Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- YouTube recommendations seem to be malfunctioning for many users.
- People are seeing very old videos they’ve already watched or irrelevant music playlists in their YouTube recommendations.
- The issue seems to have started around noon EST on November 25, with many users reporting the problem on Reddit.
Something is up with YouTube recommendations. It looks like an algorithm change has borked recommendations for many YouTube users, who are now seeing very old videos they’ve already watched or a bunch of music playlists.
Several YouTube users are reporting the issue on Reddit, and it looks like it cropped up just a few hours ago.
“Two hours ago, everything was fine, but since then, it’s only recommending me videos with under a 1000 views about topics I don’t care about,” wrote a user who started a thread about the problem on the r/youtube subreddit.
“I had the exact same thing happen. My feed is trash and showing all these music playlists. They messed something up,” said another user.
“Yeah, I came here to this subreddit specifically to see if anyone else posted about this. My algorithm is messed up BAD. Has been since about noon today (EST),” complained another commenter.
Another commenter agreed, noting that the issue with YouTube recommendations began around noon EST on November 25. “Since around noon, my suggestions are 99% things I’ve already watched (some going back several years) and the other 1% is things it’s suggested to me in the past month that I’m not interested in, mixed with podcast playlists from channels I do sub to (but I’ve never once used whatever YouTube podcasts are).”
We’ll be closely monitoring the situation and will reach out to YouTube for an explanation. In the meantime, it’s possible that the platform will address the issue once it becomes aware of it.
