Long overdue. Maybe in a few months I can watch a Joe Rogan podcast video without tainting my YouTube recommendations for the next year with Ben Shapiro-style clickbait.
On the other hand, I wouldn't know who Ben Shapiro is without having watched Rogan videos. It's an important info to have, because it tells you what people are interested in, and what they believe in. You can't communicate efficiently without knowing that.
I don't know who Ben Shapiro is so I'm just using him as an example and maybe he is noteworthy, but if the system tells everyone to watch Ben Shapiro videos of course everyone is gonna know who he is. Maybe he wouldn't be 'required knowledge' if youtube didn't force it and reinforce it on everyone.
The current system doesn't tell you what people are interested in, it tells you what the system made the people pay interest to.
Well, I assume it recommends what other people that watched similar videos watched as well.
I doubt Ben Shapiro is 'required knowledge', nor that he became popular only through youtube. Those people usually have an IRL crowd. They have IRL impacts.
> Well, I assume it recommends what other people that watched similar videos watched as well.
The problem is it creates a feedback loop and amplifies whatever is slightly over represented.
I also noticed that on LinkedIn profiles, on many high profiles ones the related section contains pretty girls profiles with unrelated positions, just because statistically they get more clicks I guess.
To take the position that people only believe stuff because it is fed to them is incredibly patronizing. Sure, the fundamental dynamic of social media (that immediate and direct feedback about what captures user attention is used to determine what users see) makes things more polarized, but people are polarized to begin with. Conservatives are conservatives because they have a fundamentally different outlook about the world, not because they just happened to fall down a specific click hole on the internet.
I have not taken that position. To misrepresent the views of others to make your argument easier is very patronizing.
My post was about notoriety not belief. Many things, trends and personalities are created by the media, whether you believe what they say or not. Flat earth conspiracies would never have been repeated by NBA players if not because of Youtube's recommendation algorithm.
Maybe so, but it now enables global reach at the speed of light.
You can't argue that the danger from a stick of dynamite is the same as the danger from a nuclear bomb. You might not care about the difference if you're standing next to it, but they are bit the same thing
You're basically saying that well done propaganda doesn't work then, which is patently false.
Watching polarizing YouTube videos isn't going to flip a bit, but constant exposure to a single perspective constantly reinforced is certainly going to influence your formation of beliefs. That's exactly what YouTube does with their recommendation system
No, that's not what I'm saying. I agree that propaganda and social media are problematic. But they can only be a problem if people pay attention. And nobody is forcing people to pay attention. Which gets to my point: people have pre-existing notions and inclinations before propaganda and social media can even have an effect.
>The current system doesn't tell you what people are interested in, it tells you what the system made the people pay interest to.
I agree with you 100% here. But this problem can't be fixed. All that's about to happen is Google is going to decide that people will be interested in something Google finds more palatable. I don't know how to fix/escape this problem.
However, who determines what is a conspaircy? The government might be deciding that Iraq has WMDs and any evidence to the contrary is a conspiracy. While some measures are needed to be taken, who decides what is? No one is truly impartial.
The censorship (while required due to how much crap is in YouTube) might devolve to 1984 without comple transparency, which we all know google isn’t providing.
There seems to be people around who still think NSA mass surveillance is a conspiracy. Heck, don't the flat earther think round earth is a conspiracy? One mans theory is another mans conspiracy.
There's some fun even around the origin of the term. In late 1963 JFK was assassinated. According to a sourced referenced on Wiki [1] the first mainstream reference to "conspiracy theory" was the New York Times who, in 1964, posted some 5 articles using the phrase. In 1967 the CIA had a psychological operation manual on discrediting conspiracy theories. [2] The reason I mention JFK there is because the conspiracy theory tactics created by the CIA were specifically relating to the Warren Commission [3].
Ultimately I've always found the term silly. People can believe idiotic things for sure, yet on the other hand I think there is an equilibrium where on one end you have people who believe no 'conspiracy theory' could ever be real, and on the other hand you have people who indulge every 'conspiracy theory' as probable. Both opposite extremes are equally naive.
Sure... some. But that's not the reason it's promoted. Paradoxically, many "fall for" it's real utility my merely lumping it in with whatever they want to discredit; disinformation is rather effective when it attaches obvious bs to other things.
Who determines when daytime is? is 7AM daytime? is 7AM in Alaska in the middle of winter daytime?
There is a discussion to be had about some topics at the edge...but 2PM everyone agrees is part of daytime; the flat earth 'conspiracy' should never be recommended to anybody.
And sadly, in the current climate, this also has to be said: This does not mean Google is picking sides. If you on your own reflections decide that for some strange reason the earth is flat, that is your right, and no one is infringing on it by not giving you a platform.
Why not? Who are you to decided what should and should not be recommended? Maybe I would enjoy watching some flat earth theory. Maybe watching it will help me understand it better so I can have a civilized conversation with one when I come across them. What about other conspiracies? What if I am researching conspiracy theories? Wouldn't flat earth theory is relevant to me?
'There is a discussion to be had about some topics at the edge...but 2PM everyone agrees is part of daytime; the flat earth 'conspiracy' should never be recommended to anybody.'
It should be recommended to anything to whom it would be relevant to. That's the whole idea behind recommendation system.
Honestly, every time I hear an argument along these lines, that any attempt at moderating content will inevitably devolve into 1984 style censorship because all terms are arbitrary and "what even is x?", it becomes less convincing.
Unless the US government bans all sites except google and turns Youtube into a direct propaganda tool and declares that publishing any unauthorized content is a crime, then the worst that can happen here is that Youtube's updated algorithm fails to serve the needs of its userbase, in which case it will probably be amended due to a drop in the site's popularity and engagement metrics.
Content that isn't recommended hasn't been censored, it's still discoverable as long as it exists on the platform, and free speech remains unaffected even when a single platform decides to alter its algorithm in a way that might slightly reduce the immediacy of certain kinds of content.
You say "a single platform" as though there is another viable platform.
Someone tried to set one up. It's called BitChute. All the payment processors blocked it.
The reality is that YouTube is not just "a single platform", it's THE platform. It's owned by a megacorporation with extreme political leanings. It's incredibly influential on votes and opinions globally. It's run with zero transparency, by a small unidentified unelected group of wealthy and powerful people.
You're just comfortable wtih this because you think they're on your side politically. Most people are comfortable with moderate levels of tyranny as long as they think it's their tribe that holds the levers of power.
But if Google was owned and run by evangelical Christians, and they were shifting their recommendations to discourage "immoral" videos of gay pride, pro-trans-rights arguments, sex worker rights, etc, you'd be incensed.
It does seem to be getting better, for a long while I had to make sure to clear my history of any conservative leaning videos or I'd end up down a rabbit hole. Too many and all of a sudden its bloody flat earth videos and other insane conspiracies. Made it very difficult to try and watch a balanced set of videos.
Personnally I find those kind of meta informations useful.
It's midly annoying to not have better suggestions, but on the other end, it gives you a perspective on what kind of people are fed with what kind of info.
Kinda like the old email chains my mother used to send me. It allowed me to understand what were her fears, hopes, and lack in understanding about things I never had the chance to talked about with her before.
Yep. I like to watch some videos of varying view points and political leanings to avoid falling into an echo chamber.
But more than. One or two conservative videos, especially about European current events, and you are sucked in to the Nazi Propaganda hole.
Another inescapable pit of content is electronic music production.
I was doing a bit of research on the teenage engineering pocket operators as a possible gift for my younger brother. Now Im almost exclusively recommend music production videos.
