Youtube and Algorithmic Feeds Youtube and Algorithmic Feeds

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Marginalia

Youtube and Algorithmic Feeds

Posted June 30, 2026 5 min read Here’s why I think modern Youtube is bad, and how you can improve your experience of the site. A video page on Youtube, circa 2010. I’ve been a YouTube user for a very long time, and I watch content on the site nearly every day. My account is old enough to have predated the transition from dedicated YouTube accounts to Google accounts. I actually remember being angry for having been forced to make the transition.I have many channels that I like to watch, and I’ve even written an article about some of them which you can read here. These days I mostly prefer longer form, informational videos. And I like to listen to them in the background while I work, moresoe than watch them directly.I have noticed recently that I have been using what amounts to two entirely different versions of YouTube: one that is defined entirely by an algorithmic feed, and another that is just a list of videos from the channels that I am subscribed to. The browser profile, with just the videos from my subscribed channels. This happened because I keep a separate browser profile just for watching YouTube from my account. It keeps my saved login and site data separate from my main profile. If there is a video that I don’t want added to my history, or I’m just clicking an arbitrary link that I’ve found, It will just load in my main browser profile. This was originally an effort to preserve my privacy, but I fully realize now that it was both paranoid and futile. It’s common knowledge at this point that Google can and will take valuable data from you whether you are logged in or not. Google gets what it wants regardless, so you might as well stay logged in to gain access to your subscriptions.I would typically not spend much time on the site using my main profile but in recent months (perhaps due to laziness) I had stopped using my dedicated profile as much, and started using my main profile just to browse. This has led to me seeing a clear difference between my main and dedicated profiles: in one I get the older subscription based experience of the site, and in the other I get the the modern version which is dominated by the algorithmic feed. I mostly don’t use other social media, so my understanding of the technology is largely second-hand. I can say now that to witness it first-hand is quite frankly revolting.The obvious thing to say is that the algorithm wants you to stay on the site, and it wants your attention. That means you will be inundated by sensationalist news, pointless video reactions, and weird thumbnails featuring the YouTube Face. I have seen videos like this since the early years of the site, and to see them placed so predominately is not surprising.What bothers me most is when the algorithm uses negativity. I find it interesting and gross that there seems to be an emergent genre on the site in which the Youtuber makes a far reaching claim about how the world is horrible, will continue to get worse, and there is nothing that you can do about it. When watching these videos I noticed that I felt compelled to keep searching for related content, with the hope that I could find proof that things weren’t as bad as they appeared. All I would find is yet more ‘doom-porn’ as I prefer to call it. This appears to me to be intentional from YouTube’s perspective.The final nail in the coffin for me, and the reason I’m even writing this post is that I had noticed recently that the algorithm had started recommending me videos of people who were terminally ill, who were expressing their thoughts about the near-term ending of their lives. I never searched for such videos, and yet over a relatively short amount of time I saw nearly a dozen of them on my home page. A mindless automation used the worst of human tragedies to cynically min-max its creator’s metric of choice. I find it absolutely disgusting.That experience demonstrated that I personally need to be more careful to avoid algorithmic feeds, on YouTube or anywhere else on the internet. I suspect that sites like TikTok are just as bad, if not worse.Going forward I will be using my dedicated YouTube profile exclusively. With the right complement of extensions it is possible to have a pleasant experience on the site. The most important one is Unhook, this will remove all recommended videos from the page, leaving only content you explicitly searched for or came directly from a subscription. Additionally, I also like to use these extensions for privacy and ad-blocking:DecentraleyesPrivacy BadgeruBlock OriginI realize that the enshittification of YouTube isn’t anything new, but I wanted to share my personal experience of what has been happening to the site. Has your experience been similar? Or entirely different? Feel free to reach out, I’d be really interested to know your perspective. Send a message to mail@lzon.ca, or DM me on one of my social...