These are all products that I legitimately like and want to engage with, but linking them all to a single account and more importantly a shared recommendation engine feels very flawed.

My music playlists from Youtube Music keep showing up on my Youtube homepage. Likewise, engaging with Youtube Shorts (especially subscribing) also subscribes to their youtube channel. I don’t know about anyone else, but what I find interesting in a 30 second video is not what I find interesting in a 10-30 minute video.

I feel like Google would be better served separating these recommendation engines. Even looking at this from a monetization lens, it feels inefficient. How do you guys feel? If you have any hacks or recommendations I’d love to hear them. I’m personally ready to create a TikTok account just to avoid contaminating my youtube feed.

  • I never engage with YouTube Shorts, so I’m mostly just skipping right past those. While I tried out YouTube Music after Google Play Music got shut down, I ultimately did not enjoy it as a service and started using Pandora instead. With that said, I still occasionally see recommendations of playlists on YouTube due to my YouTube Music data. It’s marginally annoying.

    All of this to say, it would probably bother me more if they were all services that I interacted with on a regular basis.

    • I originally had a Google Play Music subscription. This came with free youtube premium when that launched. My wife gets an incredible amount of value out of youtube premium as she almost exclusively watches youtube content (Game Grumps, Good Mythical Morning, etc). Youtube premium is equivalent to a netflix subscription in our household. Given that I could not drop Premium at this point, it just makes sense to stick with Youtube music vs Spotify or something. I personally don’t mind Youtube music, it works well enough for my casual music listening needs. I just hate the cross contamination of it.