3 Questions YouTube Won't Answer!

Where are all the girl creators? Is the algorithm biased?
Hi I am Ann Reardon, How to Cook That is my youtube channel it is filled with crazy sweet creations made just for you. Join me for creative cakes, chocolate, desserts & debunking, new video on Fridays.

Feel like binge watching? Here's some more of my videos:

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Australia

[PirikkoP]

What I find incredibly frustrating is when you watch a Youtuber for years and suddenly their new videos just won't show up on your feed anymore, so you have to visit their channel regularly.
But the shittiest videos that you'd never voluntarily watch are in your feed, of course.

[rim-orwry]

ITS SO ANNOYING to type something in the search bar and ALL I GET ARE SHORTS that are IRRELEVANT to what im searching for. The search bar is USELESS now.

[hermant]

That list of top channels is downright dystopian. A bunch of garbage content preying on children and parents who don't care. Thank you Ann, never stop the amazing work you do

[morriganx]

"they don't have to share if they don't want to!"

*Zooms in on article promising transparency*

The SHADE Ann!

[Ziiiiii]

I hate how when you open youtube it opens on shorts now. I'm usually coming on to watch longform content but I get distracted by the shorts before I even get to the homepage.

[toaztelg]

YouTube search is seriously broken. And I _hate_ shorts.

[vermillionsnow]

I deliberately have never downloaded TikTok because I know my brain well enough to know that I'd be stuck scrolling for as long as I had the time to. The biggest thing that upsets me is that shorts cannot in any way be hidden, and not only can they not be hidden - they're being pushed so hard that they cannot be avoided at all.

[amandasjoberg]

The search function is so broken now, I hate it. Why, after only showing me like 10 videos related to what I searched for (of which many are shorts), does it give me other things "I might like"?! Like I literally told it what I wanted and it tries to give me something else 😡 if what I'm looking for is not in the first videos I'm just not gonna find it. I sometimes go to google to find youtube videos which is so stupid and annoying...

[spikes_johnson]

I love how this channel went from debunking cooking to debunking EVERYTHING. These videos are super well put together and always informative

[Anhilare]

what disturbs me the most are the channels clearly made for kids but not marked so, like how is this acceptable?

[Vellss]

My biggest issue is that if you type in the search bar something say "manicure ideas" you get completely unrelated videos and a lot of them are ridiculously disgusting and I found i have to click on "videos" to avoid all the shorts which are most of the problematic videos and yet still YouTube doesn't give you the option to block channels.

[catgay]

I come to YouTube specifically becaus I'm tired of the short form content thats littering every other platform. Thats the entire point of YouTube!

Thank you, Ann, for another amazing video. Not only are you an incredible food scientist and cook, but your ability to debunk misinformation and parse reality is unmatched. You're a gift to us all 🙏

[lisagraff-sands]

I love Anne's progression of getting more and more frustrated with youtube until she starts talking about such amazing topics.

[TheGlowingFairy]

Youtube search is so biased towards new and trending videos, evern when you write a very specific title looking for a specific video, it'll be like the 5th result.

[GamerAbbylee]

It's not just the algorithm that's broken, so is the search function. I'll search something like "how to cook that chocolate cake", and I'll get two videos I already watched, another content creator's cake video, and a random reaction video. YouTube doesn't give you good suggestions even when you ask for them! 😂

[whynotcaptaincrunch]

Whenever I click "don't show me this" on the YouTube shorts, it helpfully hides them and then says, "We won't show you any shorts for 2 weeks." Why 2 weeks? Why not... forever? Or until I ask for them back? Google in the past few years has really embodied that "if you're not paying, you're the product, not the consumer" ethos. Google only cares about its users to the extent that they can sell us to advertisers.

[RosannaPansino]

Thank you so much for posting this Ann. I think you perfectly captured what so many creators talk about behind the scenes. How the algorithm works on YouTube now is purely focused on specific metrics, and if you dont reach those certain benchmarks within the first hour or so of posting, your video simply isn't suggested to your audience like it used to be.

A lot of the comments here about shorts are also spot on. Of course they are taking views away from long form, just look at the homepage you showed where there wasn't a single long form video.

Once you dive into the numbers on every single DIY and Cake channel losing 90% of their viewership all at once, especially for female creators, it paints an even crazier picture.

I truly hope you continue to cover these topics as they are very important and almost no one is discussing them.

[davidci]

It's no coincidence that Youtube Shorts are so full of misconceptions and misinformation too, negativity fuels the algorithm, and of course, those ones get pushed further at the top. And even if a YT Shorts isn't meant to misinform, it's hard to cram in all necessary details in 1 minute, so you have to take out some details, which in something as detail-heavy as cooking, can be very detrimental.

[MsChampagneSanity]

Another thing I HATE about YouTube is that you can’t BLOCK channels anymore. I have spent hours researching how to block or hide searches or channels but they still show up. I’m talking about SCARY things children shouldn’t see. On the adult app you can “block for children” but they can swap between profiles very easily. Even when these are blocked on their child account it still shows.

[RichieRouge]

To me - the likes of TikTok and Shorts are almost conditioning people to have a short attention span! It’s pathetic