How to find interesting youtube channels

December 3, 2020 8:03 PM

I recently used my adblocker to block all youtube recommendations. Overall, I'm extremely happy with this change, since it means that I don't get sucked into hours-long youtube rabbit holes, but it does mean that I'm limited to the set of channels that I already know about. How do I branch out and find more interesting channels, without using the youtube recommendation algorithm?
posted by wesleyac to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: I use "unrecommender" which does the same thing as your adblocker. I go about finding new channels in a few ways:

1) I pay attention to collaborations or mentions of other channels from my current channels. This works out some of the time, often enough that it's worthwhile. (Some channels also add their favorite channels under their "channels" tab on their main page.)

2) Sometimes I do a very focused search, and see what comes up. For me this means something like "timber framing" as opposed to "building a house"--the idea being I want to see something very specific, using terms not likely to be spammed by content farms.

3) I've found a fair number of channels via the blue. If someone links to a video in a FPP and it's good, I'll poke around the creator's channel and see if it warrants a subscription. (Often I just subscribe, and then if a few weeks go by without any of their content hitting the spot, I unsubscribe...the lazy person's way, I guess.)
posted by maxwelton at 8:22 PM on December 3, 2020

If you're watching videos on non-controversial topics, I find the comments are mostly OK to read, and sometimes a commenter will mention a similar channel.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 8:41 PM on December 3, 2020

I would seriously ask Metafilter. What kind of things are you interested in?

I found "History Cold Case" recently and it was pretty good.
posted by amtho at 10:03 PM on December 3, 2020

Best answer: Look at older videos the channels you already follow have posted that are collaborations with other YouTubers, rather than waiting for a new collaboration to appear in subscriptions since fewer people are travelling right now.

The MeTa thread should be fruitful too!
posted by ellieBOA at 11:16 PM on December 3, 2020

I don't know how the adblocker works, but I've found Youtube's algorithm does pretty good at recommending content rabbit holes I want to go down. I can go to youtube.com, and every link is at least some interest to me. I find I have to scroll for a pretty long time before it starts to suggest stuff that begins to look dodgy. The key is to cull videos and channels that are of no interest to you when they pop up.

If you want to block videos posted on other sites, I don't think the yt algorithm will help that. And if you want to block stuff you like, but just don't have time to watch, it won't help with that, either.

I know the Youtube algorithm seems to be a favorite whipping boy, but it does a pretty good job of curation if you do your part. If you watch shit, it will assume you like to watch shit, you've trained it to give you more.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:20 AM on December 4, 2020