I really wish there was a way to exclude certain videos from their feed recommendation engine. Or at least put them in a different category. If someone sends me a particularly funny cat video, because it is their cat, I really don't want to get a deluge of cat videos. Also, if you are playing videos for your 2-year-old, those shouldn't influence the playlists that come up when you are driving to work (the Gummy Bears videos keep popping up in my 80's playlists).
I have done that countless of times and I still get The John Oliver Show queued up after the most unrelated videos like videos about retro computing etc.
Except that I am interested, if I happen to be playing videos for the kid. I could create another account, but I'm not sure how to tie additional youtube accounts to the youtube red service. And I'd have to remember to switch accounts before playing videos for him (they should introduce "listening profiles", and have the ability to move certain instances of watching a video to a specific profile).
The mention of sibyl, which is rarely discussed outside of Google (https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~niejiazhong/slides/chandra.pdf) is interesting. Most people really do not understand how effective simple, straightforward linear and logistic regression done on large scale data is. The Brain stuff and deep learning is nice, but the meat and potatos is still basic regression.
Perfected the feed? As a YouTube user, 'perfected' is probably the last word I'd use for it.
Instead, it seems to either:
1. Hide stuff I actually wanted to see from channels I'm subscribed to
2. Show me videos I've already seen before.
3. Show completely irrelevant videos
4. Mix up subscriptions and recommendations by recommending videos I'd already have seen if they showed me the bloody subscriptions in the first place.
And watch later... oh boy, their idea of videos to show there seems to be stuff I've either seen years ago and didn't like enough to finish, or that I've seen multiple times and didn't finish once or twice because I saw something new to watch.
Feels like a generational difference. I'm from the generation that prided itself on its ability to selectively craft one's own "feed" (RSS originally) by spending time finding the highest quality, most relevant sources of trusted content.
The author of this piece doesn't take that approach. And YouTube caters to such. [edited to be less judgmental]
I'm constantly annoyed that the YouTube homepage requires several clicks for me to find new videos posted by channels I subscribe to. The organization on the home page is different every single day. My only options are to delete suggested channels (to see them reappear a week later!!). But in small print on the side, YouTube taunts me that it actually does remember all the channels I've subscribed to. It just thinks that it knows better what I want to be watching.
And you know what? I probably do spend more time on the site because of this shitty design. But what their algorithms don't tell them is the slowly simmering resentment I have toward the site and my feeling of being in an increasingly adversarial role with Google as a whole. Maybe that feeling will never have any monetary impact on anyone, but it seems dangerous to ignore.
I'm sorry but your melodramatic attitude makes it very hard to take you seriously. Simmering resentment? Adversarial role? Come on. It's as simple as getting a YT browser extension.
> I probably do spend more time on the site because of this shitty design
Same can be said about the insufferable video suggestions that now cover half the embedded player right where you have got used to click to pause/unpause it over the years.
YouTube UX designers implement this dark pattern, then look cheerfully at their metrics as if people are really into it because they use it so much. When I know for a fact I've mis-clicked it almost every time it's popped up.
Drowning design decisions in metrics needs to die, it's just a breeding ground for dark patterns.
This has been my experience as well. I have been using YouTube for over 7 years and the feed is getting worse. I imagine it's not great on the content creator side either. I know most youtubers have been looking to view count rather than subscriber count for a success metric. That to me signals that there is less loyalty to content creators and more loyalty to topics. That loyalty shift weakens content creator's fan bases. That combined with the current user experience of the "feed" is not what I would call perfection.
The thing that bothers me most about youtube feed is that if I watch some series up until part number N and stop somewhere in between, it would offer me to watch the N+1 part in feed even though it tracks that I finished every part before that and didn't finish the Nth one.
I'm not sure what you're saying but I think I've experienced it. Youtube tries to get me to skip parts. I watch parts 1,2,3, it recommends 5 and I have to go searching for 4. Without fail it wants me to skip one.
I solve a lot of this problem by not logging in to YouTube, by using search (often DDG's !yt <pattern>), and by browsing under Incognito such that my YouTube history is effectively continuously purged.
The searches mean that what I'm shown in a specific session tend to be related to that session's focus, and not random other stuff from 18 months ago.
It's a tremendous incentive to not log in to YouTube.
