit dog ass slop. If it was illegal to produce slop like this I genuinely think the world would be a slightly better place (or even just making it illegal to monetize it).
Same here. Trick is to not use the YT search function. My strategy changes depending on specifically what I'm looking for, but in general for anything factual I start with a no-AI text search on DDG and then go to YT once I know what I want to see, or just use DDG to trawl through the videos. It's not perfect but it cuts out a LOT of the slop.
For entertainment, if my current list of "known good" seems exhausted, I keep my subscriptions in FreeTube and go with the recommendations there where I can hide channels more effectively, but that's pretty rare because I collect what look like promising channels as I go along in regular browsing, like Lemmy or news articles, and not from any algorithm.
I mean it literally doesn't load. If you have been able to use YT in the past year, your browser is seriously insecure.