The way the algorithm pushes steadily more radical content is really concerning. Try making a completely fresh browser profile and deliberately browsing around right-leaning or "anti-SJW" channels and see how long it takes before YouTube starts pushing videos about white genocide and the impending destruction of western civilization by the muslim hordes (not very long in my experience).
edit:
I just tried this again and not much has changed. Started by viewing Joe Rogan's interview with Elon Musk on a fresh profile. The first suggestion from there is a Jordan Peterson anti-feminist video, from there we get a Jordan Peterson anti-islam video, then "The Suicide of Europe" by PragerU, and from there the floodgates are opened to fear-mongering about "rapefugees". That's less than a dozen clicks on highly related videos to get from Elon Musk smoking weed to videos with an overtly racist agenda, on a profile that's never sought out that kind of content previously.
> The way the algorithm pushes steadily more radical content is really concerning. Try making a completely fresh browser profile and deliberately browsing around right-leaning or "anti-SJW" channels and see how long it takes before YouTube starts pushing videos about white genocide and the impending destruction of western civilization by the muslim hordes (not very long in my experience).
Seems like they're trying to profile the user for recommendations too early, or just generally suggesting based on too small of a sample of videos. The blank profile is like a knife balanced on edge, where the slightest push will tip it one way or the other. If they'd just hold off the personalized recommendations entirely until you had 100 or 200 videos, it might be better.
It sounds like they are overfitting the recommendations.
They really need to get the users explict preference, rather than trying to infer it from what videos they watch, as that data is tainted by the recommendation engine.
Also they have killed the annotation system that most video creators have used to manually recommend videos to their viewers, which is probably going to cause even more overfitting of recommendations.
Interestingly, YouTube actually recommends liberal content at a rate substantially higher than conservative content. Centrists content links to liberal content about three times more frequently than it links to conservative content. Is there evidence to corroborate the claim that YouTube is pushing people to extreme content? The data seems to indicate otherwise.
I'm not sure I follow. The implication of your comment seems to be that extremist content is more conservative. On the whole I agree. Which is why the fact that YouTube steers people towards conservative content less than centrist or liberal content broadly contradicts the claim that YouTube is steering people to radical content.
The extremity doesn't seem to be the same in my experience. It could be because I fall slightly more that way that it's able to get a better handle on my preferences but I don't find I get suggested the insanity of the left when I watch more liberal videos in the same way I do when I watch conservative ones. It's a tricky one to measure though.
Ok, I'll bite. What exactly did Google do wrong here?
I'd be persuaded if you could show that a random walk through the recommendations ended up in far-right opinion some disproportionate percentage of the time. What you did was a goal directed search. At every point you selected the most right leaning perspective, and in the end you got where you wanted to go.
The only way to stop this from happening is to ban objectionable opinions from the platform entirely, or alternatively to disconnect them from the graph of recommendations. The latter is what YouTube's "limited state" already does.
It doesnt sound like they were choosing the most right-leaning perspective, but rather the first on the list (the one that would play after your current video finishes if you have autoplay enabled).
Well, I tried to reproduce it with a private browsing window.
That Jordan Peterson video was in the #4 position in the sidebar from the Musk interview. However, it was the first video that did not include Joe Rogan. So far so good.
Thereafter, clicking the first recommended brought me to another Peterson video, then Gordon Ramsay, and then into an endless loop of Kitchen Nightmares clips.
Certainly, there's some stochastic element here, but I'm still not convinced.
This doesn't match reality. I've watched lots of conservative videos and I've never seen anything about flat Earth or "insane conspiracy theories".
Honestly this comment thread seems like trying to build a narrative bridge between straightforward right-leaning content and bizarre conspiracies. The goal is to use censorship of bizarre conspiracies to justify censoring right-leaning content by conflating the two.
I'm very suspicious of YouTube's intent here. Given how vicious Google is towards conservatives inside their organization (see Damore) it's pretty obvious to suspect that they'll use their power to reduce the spread of right-wing ideas of all stripes. Put simply, after that display, nobody can trust them to be even-handed. Most of them are good people but they're totally dominated by the intransigent minority [0] of high-and-righteous recreational witch-hunters in their midst.
The first excuse will be they're insane conspiracies. Truly crazy videos will be censored. But that's just the bait, setting the narrative for the switch, where they narrative becomes about "racism" and they start censoring the right-most 10%, 20%, 30%, of the opinion spectrum. Criticism of Islam, support for Western culture, statements against anti-white bigotry, arguments for reduced immigration (even illegal immigration), arguments for equal legal treatment for men, arguments about biological differences between sexes or population groups, arguments about deep differences between religions will all be censored under this ever-expanding umbrella.
Even the notion that "conspiracy theories" are a right-wing thing is part of this - there are lots of left-wing "conspiracy theories" and always have been. Some openly racist and sexist ones are quite widespread right now.
Every looked into anti-vax (there is some right, but a lot of it is left)? How about the impeach trump stuff? Organic, anti-GMO, alternative medicine. Plenty of left wing nut jobs there. (some of them have a right wing component as well)
From my personal experience they've always tended to be further right, since often the anti-vaccine fear comes as a result of government mistrust as well as not trusting scientists. Very similar to the people against climate change in my opinion.
Though it's true that the anti-GMO and even anti-Nuclear sentiments I see accross the spectrum but those differ a bit from conspiracy theories in that it stems from junk science, rather than a belief in a hidden government or group wanting to personally change you.
My experience couldn’t have been further from yours. Most of the anti-vaxxers I encountered both irl and online were of the kind that is all about natural remedies and distrusting of GMOs and such (as opposed to those distrusting of government and believing in conspiracies; that kind i mostly encountered online only).
Just google for outbreaks in the US that are linked to anti-vaxxing and take a note of their locations. Most will start in heavily left-leaning areas. To clarify my point, I personally believe that anti-vaxxing is about evenly distributed between left and right wing, just for different reasons.
GMO/Monsanto, Big Petrol & all their wars, Putin controls XYZ, "The Oligarchy", "The Patriarchy", "The Privileged", Plastic straws from Europe killing turtles in the Galapagos, "Systemic Racism", The Gender Gap, etc.
I'm gonna need you to explain how 'The Patriarchy' ,'The Privileged', 'Systemic Racism' etc are somehow conspiracy theories considering they're more like social critiques around very real issues people face.
Unless you mean things you don't like are conspiracy theories in which case we might as well just call everything a conspiracy.
Being poor is a very real issue somebody can face. Attributing the cause of this state of affairs as being the intentional result of a coordinated group of people, without real evidence that this is the case, is a conspiracy theory.
I seems to me that 'The Patriarchy' / 'The Privileged' on the left are conceptually quite similar to 'The Deep State' or 'The Jews' on the right. And those are most often described as conspiracy theories, and rightly so.
If you think they're conceptually quite similar then I don't know what else to say except that you would just be objectively wrong.
The difference between a conspiracy theory and a social critique is the personal nature of it. People that believe that the 'Jews' or that 'The Deep State' is responsible for everything believe that there are specific actors, people doing things explicitly to stop someone.
When people complain about the patriarchy or systemic racism they're complaining about a large tangled of social contracts and norms that result in certain people, races, genders etc being disenfranchised. For example it's a statistical fact that a black man smoking marijuana is not only more likely to be thrown in jail but also more likely to face harsher sentences than a white man smoking marijuana. What else would you call this, other than systemic racism?
You can't point to a similar statistic, study or what not that shows 'The Deep State' is specifically targeting Donald Trump or that 'The Jews' are attempting to kill all white people. You can, however, point to specific actions and trends the FBI has taken in the past to disenfranchise black people, including actions taken against Martin Luther King Jr.
