I posted this on reddit but those fuckers removed it immediately
Never have I ever used a platform whose algorithm is so "sticky" that I've exhausted my entire roundup of channels and shows, and it keeps getting harder and harder to find new stuff. Big part of this is how YouTube doesn't have categories, especially on mobile.
And before anyone says it, yes they do have a category sidebar. Shopping, Music, Movies & TV, Hype, Live, Gaming, News, Sports, Courses, Fashion & Beauty, Podcasts, Playables. That's it. That's the whole list. You want to find new cooking channels? Good luck, there's no cooking category. History? Nope. Science? Nothing. Your only option is to go into "Gaming" and get served the same giants with 10 million subscribers you've already seen a hundred times.
Like, I just want to find a channel that makes videos about woodworking or obscure history or literally anything I haven't seen before, but YouTube keeps shoving the same 8 creators in my face because I watched one of their videos two years ago. The recommended page is just stuff I've already seen and stuff I actively don't want to see.
And the search is somehow even worse. You search for a topic trying to find something new and instead of relevant results it just shows you the same channels you always watch. Search "game reviews" and the top results aren't new review channels you've never heard of, it's the exact same guys already clogging your recommendations, plus videos you've already saved to watch later. You're not finding anything new, you're just being shown your own watch history back at you.
Other platforms figured this out. Spotify has genre pages, radio stations, discovery playlists. Even TikTok, for all its problems, will occasionally show you something you've never seen before. YouTube just assumes that if you liked something once you want to see it forever, and if you've never seen something before that's because you don't want to. There's no way out of it unless you already know exactly what you're looking for, which kind of defeats the whole point.
And yes I know you can delete your watch history. That's not a solution. That's a band-aid.
**I just want to find new topics** who else has this problem?
Wait you don't want to see meme compilation shorts with a hot girl in the thumbnail and the comments filled with. "Pass the ball...", "Smash, Next" or the classic "Would, Raw".
Ok, so here's a short of 5 cat videos with a ranking on the side from 1-10.
Oh you don't like that too, maybe you'll love this fun video game fact with an AI voice over. (Spoiler: The fact is that an voice actor also voiced another character in another game)
Also No? Maybe a viral video clip with a guy at the bottom pretending to watch it and just nodding along.
Ah I get it, youre not interested in shorts... now I catch your drift.
Are you interested in finding out that YOU'VE BEEN DOING/USING X WRONG THE ENTIRE TIME. Here's the first guy to ever read the user manual for a spatula and now has to make a 30:41 long video about it.
Or maybe a video essay about a game/movie, or even better a retrospective (everybody knows retro is always better, nostalgia amarite).
Oh, you just want a review. How about this one. Here's a guy that for the first 5 minutes complains how bad and woke this new game is and then followed by an hour of cut down gameplay from an 6 hours stream of him playing it.
Or maybe...
I could literally go on forever.