With a new feature called Hype, YouTube is trying to focus on growing the smaller channels and helping people discover and share new creators. Hype is an entirely new promotional system inside of YouTube: there’s a new button for hyping a video, and the most-hyped videos will appear on a platform-wide leaderboard. It’s a bit like Trending, but it’s focused specifically on smaller channels and on what people specifically choose to recommend rather than just what they watch.
The actual mechanism behind Hype is pretty complicated. A video is only eligible to be hyped in the first seven days after it’s published, and of course, if it’s made by a channel with fewer than half a million subscribers. Each user only gets three hypes a week, and each hype is worth a certain number of points that inversely correlates to how many subscribers a given channel has. (The idea is that smaller channels should be able to hit the leaderboard, too, so each hype to a smaller channel will be worth more points — YouTube is doing an awful lot here to try and make sure the biggest channels don’t just dominate the leaderboard.) The 100 videos with the most total points hit the top of the leaderboard.
This sounds like a neat concept.
It’ll probably end up full of spam, bots and marketed b.s after a year, but it’ll be cool at first.
“Don’t forget to like and subscribe and hype and hit that bell and leave a comment down below–inhale—it really helps this channel out.”
Based on what the YouTube frontpage looks like when I’m not logged in I can guarantee that I will have zero interest in anything that gets hyped up on a leaderboard. But YouTube will of course malform its UI so it can constantly shove it into my face like it does with shorts.
If your on desktop, here’s some unsolicited advice. If you’re on mobile, good luck…I’ve got nothing.
LPT: use unlock origin’s element picker to block any unwanted sections of youtube mixed into your feed.
“Premium” gone, “Shorts” gone, “Trending” gone, “Pay to watch” gone, “News” gone, “Survay” gone
LPT2: set a YouTube bookmark to go straight to your subscription page. This way you see the new videos you are most likely to care about first. No need to “hit the bell” and rely on notifications. When I’m caught up there, I’ll head over to home feed to see if there’s anything intresting.
LPT3: get the extention “Enhancer for YouTube”. There’s a ton of settings to basically set your playback defaults the way you like. I change the toolbar setting to " showin video playback bar" and auto expand" to get the various buttons to show up like the default ones. (The names of those setting is by memory).
“Unhook” is also good one for clearing out junk.
Lastly “DeArrow”, from the maker of SponsorBlock. This one crowd sources new video titles with the goal of replacing clickbait for an actual description of the video.
Aside from showing me stuff I’ve seen (hopefully I just missed a setting for that) I don’t really have an issue with the yt algorithm. I watch game stuff, tech and science and it shows me more of that mostly. I am logged in though, so I don’t know if that makes any difference given they are able to track your interests regardless.
To be honest with you, the algorithm is pretty good. I’m a pretty active user of “not interested” and “don’t recommend this channel” so the algorithm generally shows me stuff I already like or things I may be interested in.
What I find frustrating is that there are so many extra UI blocks shoved in between regular videos. Featured current events, rentable movies, playable games, and the fucking shorts I don’t give a shit about. Since I mainly watch on mobile I also can’t just remove those sections and even when I dismiss them, YouTube decides to shove them in my face again and again.
I just want to be left alone to watch my nerdy stuff :(
I tried the games once and they fucking suck, and then youtube wouldn’t stop trying to get me to play them more for like 4 months. I mostly use PC so shorts existing while being mildly inconvenient, isn’t an issue because I can just scroll past them. The movies have tempted me a couple times, but idk if i want to pay money for something i probably wont watch all of, actual youtube content is often more enjoyable.
The problem I see with this mostly has to do with the fact that they do not have a good apparatus in place for detecting and blocking bots. There’s nothing stopping bot farms from hyping channels that fit the criteria. We already see this with comments on videos.
I’m sceptical of the idea that an upvote system will actually reward genuine and interesting content, particularly considering this feature extends all the way up to channels with 500,000 subscribers. The most real YouTubers are those with like <10,000 subscribers; those are the channels I would like to have suggested.
This actually doesn’t sound terrible? I mean I’m sure people will find ways to abuse it, but the concept seems pretty good. There are plenty of tiny channels that could use something like this to get more attention when they put out a video.