One side explicitly has a factual basis behind it. The other does not. That's what makes one a conspiracy theory, and the other something worthy of scrutiny.
> You can't point to a similar statistic, study or what not that shows 'The Deep State' is specifically targeting Donald Trump
It usually gets more personal at the extreme. People will show you stats that shows a disproportionate majority of federal employees supporting the Democratic party and infer that there is 'systemic bias', some will point at specific cases and make leaders of hidden conspiracy out of them. I've seen enough of 'Kill All Cops' to know that there is similar extremes on the left.
You seemingly avoid the core conceit here, which is making me think you're not actually here to argue in good faith.
Yes, there are going to be people that will take anything to an extreme. That does not make 'Systemic Racism' somehow a conspiracy theory, especially on the level of things like the 'Deep State'. Arguing otherwise is to me the highest delusion.
The strange thing about slippery slope is that it is both a logical fallacy and an effective means to accomplish political objectives (of course one does things incrementally)
Left wing conspiracies are usually narrow in scope: the Republican party, the Koch brothers, George Soros, Dick Cheney, the Oil Industry, its not really the same as a intra-national conspiracy that transcends party lines.
This is exactly my experience. I've watched many videos from conservative content creators on YouTube to understand their perspectives, and by and large I found them to be reasonable and not dissimilar in their balance to the content I usually watch. I did not find conspiracy theories, flat out lies, or other extremist content either nestled within those videos or recommended to me in other videos. They may exist out there, but I haven't been exposed to them.
The Buzzfeed article (and others like it) is ultimately just a collection of anecdotes. It is not data that reflects my reality and I expect it does not reflect reality for many of YouTube's users. However, it provides a lot of confirmation bias for those who look at the existence of content/perspectives they disagree with and have an urge to want to erase that content wholesale. It feeds into what seems to be a crisis manufactured by some activists on Twitter and some news outlets (like Buzzfeed).
And of course, it dehumanizes the right and their experiences/perspectives by associating them with terms like 'radicalization', or 'conspiracy theory', or 'fake news', which are probably not only exceedingly rare but also present on the left.
"The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four exists in a state of perpetual war among the three major powers. Two of the three states are aligned against the third: Oceania and Eurasia against Eastasia or Eurasia and Eastasia against Oceania. However, as Goldstein's book points out, each superstate is so powerful that even an alliance of the other two cannot destroy it, which results in a continuing stalemate. From time to time, one of the states betrays its ally and sides with its former enemy. In Oceania, when that occurs, the Ministry of Truth rewrites history to make it appear that the current state of affairs is the way it has always been, and documents with contradictory information are destroyed in the memory hole." [0]
They're making a reference to the novel 1984, in which governments routinely recast history such that the current status quo "has always been this way".
> They're making a reference to the novel 1984, in which governments routinely recast history such that the current status quo "has always been this way".
Though the reference they're making is so irrelevant to this story that it verges on a non sequitur. This action is more akin to developing a spam filter for your email service than a government totally rewriting history for political reasons.
If you're going to reference a work as well-known as 1984, make sure it's a very apt reference.
It would be great if Youtube actually stopped recommending irrelevant videos that I do not care about (the recommended for you videos) and instead only showed videos in the sidebar that are relevant to what I am watching at that very moment. If I am watching a conspiracy video then I would prefer it if I got another conspiracy video as a suggestion rather than a random cooking video - and it actually goes the other way too! Every time that I go to watch a gaming or a programming video at least one of the suggestions is some lame political or conspiracy-related video.
They should introduce some features that allow better search or a hierarchical directory for ppl who like to pick and choose. Perhaps allow a more descriptive presentation of the creators themselves. Not everything needs to be a flat feed.
Seems to work fine for me. You just have to click "not interested" on every video of the topic that you don't like and after 5 times or so it stops recommending that topic.
Let's say you watched a video called "Top 10 most amazing things you never knew until today" and now the youtube algo recommends you a bunch of clickbait. Just hit "not interested" on every single clickbait video you see and eventually it stops showing you those videos unless you watch more of them.
I would like a spam bayes like detection and js modification add-on.
I would flag a video title as clickbait and the algo learns what I think, and then when it sees a similar title in the recommended list it removes the div from the page.
But who gets to decide what counts as a "conspiracy"? It's very easy to suppress true and inconvenient information by attaching some vague and undesirable label to it, e.g., the Soviets abusing mental health diagnoses to silence dissidents.
I'd rather have conspiracy videos in my feed than give the YouTube content moderation people the power to decide what counts as conspiracy.
I know what you mean, not I can't think of any other way I would fully trust. What committee would l trust? I suppose the only thing we can do is to require more transparency.
What about the endless "Anonymous Sources say..." Trump/Russia collusion stories that appear regularly in the Buzzfeed, NY Times, CNN and Washington Post that never lead anywhere? Are these classified as conspiracy theories?
Unfortunately things are converging on the Chinese model. Young people in the US have been so brainwashed against anything really critical of the government that they are literally earnestly requesting political censorship.
I downvoted you because YouTube made no indication they're censoring anything at the behest of the government. They're also not removing content, just adjust what's recommended.
I sorta view actively suppressing information, while not completely removed, as censoring...which YouTube very much does.
There’s plenty examples of things that should have been on trending by every possible metric, but never gets there. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen PewDiePie appear in my recommended section, even though he’s the only creator I consume regularly. I have to find him in my notification list, on the site, buried.
Replace "government" with "Silicon Valley groupthink" and the same argument applies. Meanwhile, Google is happily doing business in China & other oppressive country when I'm absolutely certain they do censor based of government standards.
How so? They are changing how recommendations work, they aren't removing videos based on agenda. I am also wondering how the brainwashing comment comes into play here, just because people do not believe in a conspiracy theory doesn't mean they are brainwashed. I also do not remember ever asking to be censored.
The recommendations determine what people see. People in this thread are asking youtube remove content from their feed that does not tailor to their worldview. The problem is that the worldview many young people have is highly dictated by the government and any serious accusations toward the government are labeled as conspiracy. Conspiracy is auotomatically associated with insanity. The reason I use an extreme word like brainwashing is because many people have been given such a strong bias that it is impossible for them to accept the possibility of serious criminal immoral activities by their government.
YouTube suggestions are worthless now. Used to be if you were watching "Jack cooks a 4 course meal part 2" the recommended videos would be "Jack cooks a 4 course meal part 3", Part 1, and some other videos by the same user. Now it's a host of other unrelated bullshit.
it changed from being “users who watched this video watched X next” to “You would like Y videos based on your watch history” (somewhat biasing the first 2 or 3 to be related to current video)
I like that it seems heavily based on the watch history because it gives me some control.
In general I find the selction on the homepage to be useful, however it does take some work as I regularly remove a lot of random things.
I also open random videos in a private window to keep my watch history more focused.
So it works fairly well for me, bringing up videos from channels I like that I haven't seen before... but it takes effort to get it to work for me. So it is arguably not very good for a typical user.
A few weeks back I got a weird fan biopic of Himmler created by some account with the SS logo in their picture recommended to me after watching a video on some obscure DNS features. I reported it but it's still there.
Google is beyond broken. Chasing those engagement numbers on a forever treadmill, just hoping they inch up a little more at any cost.
I remember that! That system was so sensible, it was great when I was following the lessons on ExcelIsFun/VBAisFun. The next video in the series would play seamlessly.
Now, thanks to the all powerful algorithm, I can watch a video about a rescued pitbull living with his new family, and have it followed up by "10 times Ben Shapiro owned the libs".