Point #1 I only noticed the other day - I wondered why a handful of channels I subscribe to hadn't appeared in months on my front page. Turns out they'd been posting heaps of new videos but YT was "recommending" me other stuff I wasn't interested in (well I was interested in watching the ones I chose, not the flood of useless recommendations that followed). It just meant that i ended up Spending less time on YT
Their general-purpose video recommendations remain terrible
However, their music recommendations for me have improved drastically in the last few months. I've discovered so many obscure indie bands that it has become my go-to discovery platform now.
It also has the incredibly annoying behavior that if you watch one video you are shown of some cartoon (maybe Family Guy, or the Simpsons, or the DC Comics cartoon from the 90s), even if you didn't enjoy it, what feels like a full third of your feed will be that for days... from one video you saw... it all makes absolutely no sense :/. It would be epic if it noticed "oh, this user seems to like watching pop culture examples of this specific thing happening in the videos (such as commentary on machine learning, or politics, or the existential angst that is life itself)" and started finding such across all TV shows (as I quite like many of these shows! but that isn't why I am watching them today), but it just goes "oh, you like Futurama? OMG HAVE I GOT FUTURAMA FOR YOU".
Yeah, I don’t know when, but sometime in the past few months I’ve basically been exclusively using YouTube’s recommendation engine. While before it was kind of blunt (“you like video games, so here’s some more video game videos”), now it’s very sharp (“you’ve been interested in half life recently, and you like the video essay format, so we’ll give you half life video essays”). It’s honestly amazing how easy it makes it to reach good content.
A giant feed of neurally recommended videos, created by average people with passion in topics really feels like the future.
My biggest complaint with youtube is that the feed is awful. It doesn't help me discover new stuff I like, it doesn't even help me discover obvious stuff like new uploads from posters I like. I don't know what the hell they're doing, but I've caught myself resorting to google searches to find Youtube content that I like on more than one occasion. Maybe I'm a minority, but the entire front page of youtube is a huge miss for me.
The feed seems to be incredibly biased towards recently watched videos, to the point where clicking a single weird link on reddit is enough to fuck up my top suggested videos for a while.
Is there a way to turn off the watch-this-next feature? I sometimes show educational videos to my toddler, and if she sees the tiles of other videos, she always wants to watch them (and will often throw a fit if she's not allowed). I would literally pay money to turn off this "feature".
http://fixyt.com is one interface that avoids that. Though its search features seem broken currently.
The other option is to use a downloader (yt-download, mps-youtube -- seem my comment elsewhere) to specify only what you want to watch, without YouTube's "helpful" drug-pusher suggestions.
1 is obvious. 2 is questionable. It could be a consequence of point 1. Or it could be a matter of sneaky manipulative tactics. I am suspicious of platforms' recommendation algorithms. They are working for the interests of the platform, not necessarily mine. (But that isn't the way it needs to be. Recommendation bots independent of platforms could resolve this conflict-of-interest issue.)
Watch one video about graphics cards and then have YouTube recommend you Linus Tech Tips every day, till the end of time completely ignoring how many times you click "Not Interested" completely ignoring you have blocked his account.
Noticed several other scenarios like this where you watch a part of one video on a topic and YT's algorithm will try and force a certain YouTuber on you for the rest of the time you use that account.
This isn't perfecting this is force feeding. Respect my blocks.
The example at the top of the article is actually an example of what makes me dislike the YouTube feed. I watch one video review of a game, and now I'm getting 20 videos suggested about the same game which I only had a passing interest in.
Sure, show me a few related videos, but often it can be a large percentage of the home page taken up by a section like this.
The same over-personalisation is an issue in a lot of Google platforms. On the Google news feed in Android, when I enabled personalisation it became dominated by unimportant articles about games, films, or TV shows I'd looked up recently, and hardly any general news. Not to mention the filter bubble of Google searches in general. I find this trend of over personalisation inconvenient, and not to mention a bit creepy.
YouTube and Amazon both have an awful recommendation system. Both sites have a wealth of data, a wealth of consumables, and yet if I go to them without something specific in mind I'm pretty much only offered things I've previously viewed.
Perfected the feed? its worse than ever. And the new reskin of youtube is also the most lazy hack job I ever saw from Alphabet, its quirky even in chrome.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 61.2 ms ] threadWorks wonders for click baity videos that you're likely to regret if it affected recomendations.
In light of recent transgressions against speech on their platform, I wouldn't use the word "perfect" to describe YouTube feed.
Instead, it seems to either:
1. Hide stuff I actually wanted to see from channels I'm subscribed to 2. Show me videos I've already seen before. 3. Show completely irrelevant videos 4. Mix up subscriptions and recommendations by recommending videos I'd already have seen if they showed me the bloody subscriptions in the first place.
