• Victor@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    How does Piped work? It just downloads all of YouTube (lol), or you tell it to archive certain channels/subscriptions kinda like Sonarr and them?

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It just runs as a proxy front end and fetches the videos as you use them. You have to set up your channel subscriptions and then if you go to your Feed, it just shows the channels, and nothing else. No algorithm spamming up your feed. No ads, uses Sponsorblock

      It’s the way Youtube should have been. There’s a bunch of public ones, https://piped.video is the one run by it’s creator. Make an account and play around before you decide if you want to run your own instance.

      • Echo Dot
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        8 months ago

        So it’s the same as just going to the subscriptions tab? I’m just a bit confused about what the difference here is.

        • EmptySlime@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          8 months ago

          Kind of? It’s more like if all of YouTube functioned like the subscriptions tab. You still have a trending page but it seems to be just the raw “this has gotten X views in Y time” kind of trending. Not the “this is what our Ineffable Algorithm God™©® thinks will maximize the amount of time you spend on our platform” kind. Then you’ve got the subscriptions page which is just chronologically all the videos from the channels you’re subscribed to. But then there’s also the stuff like sponsor block, dearrow, and such.

          It’s pretty good what little I’ve used it. It was just a bit of a pain to bring over your my subscriptions at least when I did it on mobile with the NewPipe app. I had to like download my data from Google, find the archive with my subscriptions data and give that to the app so it could find the channels I was subscribed to.

      • Victor@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I see, interesting. Thank you for explaining!

        I feel like I must be one in a million, because I actually think the algorithm is being pretty good to me. It’s giving me so many interesting new suggestions and my Watch List keeps building up to where I will never have time to catch up and I just keep adding more and more.

        I guess I’ve just been very disciplined in watching videos that are interesting to me, and not allowing anyone to watch their shit on my account. If they do, I remove that history.

        • Echo Dot
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          8 months ago

          I think a lot of people who complain about the algorithm don’t actually have that many subscriptions set up. So there isn’t really much of a guide for the algorithm on what to show people. I never get sports videos recommended or conspiracy theory videos because I never watched that kind of thing.

          My subscriptions are all science channels, and people building their own computers. The algorithm knows what stuff to recommend me and what not to because I’ve told it.

          • Victor@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            That might be it actually. I probably have hundreds of subscriptions. I also make sure to like and dislike stuff to let it know what’s up. 🙂👍