I still get the old-style suggestions from time to time. It seems like the functionality is still there to display videos related to the one you're watching, but half the time it displays the same mix of recommendations you get on the youtube homepage. I'm not sure what it is that triggers the related video recommendations instead of the "personalized" recommendations.
I went through a "This Old Tony" binge a couple months ago because i stumbled upon one of his videos and youtube kept recommending more. But that seems to be the exception rather than the norm.
I was curious why this is happening now. Someone mentioned it may be because I was using an adblocker or had privacy settings on google too high, I haven’t checked.
Currently I see absolutely zero related content next to the current video I’m watching, from the current user or the subject matter.
Tweet: "Ugh. G-mail's suggested responses to an update from my aunt about my uncle's fight with cancer.
Google Mail suggests: Will do! So cute! Love it!"
------------------------
If this is the quality of AI and their suggestions machine learning, then I have serious doubts. I'd figure the word "cancer" would be enough for basic sentiment calculators to go 'give somber sad answer', not "Love it!"
We currently don't allow our son to watch anything on youtube, simply because it's a cesspool of horrible videos for children. You're always almost one click away from some violent video where cartoon characters are getting their limbs chopped off, etc. And it's sickening that Google's done nothing about it.
Secondly, I can't watch any video without it taking over my recommendations. Alex Jones for example. I still haven't watched an Alex Jones video (I was curious about what rubbish he spews), without worrying that I'll get a bunch of delusional hyper-conservative drivel taking over my recommendations.
There should be a way to watch a video once and not have it take over your recommendations.
On the one hand, we find that we're making great strides in certain areas with ML. On the other hand, recommendation systems are still just so, so, so naive and bad.
My anecdotal experience agrees. I cleared my watch history and then all my recommendations changed from being tech related to more pop culture oriented for a few weeks
What do you want them to do? I'm an adult who uses YouTube and I don't want sanitized kid-friendly recommendations just so that you can protect your son's eyes from cartoon violence. In fact, several of the creators I like have been pinched hard by changes to the All-Powerful Algorithm which seem to be deliberately de-emphasizing anything that could be remotely considered offensive, and it's not fair to them at all.
How about employing 10 people of this massive platform to curate some channels that people can easily subscribe to? It could literally be advertised to be kids-friendly and not dumb etc.
Employ human curated collections, no algorithms. There is simply no other way that guaranteed kid-friendly content will exist in a space. Otherwise people will game the algorithms and you get Elsa-gate.
I’ve talked about this before, but if you have kids, the only surefire solution is curating the videos yourself and downloading them. Then playing them offline. Anything else is a gamble, which may or may not be the route you want to take.
YT cracking down on videos also has a lot to do with skittish advertisers. I’m not sure if a solution is possible other than utilizing Patreon, librepay, etc. Even if you don’t make “controversial” content, that’s what most people do these days for consistency, as well as merchandise.
YouTube Kids is a separate app and it has an option to only allow human-vetted videos. From the support site:
"In this setting, your child will only be able to watch videos, channels and collections that you have hand-picked. Collections are videos and channels grouped by topics, such as science and music, picked by the YouTube Kids teams or our partners."
Sorry to be so cynical, but I do not trust youtube whatsoever. Do you trust random "partners" of youtube? I don't.
YT has proven themselves incapable time and time again when it comes to dealing with human support and services. I cannot read PR text from them and just believe it.
Nobody needs to watch an Alex Jones video to have an opinion on the man. He is a garbage person who spreads lies and propaganda. This isn't an opinion, this is Jones' own admission in court of what his program represents.
I noticed that you started the article by transferring guilt from an crude, anonymous Youtube comment about illegal immigrants, to a video posted by a think tank which was designated as a "hate group" by a private organization based on vague criteria, to a fickle recommendation algorithm which picked a valid (related content, just from a different angle) video, to Youtube and Google the company.
I also noticed that every one of the "bad recommendations" you picked out in your article falls on one side of the political spectrum.
My question is: when you cause a $1T monopoly with unprecedented control over the world's information to enhance its censorship algorithms with a news article, what motivates you? Is it just the feeling of power? Do you recognize that you have a particular viewpoint or philosophy that you're trying to protect? Or do you believe that you're only seeking the truth, that you're right, and everyone else is wrong?
edit: forgot another possible motivation: getting paid to do it, raised whole life to do it, don't care any further than that. (I'm not just trying to impugn, I literally have no idea what goes through journalists heads when they write articles like this)
Agreed! What I have found is that most legitimate popular YT kids content (Blippi, Pinkfong, etc.) is also available repackaged and included in Amazon Prime. I've been using that for most kids content instead, as it's not just sponsored toy unboxing crap and I don't need to worry about weird auto-playing recommendations or commercials.
Tangent: I'm expecting a kid, and time will come in couple years, when I'll want to show them kid videos. I fully intend to set this up as streaming from a library curated by my wife & me, populated with youtube-dl and through other means.
I know some people on HN have such setups; could you share recommendations for hardware and software stack? I suspect a Raspberry Pi may not be enough (having network and USB sharing capacity), especially if we want to simultaneously stream movies for ourselves. But I also don't want to turn it into some $1k+ server build, the way they do on /r/plex and elsewhere. Could anyone recommend a "compromise" setup, that would allow to comfortably stream HD videos to 2-3 devices simultaneously?
If you're in the United States, 90% of the population can receive the 24/7 PBS Kids channel over the air for free.
If you're worried about the quality of content from YouTube, or the chances that someone gaming the system dumps questionable content into your stream, it's worth spending ten bucks on an antenna. It's also good for supplementing your child's YouTube viewing when YT starts showing the same stuff over and over.
Not in the US; unfortunately, I don't think Poland has a dedicated government channel for kids.
Still, I want to make it video-on-demand, but with content fully curated by us - to avoid age-inappropriate content, ads and recommendations. There's no way I'm going to let my kid touch raw YouTube in the next decade.
It may not be much help, but I've found minidlna to be a reliable, simple, lightweight media server on my LAN. I expect it could run well on a low-power device. Any DLNA/UPNP device can stream from it.
I don't have much to add, other than I have had some good results with using the application "4k video downloader" to grab playlists on youtube. I'm not a fan of the generic name, but it does what it sets out to do and is fairly cheap. I'm sure everything can be done with youtube-dl, but I don't have a ton of experience with that.
I am able to get most of the videos downloaded and converted using that application. Sometimes I have to go and manually get a couple of videos that failed to download, but the app has served me well.
Whatever you do, keep the kids off youtube unless you want to deal with nightmares and other unpleasantness.
(I have a seven year old and a three year old)
In the end we just settled on netflix and the national broadcasting company (NRK), but I do have a synology nas with some stuff that I can stream to mobiles/ps4 via dnla or apps which would do most of what you want.
Have you used YouTube Kids in the last ~6 months? They made a lot of changes and enabled a mode where only human-vetted videos from topics/creators you select can play. I don't have kids but had assumed that problem was largely addressed.
No it has not. An average person wouldn’t have time to tweak the unknown changes thrown by unknown developers at them for their kids viewing experience. Nobody should trust the YT for kids because their primary motivation is not kids safety or education. When my daughter uses PBS Kids or Khan Academy Kids, I don’t have to worry about what they are throwing at her (relatively). YT on the other hand is a pure disaster waiting to happen to parents, if they don’t know (I was in that boat for some time).
How does one report videos to Youtube that violate their policies and actually get them to do something about it. It appears one can talk about the Holocaust not being real / that people don't get killed in mass shootings in the United States all they want and keep their monitization / Superchats.
What's the problem with videos like you mentioned?
Do you think all videos in which people are wrong about things should be taken down?
If somebody writes on their blog that they don't think the holocaust is real, should their blog get taken down, or is there something different about it being a video?