And watch later... oh boy, their idea of videos to show there seems to be stuff I've either seen years ago and didn't like enough to finish, or that I've seen multiple times and didn't finish once or twice because I saw something new to watch.
Otherwise I agree completely.
Feels like a generational difference. I'm from the generation that prided itself on its ability to selectively craft one's own "feed" (RSS originally) by spending time finding the highest quality, most relevant sources of trusted content.
The author of this piece doesn't take that approach. And YouTube caters to such. [edited to be less judgmental]
I'm constantly annoyed that the YouTube homepage requires several clicks for me to find new videos posted by channels I subscribe to. The organization on the home page is different every single day. My only options are to delete suggested channels (to see them reappear a week later!!). But in small print on the side, YouTube taunts me that it actually does remember all the channels I've subscribed to. It just thinks that it knows better what I want to be watching.
And you know what? I probably do spend more time on the site because of this shitty design. But what their algorithms don't tell them is the slowly simmering resentment I have toward the site and my feeling of being in an increasingly adversarial role with Google as a whole. Maybe that feeling will never have any monetary impact on anyone, but it seems dangerous to ignore.
I'm sorry but your melodramatic attitude makes it very hard to take you seriously. Simmering resentment? Adversarial role? Come on. It's as simple as getting a YT browser extension.
Same can be said about the insufferable video suggestions that now cover half the embedded player right where you have got used to click to pause/unpause it over the years.
YouTube UX designers implement this dark pattern, then look cheerfully at their metrics as if people are really into it because they use it so much. When I know for a fact I've mis-clicked it almost every time it's popped up.
Drowning design decisions in metrics needs to die, it's just a breeding ground for dark patterns.
The searches mean that what I'm shown in a specific session tend to be related to that session's focus, and not random other stuff from 18 months ago.
It's a tremendous incentive to not log in to YouTube.
However, their music recommendations for me have improved drastically in the last few months. I've discovered so many obscure indie bands that it has become my go-to discovery platform now.
A giant feed of neurally recommended videos, created by average people with passion in topics really feels like the future.
My biggest complaint with youtube is that the feed is awful. It doesn't help me discover new stuff I like, it doesn't even help me discover obvious stuff like new uploads from posters I like. I don't know what the hell they're doing, but I've caught myself resorting to google searches to find Youtube content that I like on more than one occasion. Maybe I'm a minority, but the entire front page of youtube is a huge miss for me.
The feed seems to be incredibly biased towards recently watched videos, to the point where clicking a single weird link on reddit is enough to fuck up my top suggested videos for a while.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-24/google-ro...
The other option is to use a downloader (yt-download, mps-youtube -- seem my comment elsewhere) to specify only what you want to watch, without YouTube's "helpful" drug-pusher suggestions.
1. it shows me cool new stuff
2. it keeps me on the site
1 is obvious. 2 is questionable. It could be a consequence of point 1. Or it could be a matter of sneaky manipulative tactics. I am suspicious of platforms' recommendation algorithms. They are working for the interests of the platform, not necessarily mine. (But that isn't the way it needs to be. Recommendation bots independent of platforms could resolve this conflict-of-interest issue.)
Noticed several other scenarios like this where you watch a part of one video on a topic and YT's algorithm will try and force a certain YouTuber on you for the rest of the time you use that account.
This isn't perfecting this is force feeding. Respect my blocks.
This is a console-based audio- and video-playing tool which allows me to:
1. Search for content.
2. View detailed information.
3. Search by user or YouTube playlist.
4. Selective add or remove items from a current playlist.
5. Save and manage multiple named playlists.
6. Queue up large sets of content to be accessed. Including audio-only, in background (my preferred mode).
7. Works on Android via Termux.
8. Keyboard playback controls to skip, jump, play, pause, speed, or slow playback. (Similar to mplayer's if you're familiar with those.)
9. No ads.
10. No comments.
11. No recommended "fail", "dash-cam", or "blackhead" crap. That corner of YouTube.
It's everything I've wished YouTube was, and that it isn't.
https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube
Sure, show me a few related videos, but often it can be a large percentage of the home page taken up by a section like this.
The same over-personalisation is an issue in a lot of Google platforms. On the Google news feed in Android, when I enabled personalisation it became dominated by unimportant articles about games, films, or TV shows I'd looked up recently, and hardly any general news. Not to mention the filter bubble of Google searches in general. I find this trend of over personalisation inconvenient, and not to mention a bit creepy.