There are plenty of things I have no interest in doing but have watched hours of great Youtube videos by very dedicated people in the field. The depth of some forms of user generated content is amazing and there's nothing wrong with being a spectator. There's definitely a sea of trash too though.

A couple of my favorites in this line of thought: David Bull of Mokuhankan (Japanese woodblock printing), Leo of Sampson Boat Co (rebuild 110 year old gaff cutter). They are both very knowledgeable in their field and take efforts to produce good content at their own pace as part of a long running objective.

Regarding your point of there being a sea of trash, check out David Bulls video "Its not garbage" where he argues that out of all the garbage in our society, woodblock printing is something special. https://youtu.be/hIL3Xpaoe1o

Thanks for the video. The sea of trash I was thinking of is still trash by this definition. Youtube is full of videos that are just some other clip copied with an automated intro and other such things. The algorithm does ok at filtering it out but it's only helping you navigate the sea, you still hit a few of those often enough to be noticeable.

Cody's Lab has lots of other content to but he used to post bee keeping videos. I found it interesting just from the standpoint of seeing how its done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdItRBzixf0

After watching this aggressive hive linked in the video above though I think I will leave this hobby to others to partake in.

As he says, behavior like this, in his part of the world, is highly unusual. I've never seen anything like it. I'm glad he takes the time to show what a typical hive is like (at the 20:00 mark in the original video). Beekeeping is generally a very relaxing activity for both bees and beekeeper.

Click the "..." next to one of the bad recommendations. Click "Not interested." Click "Tell us why." Tick "I'm not interested in recommendations based on [whatever bee keeping video is cited here]." Click "Submit." Repeat if you keep getting bee keeping videos. Shouldn't take too many repeats of this process to stop seeing such videos.

I've used this method in the past but it never worked for me. case in point: try to watch a single Joe Rogan and then try to get rid of the recommendations with this. nearly impossible. maybe certain topics are easier?

I've had success with just removing the video from my watch history.

I've never had a problem with it tbh. But ymmv of course.

I think we got nerd sniped. The algorithm worked.

However I'm curious about how someone could write their own customized recommendation engine, if the Youtube APIs even support that. One thing on my to-play-with list is http://invidio.us, code at https://github.com/omarroth/invidious, which would be a nice starting point.

You basically need the visit and like graphs (which videos were liked/watched by what users), and I don't think the YouTube API will give you that.

If you had those, a good place to start would be the alternating least squares algorithm.

The visit/like graphs are "one-class", which means you don't know if user x hasn't watched video y because x disliked it or just didn't know of its existence. That makes it harder to apply ALS, but it can be done, e.g. http://www.rongpan.net/publications/pan-oneclasscf.pdf

Same here. Presumably this is why it's on HN all of a sudden too. The YouTube algorithm works in mysterious ways.

I sometimes use ‘private’/‘incognito’ tabs or NewPipe on Android to watch one-off vids that I otherwise don't want in my feed.

But also, since the same vid popped up for me as well in the past days, and it's not the first such occurrence—I feel that it might be a not-entirely-organic phenomenon.

As did I. Up until now, I had watched maybe two videos about beekeeping in the past 6 years.

I wonder if we’re all are “binned” into some YouTube nerd classification.

It was on Reddit at around the same time: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/he2za9/beekeeper_ma...

you click on the three dots on some of the recommended videos and choose "Not Interested" in case you want to stop the recommendations.

I am not quite sure the difference between "not interested" and "don't show me this channel" option? Does the first affect the recommendation engine, and the 2nd only blacklists a specific channel from being shown to you?

Also, I don't know about anyone else with the same preferences/obssessiveness (I admit it's a bit futile in the bigger picture), but I've tried to give Youtube very strong/steady feedback about the videos it suggests to me (mostly in the negative direction), and it seems I've almost painted myself into a corner with being shown the same videos every day on the YT front page.

I have no idea how long the feedback to their recommendation engine lasts or whether it tails off with time, etc... Or whether it's really worth me continuing to do so vs. opening videos in incognito mode, etc. is more effective.

I had this weird video recommended to me of some Norwegian lady interviewing some guy who is a psychic medium. The whole channel reeked of woo.

Haven't seen any more since I hit "Not Interested"

I keep trying this with Jordan Peterson videos, but somehow YT thinks I still want to see them.

Eventually it'll work. I managed to get rid of Jordan Peterson this way.

Delete it from your viewing history.

Same for me as well