In my opinion, YouTube has gone much too far towards the side of taking down videos rather than leaving them up. We don't need to be calling for them to be even more strict with removing videos that people don't like. If you don't like it, you don't have to watch it.
If your goal in taking down conspiracy theory videos is to kill the conspiracy theory, I think that may actually be counterproductive. If the video stays up and everyone laughs about how stupid it is, nothing bad happens. If the video gets taken down then it just provides them an opportunity to shout about how they're trying to spread the truth but they're being silenced by the establishment.
I think that videos that say kids didn't die in school shootings should not be allowed to make money off of said videos especially when they try to get people riled up to harass the survivors and their parents.
Furthermore I expect Google to apply their policies evenly which they don't. If violations of Google ToS are reported they should be taken care of don't you think.
It isn't like you can actually debate them on their channels either as they delete comments that don't support them the vast majority of time.
> You seem to be against people putting out content that don't align with your views
Not GP, but I see this a lot as a retort to people who make the claims they did and I tend to call BS on it.
I strongly suspect there is an extremely broad library of "content that doesn't align with their views", including an extremely broad spectrum of political views, they would have zero issues with on YouTube.
Somehow, climate denialism, antivax content (and other health hazards), holocaust denial, general nazi shit etc are consistently not part of that.
Now GP can come in, correct me and tell me that they want everything they ever would disagree with off Youtube for good. But somehow, I suspect they won't.
So, tangential to your post but, tell me: why is it that there's such a consistently-easy-to-define line for content that a lot of people think should be kept off various platforms, and why the hell is it that, whenever I see someone defending such content, it's almost always someone who belongs in the category of people who believe in said content, rather than a staunch defender of free speech.
I ask this knowing full well there are many people I hold in very high esteem, who legitimately do defend extremely vile shit they disagree with, based on free speech principles. Most of those people I personally know work at the EFF and I've never heard them say much about deplatforming nazis. (could it be because free speech is a government thing, not a youtube thing …)
> why the hell is it that, whenever I see someone defending such content, it's almost always someone who belongs in the category of people who believe in said content
Since nobody here has given any indication that they believe in these ideas, it's probably because you simply assume that anyone defending it believes in it.
Possibly also because the concept of not wanting to take down objectionable videos is a "weird" idea, and people who are willing to take weird ideas seriously probably have lots of other weird ideas.
The counterargument here is that "everyone" doesn't laugh about how stupid these videos are. Many people do, maybe most people, but some go, "Well, yeah, it's kinda crazy and stupid, but it makes you think." Fringe ideologues may upload videos to YouTube in part to hear themselves speak and to preach to the choir, but they also expand their audience and reach.
Do you think all videos in which people are wrong about things should be taken down??
Suppose Video A posits "your computer has a little gremlin inside of it and you should shove an oatmeal cookie into the CD slot at least once a month to keep the gremlin happy" and Video B posits "the Jewish-controlled mass media is conspiring to make us believe school shootings are a real thing and you should stockpile weapons for the coming race war." They are both technically "videos in which people are wrong about things," but isn't there a qualitative difference between those two things? Don't you think it's defensible for YouTube to take down Video B without taking down Video A?
What really bugs me is when a video literally has "Episode 18" in the name, but somehow the recommendation list on the right side fails to find the one with "Episode 19".
But if I want to go watch Episode 5 again or jump ahead to Episode 26, it's happy to help. Awesome.
What would be even better is if they had somewhere that you could just specify what episode it is in a series rather than it try to guess based on titles
This is not available to... well, almost anyone. Seriously try searching for it. Every permutation of your search terms will bring you back to one of three results that all heavily imply or say that it's available to a select handful of channels
It's not even subscriber gated or verified channel gated, it's someone at youtube for some reason flicked the switch on for this channel gated
The problem is when you first find a video that's interesting you don't necessarily find the playlist that it belongs to. (or worse, you find it in someone else's playlist which includes the video along with other seemingly random videos that the playlist creator was interested in)
Sometimes they're in a playlist, but sometimes I'm not watching via the playlist. Like if I know that episode 19 is the next one I need to watch, I go in search and find "Super cool series episode 19", and then I watch it.
I don't search for the playlist, then go to the playlist and scroll through to the episode I want, then pick it.
But then since I didn't go to the playlist, now YouTube can't recommend the incredibly obvious next video in the series.
I wish they would fix their iPad app. I'm learning to play guitar with the JustingGuitar channel. Justin has created playlists that match his book that I bought. But as soon as I play a video from that list, it seems to lose that context.
Plus, on the iOS app there's no way to search within a channel or playlist. If I want to find Justin's lessons on a Nirvana song I have to search "justin guitar nirvana" rather than just "nirvana" when I'm on that channel.
The app is better than the website in other ways so I'm reluctant to do that. I actually called YouTube and talked to somebody about this. Whether or not that makes a difference, who knows?
As I remember at least some series videos used to be recommended in order, but I haven't seen that in a while.
The behavior that really gets me now is having the top recommended videos on my YT homepage ones I've watched... Recently. I can watch a video from my notifications, and then have it stay at the top of my homepage until I hide it manually. Refreshing the page changes some videos, but rarely the top few.
Of course, hiding the video helps but I get tired of having to do it constantly. I think I'm resigned to my YT homepage being useless at this point.
It's possible your adblocker is preventing YouTube from tracking your watched video history. I know pi-hole does this by default unless you whitelist certain domains.
user agent hits Google random-string.googlevideo.com/videoplayback with referrer, ip, signature and several other parameters coding your individual user id, Google knows every single time who, why and when requested particular resource.
Just because they have the data doesn't necessarily mean that they use it. They might rely on some javascript XHR to tell them when a video is really watched. Just guessing here.
I think this behavior is probably driven by people like me, who use youtube mostly for music. I repeatedly listen to/watch performances on youtube because to me it's the only streaming service I have. I frequently come to youtube just to watch stuff I've already seen. I find the recommendation in that context to be uncannily good and they keep me coming back to find new music and to see the cool performances I've already seen. Maybe youtube has trouble differentiating these use cases?
I think when you turn off tracking what you watch it warns you this will happen. it does this for me i think and didnt before i turned off watch history.. but maybe i am just imagining that. And maybe you havent turned off watch history.
That's even worse when you make videos, especially when they search for something that is episodic like a let's play.
I'd much rather have youtube recommend episode 1 or the first video of the playlist to people but instead it gives them a random one in the middle. This causes the viewer to get mad and press thumbs down. This also makes the "average viewed minutes" go drastically down.
That's probably the source of most of my thumbs downs.. It also causes ridiculous stats like episode 27 of 50 has 100 times the number of views as the first episode but not more view time.
That recommendation issue you point out is extremely annoying since YouTube has no way to reverse the order of videos in a playlist. More often than not for some reason Let's Play and other chronological video authors create their playlists in a reverse chronological order, latest first so it's basically impossible to binge them unless you manually click on the next episode yourself.
It's actually just a playlist setting for the creator but the default is reverse and that makes the whole list useless. You even have chrome and firefox plugins to fix it.
I also link the playlist in each youtube description but unfortunately they are not so easy to spot on app/tv/game consoles.
Also, in this case I think it's OK to youtube-dl the list and play them in order locally.
You know the exact date of Episode 18 so you assume Episode 19 was published soon afterwards. So you go into the profile and click videos.
You realize that the date is not even listed, it just says "x months ago", or "x years ago". And since this video was from two years ago you have to sift through all videos of the last two years. And you can't just ctr+f. You have to go to the bottom to load the next 30 or so videos.
