So I have a real Love/Hate relationship with YouTube. And the extremes are so great. There are times I find myself cursing at YouTube. It’s algorithms are absolutely useless and – in my opinion – should be able to be customized by the viewer/subscriber.

I use YouTube one of two ways. #1 – I check on my subscriptions to see if anything warrants my curiosity and attention. #2 I search for what I want to see.

YouTubes “HOME” page and “TRENDING” page are absolutely useless to me and the greatest source of aggravation. I hate them and if I could hide them I would. As it is I just ignore them.

Why do those two pages cause me such grief. I’ll start with trending. The videos on the trending page are determined by the lowest common denominator and do not reflect quality, artistic merit or anything that could seriously be considered newsworthy or valuable. Even the different categories are basically drivel. They are just showing you what is currently popular. I HATE popularity – as any of you who have already read my “Mobius Faith” page (describing my blog) will be able to deduce. So that’s it for “Trending”. Useless drivel!

The other page is a little more complex. Your “HOME” page is things that YouTube recommends to you based on your viewing and search habits. They will push things through to you that they think you will watch. In otherwords they are creating “click-bait”. This is simply the most frustrating page of them all. While I learned a long time ago to ignore the “TRENDING” page it took me a while to get to that point with the Home Page. Again, the algorithms are completely out of whack. What is most maddening is that if you watch a video – YouTube will assume you will want to watch that video again and every other video like it so they push it to your HOME page. For me this just clutters my home page with things I have no interest in – basically I’ve watched the video I wanted now I don’t want to watch more of the same – I want to move on. For example. You watch an a video by The Stray Cats (from their VEVO channel) YouTubes algorithms will push more of that exact same video that maybe someone on a different channel has uploaded. They will also push every Stray Cats VEVO Channel video to your home page. Now it’s been said that you and I have some control over the algorithms by clicking on the menu icon beside each video (the three little dots lined up vertically) where you have the option to click on “Not Interested” and “Don’t Recommend Channel”. If you click on “Not Interested” it will ask you “Why?” Where you get the chance to click on “I’ve already watched the video” to “I don’t like the video”. From what I can tell none of the above options really does any good. They only give you the illusion of control – YouTube is still in control. You will still get thousands of useless recommendations and channels and that you are not interested in and do not like.

You may ask, “So, what if I decide to delete my history”. OMG then the cycle starts all over again and anything you clicked on above like “Not Interested” (for any reason) and “Don’t Recommend Channel” is deleted and – you guessed it – you start the cycle all over again of have stuff pushed to you that you’ve already seen and disliked or chose some other option previously mentioned. So the best option is just to ignore the “HOME” page – Like “TRENDING” it too is completely useless and more aggravating.

All that complaining aside. I do like that I can search and find anything I’m looking for on YouTube.