This doesn't answer your question properly, but a few years ago when I moved away from the YouTube front end (I use FreeTube primarily), like you I initially missed the recommendation algorithm (more than I thought). But the longer I went without it, I realised that the recommendations were really fuelling a kind of mindless addiction, eventually I started to watch fewer but higher quality videos, usually based on what other humans had recommended to me and I've found that to be a much better experience overall. Remember the algorithm is designed to keep you on the platform for as long as possible, not necessarily to give you the highest quality experience.
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
27 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy Guides
16263 readers
2 users here now
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I guess i will try out watching videos other people recommend me and maybe try something else to refresh myself. thanks
Youtube's search algorithm used to be great and you could just search a topic and get good results, now it is hot garbage just like the recommendation algorithm. So just subscribe to more people?
I wish there were a way to filter out monetized content. Sometimes I just want to watch some absolute rando raving about things from a shitty phone camera.
Block tube extension has been great. I found that I didn't need to block that many channels to start having content show up that isn't from the big YouTube channels. For example tech and game searches heavily promote big channels and dominate the first several pages of search results, and suppress little ones. But, then block some of them, and suddenly it's more of the regular small YouTube channels over the YouTube as a business channels.
Thanks for the tip! I'll give it a try.
The only things I have found use the YouTube's engine to recommend. But if their privacy focused and logged out. It's only going to recommend either the generic trash that are logged out user would see, or per video recommendations you know related videos.
If there's any project that can take your channel list and then recommend new channels based on that in a privacy friendly fashion I would love to know about it.
On android there's libretube. I think it has some recommendation/related content suggestion functionality in the app.
On the web version of piped, i do not know of any recommendation feature.
I have been using Newpipe but i will give libretube a try!
I used LibreTube for a while, and I really preferred many things about its GUI and recommendations, but I switched back to NewPipe because I found myself having to fiddle with it too much to make it work. For example, if one instance isn't working it's easy enough to switch to another in settings, but it doesn't remember your login details for your NewPipe accounts, so I felt frustrated that I'd then have to launch Bitwarden and copy/paste my logon info every time.
If you're not concerned about your NewPipe accounts and only want it local to your device, it's not a problem, but I like to try to make things like my history sync between my phone and in browser on PC. (Probably not ideal for privacy, I admit.)
I tried out libretube yesterday and it seemed a bit buggy. It seems great with the recommendations and GUI but not so much feature wise. Guess i will keep using newpipe locally
You can setup bitwarden to auto fill by allowing it to use the android accessability option. Makes frequent sign ins easier. Had to sign into a bunch of apps after a factory reset and it was a breezy.
I know, but I'm not a big fan of using autofill, and it's not worth it for this niche scenario. LibreTube is literally the only app I have that behaves like this.
I can see why it would be handy in a factory reset situation, but in such a case I could just toggle it on temporarily and then turn it off again.
Understandable.
Yes LibreTube shows recommendations under the video that you're watching based on that video