The user interface for these kinds of sites are just incomprehensible poor.
I wish YouTube kept better tabs on what I've watched and not re-recommend them. I especially wish they wouldn't automatically add to the automatic play list videos I've already seen.
For a short time, you could actually hide a video in your subscriptions by just clicking one button (an "X" overlayed in top-right). Best feature ever. Now it takes two clicks and mouse movement to hide.
Why do they recommend the same five videos of a series (like Barefoot Contessa) over-and-over when I've watched them already?
I don't want to say "not interested" because I don't know what that means... I want a feature where it's like "more like this, but not this one in particular."
It's surprising they've been under Google's control for a very long time and yet their main recommendation algorithm still leaves a lot to be desired.
That just makes it seem like their algorithm is powered by bad code or bad management, or both. They know what I've watched. They should know if a video is likely to be watched repeatedly (ie. classifying songs/music videos differently from other content).
I banned thousands of channels in Russian language, but Youtube never stop attempts to convince me to watch an another video about Putin or mighty Russia.
How to ban all videos per country of origin or/and per language?
edit:
Moreover, how to bless my native language in Youtube and Google?
For some insane reason, no matter what video I watch, I almost always get recommendations for Penn & Teller. Doesn’t matter that I don’t care about that even a little bit, and haven’t watched one of their bits for years. Doesn’t matter that I was just watching a technical tutorial. Doesn’t matter that I was just listening to a music video. Doesn’t matter if I just played a Thomas and Friends video for my kid. I mean, wtf? I want a “why am I seeing this recommendation” button at this point, because my curiosity has gotten the better of me and I want to see how this magic trick is done. Oh, hey, wait a minute...
I would love to see youtube add more videos to the recommended section. Right now I believe the limit is 18. When you load the homepage it shows you 12 tiles and you can click "show more" to display 6 more for a total of 18.
Yeah, this is the most annoying thing for me too. They have an endless stream of recommendations if you go to www.youtube.com/feed/recommended , so why not put it in the main page?
I can only assume that it's an intentional marketing thing to get people to watch other things.
310 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadThe current system doesn't tell you what people are interested in, it tells you what the system made the people pay interest to.
I doubt Ben Shapiro is 'required knowledge', nor that he became popular only through youtube. Those people usually have an IRL crowd. They have IRL impacts.
But I see your point.
The problem is it creates a feedback loop and amplifies whatever is slightly over represented.
I also noticed that on LinkedIn profiles, on many high profiles ones the related section contains pretty girls profiles with unrelated positions, just because statistically they get more clicks I guess.
My post was about notoriety not belief. Many things, trends and personalities are created by the media, whether you believe what they say or not. Flat earth conspiracies would never have been repeated by NBA players if not because of Youtube's recommendation algorithm.
I also remember when I watched in disbelieve people saying the sun was going around the earth.
Internet is just the reflect of human nature. Flat earth theory would have existed without it.
Watching polarizing YouTube videos isn't going to flip a bit, but constant exposure to a single perspective constantly reinforced is certainly going to influence your formation of beliefs. That's exactly what YouTube does with their recommendation system
I agree with you 100% here. But this problem can't be fixed. All that's about to happen is Google is going to decide that people will be interested in something Google finds more palatable. I don't know how to fix/escape this problem.
Worse, people that said it was a conspiracy are now calling other things conspiracy, without any consideration for their past errors.
Ultimately I've always found the term silly. People can believe idiotic things for sure, yet on the other hand I think there is an equilibrium where on one end you have people who believe no 'conspiracy theory' could ever be real, and on the other hand you have people who indulge every 'conspiracy theory' as probable. Both opposite extremes are equally naive.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory#Etymology_an...
[2] - https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-23/1967-he-cia-create...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Commission
Sure... some. But that's not the reason it's promoted. Paradoxically, many "fall for" it's real utility my merely lumping it in with whatever they want to discredit; disinformation is rather effective when it attaches obvious bs to other things.
There is a discussion to be had about some topics at the edge...but 2PM everyone agrees is part of daytime; the flat earth 'conspiracy' should never be recommended to anybody.
And sadly, in the current climate, this also has to be said: This does not mean Google is picking sides. If you on your own reflections decide that for some strange reason the earth is flat, that is your right, and no one is infringing on it by not giving you a platform.
'There is a discussion to be had about some topics at the edge...but 2PM everyone agrees is part of daytime; the flat earth 'conspiracy' should never be recommended to anybody.'
It should be recommended to anything to whom it would be relevant to. That's the whole idea behind recommendation system.
Unless the US government bans all sites except google and turns Youtube into a direct propaganda tool and declares that publishing any unauthorized content is a crime, then the worst that can happen here is that Youtube's updated algorithm fails to serve the needs of its userbase, in which case it will probably be amended due to a drop in the site's popularity and engagement metrics.
Content that isn't recommended hasn't been censored, it's still discoverable as long as it exists on the platform, and free speech remains unaffected even when a single platform decides to alter its algorithm in a way that might slightly reduce the immediacy of certain kinds of content.
Not all slopes are slippery.
Someone tried to set one up. It's called BitChute. All the payment processors blocked it.
The reality is that YouTube is not just "a single platform", it's THE platform. It's owned by a megacorporation with extreme political leanings. It's incredibly influential on votes and opinions globally. It's run with zero transparency, by a small unidentified unelected group of wealthy and powerful people.
You're just comfortable wtih this because you think they're on your side politically. Most people are comfortable with moderate levels of tyranny as long as they think it's their tribe that holds the levers of power.
But if Google was owned and run by evangelical Christians, and they were shifting their recommendations to discourage "immoral" videos of gay pride, pro-trans-rights arguments, sex worker rights, etc, you'd be incensed.
It's midly annoying to not have better suggestions, but on the other end, it gives you a perspective on what kind of people are fed with what kind of info.
Kinda like the old email chains my mother used to send me. It allowed me to understand what were her fears, hopes, and lack in understanding about things I never had the chance to talked about with her before.
But more than. One or two conservative videos, especially about European current events, and you are sucked in to the Nazi Propaganda hole.
Another inescapable pit of content is electronic music production.
I was doing a bit of research on the teenage engineering pocket operators as a possible gift for my younger brother. Now Im almost exclusively recommend music production videos.
edit:
I just tried this again and not much has changed. Started by viewing Joe Rogan's interview with Elon Musk on a fresh profile. The first suggestion from there is a Jordan Peterson anti-feminist video, from there we get a Jordan Peterson anti-islam video, then "The Suicide of Europe" by PragerU, and from there the floodgates are opened to fear-mongering about "rapefugees". That's less than a dozen clicks on highly related videos to get from Elon Musk smoking weed to videos with an overtly racist agenda, on a profile that's never sought out that kind of content previously.
Seems like they're trying to profile the user for recommendations too early, or just generally suggesting based on too small of a sample of videos. The blank profile is like a knife balanced on edge, where the slightest push will tip it one way or the other. If they'd just hold off the personalized recommendations entirely until you had 100 or 200 videos, it might be better.
They really need to get the users explict preference, rather than trying to infer it from what videos they watch, as that data is tainted by the recommendation engine.
Also they have killed the annotation system that most video creators have used to manually recommend videos to their viewers, which is probably going to cause even more overfitting of recommendations.
https://www.thepostmillennial.com/does-youtube-facilitate-ri...
I'd be persuaded if you could show that a random walk through the recommendations ended up in far-right opinion some disproportionate percentage of the time. What you did was a goal directed search. At every point you selected the most right leaning perspective, and in the end you got where you wanted to go.
