Normally, I use YouTube very little (watch a couple videos a month). However, I’ve been in bed with an injury for some time now, which has led me to watch quite a bit of YouTube. The thing is, I subscribe to a small handfull of channels that I enjoy content from, but after a relatively short time I had watched pretty much all the new content from those channels.
Now, I would expect that the YouTube algorithm, which is supposedly designed by competent people to get me to stick around, would be able to suggest some decent content to me based on my subscriptions. However, the past week, I’ve opened YouTube only to find the same old videos being suggested over and over. Even worse: Whenever there’s something interesting-looking from a channel I don’t recognise, it always turns out to be some shitty AI voice over some generic animations or footage.
I know for a fact that thousands of hours of content are created on YouTube daily, but it genuinely feels like there are maybe five creators out there that are making anything worth watching. It’s either that, or the YouTube algorithm is just complete crap at suggesting creators that are in any way similar to what I’m already subscribing to.
What’s going on here? Why does it seem like there’s no real content out there?
As a “funny” side note: What’s with the “aggressively American” AI narrator-voice? I’ve heard it before, but thought it was some dude until I realised it’s the same voice in a bunch of unrelated videos. It reminds me of the Discovery-channel “action-narrator”-voice from back in the day, but now it’s showing up in all kinds of crap videos.
99% of channels suck. Its only the select few educational channels that actually have content. Other than watching Youtube, I pirate a lot of TV shows and movies.
This may be a large part of my problem. I’ve kind of just noted that theres so many people spending so many hours watching youtube, that there must be an abundance of good content. Then again, a decent amount of people are probably content with having some slop on in the background, and a major user-base probably consists of kids watching people scream into the camera. With that in mind, it may not be that unlikely that even with millions of hours of content, there may only be a few thousand actually worth watching if you find it…