"the Algoirithm" often gets sited, but it's often a youtuber's interaction with thier audience, the pressure to keep up with demand, rising success and not wanting to miss out.
Its nuanced, part safety, partly that its a tonne of work to produce good content when you can simply switch to fluff pieces like Berm Peak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNiCtWoGonw
"The Algorithm" doesn't reward hard work, imho part of the math is our short attention spans... there's only so many time you can watch someone else vlog from a sprinter in Squamish.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5S7V5NhM8JSm7EK8IYTS...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5S7V5NhM8JRuAMsVEQ_3...
I watch photography videos on YouTube, and camera review channels consistently have far more subscribers than channels who make content about taking photos. (Or at least they did in the past - in recent years camera tech has really matured and interesting releases are much less frequent, and reviewers seem to have taken a hit).
I think people just like gear. Should YouTube not show people what they like to see?
I've watched some Berm Peak videos in the past and I mostly know the channel for its videos about builds/repairs, or his video about the history of valves. The mountain biking videos are good too, but only hold my interest for so long. If I want to see mountain biking I'm more likely to look at some of the stuff Red Bull is putting out.
But there are ways to never be shown shorts. They just tend to require avoiding the YouTube app.
Remember the World Wide Web? Even here in 2026, YouTube is still just a website -- if you want it to be. Web browsers like Firefox can still be used to block whatever you don't want to see.
So an effective way to deal with this situation is to switch to a browser, block the shorts, and then cancel premium and block ads as well.
In this way: A person can still consume the content that they want, while also protesting with their wallet.
Hell, many times I launch YouTube and it immediately starts playing a short, no interaction required. And I have "show touches" on, so I know it's not a phantom tap or something, it's doing it all on its own.
YouTube pushes shorts insanely hard.
I've also never watched a short, or if I did I immediately removed it from my watch history. I do keep that trimmed with prejudice, because the algorithm is desperate to show me something other than what I normally watch.
Why it happens with remove-animations: well I'm pretty confident they don't test with it. But it's super freakin' weird. I kinda doubt it'll get fixed though, doing so will cause "engagement" to drop, and it has been happening for most of a year now.
Luckily I use uBlock Origin and ReVanced, and I blocked all Shorts from even appearing.
But I subscribe now god damn it! Can’t I just only see what I want to see? Is this too much to ask?
The thing is, "what people enjoy while watching", "what they derive lasting benefit, memory or happiness from", and "what they click on in a thumbnail" are three different things, and youtube optimizes for the latter. Which is why youtube face is a thing.
And I think that when you spend a significant amount of time watching videos on a certain subject or from a certain channel - or when you repeatedly decline to watch videos of a certain type when they are suggested - you are signaling a very clear preference.
Are the videos the algorithm serves up something that people will "derive lasting benefit, memory or happiness from"? Probably not - but I also don't think that's what most people are looking for from YouTube. Sometimes, maybe, but more often they are just looking for mindless entertainment. Engaging with media on a deeper level requires effort. YouTube is where people go when even finding something to watch on Netflix is too much effort, let alone doing something healthy.
To keep this all in context - the parent comment was complaining that the algorithm doesn't promote videos of a guy building bike jumps in his back yard enough. I like Berm Peak - but is that something that most people would "derive lasting benefit, memory or happiness from"? No, it's not.
Anyone who hasn't seen those videos hasn't lost out on very much. And for anyone who has spent any amount of time watching videos about bicycles on YouTube - they probably have been recommended Berm Peak videos on numerous occasions. I know I have. The guy has 2.77 million subscribers and 787 million total views on his videos. Whether or not people actually watched the videos when suggested is more likely a matter of personal choice than the algorithm doing him dirty.
Which means the person that put up 1 video with a massive amount of views will get squat (but Google will gladly put in ads and take a 100% cut).
Protip: subscribe to creators that post useful but not very subscribeable videos. Sucks for creators that put up videos that don’t really relate to eachother.
Dunno why everything has to be a “channel”. That’s what search is supposed to be for.
They must do this as a global level, not an individual level.
I've never noticed a single one of those awful algo-driven apps notice that I never watch short videos and in fact I often force quit the app the second they feed me trash I don't want to see.
And they keep doing it.
I always got garbage even if it suggested things I wanted to watch too.
The best way is to disable suggestions completely and then just make a note of your favourite channels. That way you get a completely blank landing page and are forced to search out exactly what you want every time.
Whether they achieve that goal or not is a different story.
There the summary of the discussion was: Our core demographic are 60 to 70 year olds which is why we only make shows that appeal to 60-70 year olds and our core audience watches TV while doing household chores, so it needs to be simple to follow, so they can do household chores while watching.
I told them that to me this sounds a lot like circular logic, where they justify the things they are doing with the outcomes that produced. It is obvious there are other markets targeting different audiences (e.g. the likes of Netflix have been explicitly mentioned) and these markets are growing based on the way demographics shift.
A bit like a drug dealer that says he can't do honest work since all his customers are drug addicts, they are using the status quo as an excuse to persist the status quo.
The real way to think about these things is to consider them feedback loops. If all your content targets a specific demographic of course you're gonna have more audience members of that demographic, which again leads you to make more content for said demographic, which leads to more audience members of that demographic which... Until you hit some systemic limit, e.g. you have saturated the market or it turns out your content isn't that appealing to begin with in comparison to other stuff.
That means if you want to be strategic about this you need to give incentives to creators to produce stuff for audiences you don't already have. Even better: you need to become a partner these creators can and want to trust in.
These are the levers YouTube needs to pull if they want to stay a relevant platform that people enjoy spending their time on.
There are a bunch of other channels out there too that I watch from time to time, but I think the above are the best in their respective categories.
For this particular channel, I watched a bunch of his videos on this Reevo bike In January 2025, and a lot of bike/cycling related videos in general. Despite this clear preference to guide the algorithm, Youtube stopped recommending this channel to me. It disappeared from my feed.
I always suspected Youtube "motivates" creators to pay for promotion by giving them a taste for free, how it looks like to be on everyone's feed, and then takes them off.
There are two ways that I've noticed though that YouTube tends to consistently suggest older videos. One is when you first discover a new channel that you like and watch a few videos from that channel, YouTube will start recommending older videos from that channel until you've exhausted the back catalog (or lost interest).
The other way I've noticed is that when I hit the like button a video, YouTube will recommend it to me again after some time has passed. This also seems to depend on the type of video. Music videos are almost always recommended again after some time, while news videos almost never are.
I think these mechanisms are effective at driving traffic to older videos. If I look at my home page right now, most of it does tend to be newer content, but I'd estimate about 25% of it is more than a year old.
In response to your complaint about Berm Peak videos disappearing from your feed - obviously I don't know for certain, but is it possible that YouTube did suggest other Berm Peak videos after you watched a bunch of Reevo videos - but you didn't watch them? And that YouTube might have interpreted that as a lack of interest in the channel?
I've got a couple of channels that I consistently watch whenever they put out a new video. And I find that YouTube is really good about putting their videos at the top of my home page whenever a new video comes out.
I didn’t read the rest of your comment but it’s the fault of the algorithm because that tail wags the dog. It’s physically impossible to watch all videos so we are all at the mercy of the (a) algorithm.