The only way to stop this from happening is to ban objectionable opinions from the platform entirely, or alternatively to disconnect them from the graph of recommendations. The latter is what YouTube's "limited state" already does.
>The first suggestion was...
It doesnt sound like they were choosing the most right-leaning perspective, but rather the first on the list (the one that would play after your current video finishes if you have autoplay enabled).
That Jordan Peterson video was in the #4 position in the sidebar from the Musk interview. However, it was the first video that did not include Joe Rogan. So far so good.
Thereafter, clicking the first recommended brought me to another Peterson video, then Gordon Ramsay, and then into an endless loop of Kitchen Nightmares clips.
Certainly, there's some stochastic element here, but I'm still not convinced.
Honestly this comment thread seems like trying to build a narrative bridge between straightforward right-leaning content and bizarre conspiracies. The goal is to use censorship of bizarre conspiracies to justify censoring right-leaning content by conflating the two.
I'm very suspicious of YouTube's intent here. Given how vicious Google is towards conservatives inside their organization (see Damore) it's pretty obvious to suspect that they'll use their power to reduce the spread of right-wing ideas of all stripes. Put simply, after that display, nobody can trust them to be even-handed. Most of them are good people but they're totally dominated by the intransigent minority [0] of high-and-righteous recreational witch-hunters in their midst.
The first excuse will be they're insane conspiracies. Truly crazy videos will be censored. But that's just the bait, setting the narrative for the switch, where they narrative becomes about "racism" and they start censoring the right-most 10%, 20%, 30%, of the opinion spectrum. Criticism of Islam, support for Western culture, statements against anti-white bigotry, arguments for reduced immigration (even illegal immigration), arguments for equal legal treatment for men, arguments about biological differences between sexes or population groups, arguments about deep differences between religions will all be censored under this ever-expanding umbrella.
Even the notion that "conspiracy theories" are a right-wing thing is part of this - there are lots of left-wing "conspiracy theories" and always have been. Some openly racist and sexist ones are quite widespread right now.
[0] http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf
Unless you can give me examples of conspiracy theories and their peddlers on level of Alex Jones for the far left.
Though it's true that the anti-GMO and even anti-Nuclear sentiments I see accross the spectrum but those differ a bit from conspiracy theories in that it stems from junk science, rather than a belief in a hidden government or group wanting to personally change you.
Just google for outbreaks in the US that are linked to anti-vaxxing and take a note of their locations. Most will start in heavily left-leaning areas. To clarify my point, I personally believe that anti-vaxxing is about evenly distributed between left and right wing, just for different reasons.
P.S. As I was trying to find an article about an outbreak in Seattle that I remembered from a few years ago, I realized there is another one happening right this moment https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/an-anti-vaccinatio...
Unless you mean things you don't like are conspiracy theories in which case we might as well just call everything a conspiracy.
I seems to me that 'The Patriarchy' / 'The Privileged' on the left are conceptually quite similar to 'The Deep State' or 'The Jews' on the right. And those are most often described as conspiracy theories, and rightly so.
The difference between a conspiracy theory and a social critique is the personal nature of it. People that believe that the 'Jews' or that 'The Deep State' is responsible for everything believe that there are specific actors, people doing things explicitly to stop someone.
When people complain about the patriarchy or systemic racism they're complaining about a large tangled of social contracts and norms that result in certain people, races, genders etc being disenfranchised. For example it's a statistical fact that a black man smoking marijuana is not only more likely to be thrown in jail but also more likely to face harsher sentences than a white man smoking marijuana. What else would you call this, other than systemic racism?
You can't point to a similar statistic, study or what not that shows 'The Deep State' is specifically targeting Donald Trump or that 'The Jews' are attempting to kill all white people. You can, however, point to specific actions and trends the FBI has taken in the past to disenfranchise black people, including actions taken against Martin Luther King Jr.
One side explicitly has a factual basis behind it. The other does not. That's what makes one a conspiracy theory, and the other something worthy of scrutiny.
It usually gets more personal at the extreme. People will show you stats that shows a disproportionate majority of federal employees supporting the Democratic party and infer that there is 'systemic bias', some will point at specific cases and make leaders of hidden conspiracy out of them. I've seen enough of 'Kill All Cops' to know that there is similar extremes on the left.
Yes, there are going to be people that will take anything to an extreme. That does not make 'Systemic Racism' somehow a conspiracy theory, especially on the level of things like the 'Deep State'. Arguing otherwise is to me the highest delusion.
Left wing conspiracies are usually narrow in scope: the Republican party, the Koch brothers, George Soros, Dick Cheney, the Oil Industry, its not really the same as a intra-national conspiracy that transcends party lines.
Are you sure you’re not watching too many conspiracy theory videos?
The Buzzfeed article (and others like it) is ultimately just a collection of anecdotes. It is not data that reflects my reality and I expect it does not reflect reality for many of YouTube's users. However, it provides a lot of confirmation bias for those who look at the existence of content/perspectives they disagree with and have an urge to want to erase that content wholesale. It feeds into what seems to be a crisis manufactured by some activists on Twitter and some news outlets (like Buzzfeed).
And of course, it dehumanizes the right and their experiences/perspectives by associating them with terms like 'radicalization', or 'conspiracy theory', or 'fake news', which are probably not only exceedingly rare but also present on the left.
"The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four exists in a state of perpetual war among the three major powers. Two of the three states are aligned against the third: Oceania and Eurasia against Eastasia or Eurasia and Eastasia against Oceania. However, as Goldstein's book points out, each superstate is so powerful that even an alliance of the other two cannot destroy it, which results in a continuing stalemate. From time to time, one of the states betrays its ally and sides with its former enemy. In Oceania, when that occurs, the Ministry of Truth rewrites history to make it appear that the current state of affairs is the way it has always been, and documents with contradictory information are destroyed in the memory hole." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nations_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Fou...
Though the reference they're making is so irrelevant to this story that it verges on a non sequitur. This action is more akin to developing a spam filter for your email service than a government totally rewriting history for political reasons.
If you're going to reference a work as well-known as 1984, make sure it's a very apt reference.
Let's say you watched a video called "Top 10 most amazing things you never knew until today" and now the youtube algo recommends you a bunch of clickbait. Just hit "not interested" on every single clickbait video you see and eventually it stops showing you those videos unless you watch more of them.
I would flag a video title as clickbait and the algo learns what I think, and then when it sees a similar title in the recommended list it removes the div from the page.
I'd rather have conspiracy videos in my feed than give the YouTube content moderation people the power to decide what counts as conspiracy.
There’s plenty examples of things that should have been on trending by every possible metric, but never gets there. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen PewDiePie appear in my recommended section, even though he’s the only creator I consume regularly. I have to find him in my notification list, on the site, buried.
In general I find the selction on the homepage to be useful, however it does take some work as I regularly remove a lot of random things.
I also open random videos in a private window to keep my watch history more focused.
So it works fairly well for me, bringing up videos from channels I like that I haven't seen before... but it takes effort to get it to work for me. So it is arguably not very good for a typical user.
Google is beyond broken. Chasing those engagement numbers on a forever treadmill, just hoping they inch up a little more at any cost.
Now, thanks to the all powerful algorithm, I can watch a video about a rescued pitbull living with his new family, and have it followed up by "10 times Ben Shapiro owned the libs".
I went through a "This Old Tony" binge a couple months ago because i stumbled upon one of his videos and youtube kept recommending more. But that seems to be the exception rather than the norm.
Currently I see absolutely zero related content next to the current video I’m watching, from the current user or the subject matter.
https://twitter.com/300_lines/status/1088288289042415617
------------------------
Tweet: "Ugh. G-mail's suggested responses to an update from my aunt about my uncle's fight with cancer.
