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.
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.