Google Mail suggests: Will do! So cute! Love it!"
------------------------
If this is the quality of AI and their suggestions machine learning, then I have serious doubts. I'd figure the word "cancer" would be enough for basic sentiment calculators to go 'give somber sad answer', not "Love it!"
Secondly, I can't watch any video without it taking over my recommendations. Alex Jones for example. I still haven't watched an Alex Jones video (I was curious about what rubbish he spews), without worrying that I'll get a bunch of delusional hyper-conservative drivel taking over my recommendations.
There should be a way to watch a video once and not have it take over your recommendations.
On the one hand, we find that we're making great strides in certain areas with ML. On the other hand, recommendation systems are still just so, so, so naive and bad.
Log out.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725?hl=en
Why can't we opt out completely from "recommendations"?
is a lie
I’ve talked about this before, but if you have kids, the only surefire solution is curating the videos yourself and downloading them. Then playing them offline. Anything else is a gamble, which may or may not be the route you want to take.
YT cracking down on videos also has a lot to do with skittish advertisers. I’m not sure if a solution is possible other than utilizing Patreon, librepay, etc. Even if you don’t make “controversial” content, that’s what most people do these days for consistency, as well as merchandise.
"In this setting, your child will only be able to watch videos, channels and collections that you have hand-picked. Collections are videos and channels grouped by topics, such as science and music, picked by the YouTube Kids teams or our partners."
YT has proven themselves incapable time and time again when it comes to dealing with human support and services. I cannot read PR text from them and just believe it.
So all of us should be handheld on YT because of your son? No thanks. Violence should be allowed. The problem is at your end.
I helped contribute to that article, feel free to ask any questions!
I also noticed that every one of the "bad recommendations" you picked out in your article falls on one side of the political spectrum.
My question is: when you cause a $1T monopoly with unprecedented control over the world's information to enhance its censorship algorithms with a news article, what motivates you? Is it just the feeling of power? Do you recognize that you have a particular viewpoint or philosophy that you're trying to protect? Or do you believe that you're only seeking the truth, that you're right, and everyone else is wrong?
edit: forgot another possible motivation: getting paid to do it, raised whole life to do it, don't care any further than that. (I'm not just trying to impugn, I literally have no idea what goes through journalists heads when they write articles like this)
I know some people on HN have such setups; could you share recommendations for hardware and software stack? I suspect a Raspberry Pi may not be enough (having network and USB sharing capacity), especially if we want to simultaneously stream movies for ourselves. But I also don't want to turn it into some $1k+ server build, the way they do on /r/plex and elsewhere. Could anyone recommend a "compromise" setup, that would allow to comfortably stream HD videos to 2-3 devices simultaneously?
If you're worried about the quality of content from YouTube, or the chances that someone gaming the system dumps questionable content into your stream, it's worth spending ten bucks on an antenna. It's also good for supplementing your child's YouTube viewing when YT starts showing the same stuff over and over.
Also PBS kids apps, ad-free as well.
Still, I want to make it video-on-demand, but with content fully curated by us - to avoid age-inappropriate content, ads and recommendations. There's no way I'm going to let my kid touch raw YouTube in the next decade.
I am able to get most of the videos downloaded and converted using that application. Sometimes I have to go and manually get a couple of videos that failed to download, but the app has served me well.
(I have a seven year old and a three year old)
In the end we just settled on netflix and the national broadcasting company (NRK), but I do have a synology nas with some stuff that I can stream to mobiles/ps4 via dnla or apps which would do most of what you want.
Do you think all videos in which people are wrong about things should be taken down?
If somebody writes on their blog that they don't think the holocaust is real, should their blog get taken down, or is there something different about it being a video?
In my opinion, YouTube has gone much too far towards the side of taking down videos rather than leaving them up. We don't need to be calling for them to be even more strict with removing videos that people don't like. If you don't like it, you don't have to watch it.
If your goal in taking down conspiracy theory videos is to kill the conspiracy theory, I think that may actually be counterproductive. If the video stays up and everyone laughs about how stupid it is, nothing bad happens. If the video gets taken down then it just provides them an opportunity to shout about how they're trying to spread the truth but they're being silenced by the establishment.
Furthermore I expect Google to apply their policies evenly which they don't. If violations of Google ToS are reported they should be taken care of don't you think.
It isn't like you can actually debate them on their channels either as they delete comments that don't support them the vast majority of time.
You seem to be against people putting out content that don't align with your views, which is something completely different.
Not GP, but I see this a lot as a retort to people who make the claims they did and I tend to call BS on it.
I strongly suspect there is an extremely broad library of "content that doesn't align with their views", including an extremely broad spectrum of political views, they would have zero issues with on YouTube.
Somehow, climate denialism, antivax content (and other health hazards), holocaust denial, general nazi shit etc are consistently not part of that.
Now GP can come in, correct me and tell me that they want everything they ever would disagree with off Youtube for good. But somehow, I suspect they won't.
So, tangential to your post but, tell me: why is it that there's such a consistently-easy-to-define line for content that a lot of people think should be kept off various platforms, and why the hell is it that, whenever I see someone defending such content, it's almost always someone who belongs in the category of people who believe in said content, rather than a staunch defender of free speech.
I ask this knowing full well there are many people I hold in very high esteem, who legitimately do defend extremely vile shit they disagree with, based on free speech principles. Most of those people I personally know work at the EFF and I've never heard them say much about deplatforming nazis. (could it be because free speech is a government thing, not a youtube thing …)
Since nobody here has given any indication that they believe in these ideas, it's probably because you simply assume that anyone defending it believes in it.
Possibly also because the concept of not wanting to take down objectionable videos is a "weird" idea, and people who are willing to take weird ideas seriously probably have lots of other weird ideas.
Do you think all videos in which people are wrong about things should be taken down??
Suppose Video A posits "your computer has a little gremlin inside of it and you should shove an oatmeal cookie into the CD slot at least once a month to keep the gremlin happy" and Video B posits "the Jewish-controlled mass media is conspiring to make us believe school shootings are a real thing and you should stockpile weapons for the coming race war." They are both technically "videos in which people are wrong about things," but isn't there a qualitative difference between those two things? Don't you think it's defensible for YouTube to take down Video B without taking down Video A?
For me, at least right around the 2016 election...
But if I want to go watch Episode 5 again or jump ahead to Episode 26, it's happy to help. Awesome.
Example: The Slow Mo Guys channel has a "Planet Slow Mo" series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbIZ6k-SE9Shmj0Uvxtrv...
It's not even subscriber gated or verified channel gated, it's someone at youtube for some reason flicked the switch on for this channel gated
I don't search for the playlist, then go to the playlist and scroll through to the episode I want, then pick it.
But then since I didn't go to the playlist, now YouTube can't recommend the incredibly obvious next video in the series.
Plus, on the iOS app there's no way to search within a channel or playlist. If I want to find Justin's lessons on a Nirvana song I have to search "justin guitar nirvana" rather than just "nirvana" when I'm on that channel.
The behavior that really gets me now is having the top recommended videos on my YT homepage ones I've watched... Recently. I can watch a video from my notifications, and then have it stay at the top of my homepage until I hide it manually. Refreshing the page changes some videos, but rarely the top few.
Of course, hiding the video helps but I get tired of having to do it constantly. I think I'm resigned to my YT homepage being useless at this point.
Don't get a started on discovery!
For that youtube is great because it's autoplay just seamlessly plays one after another.
For everything else it's recommendations are hilariously bad.
I'd much rather have youtube recommend episode 1 or the first video of the playlist to people but instead it gives them a random one in the middle. This causes the viewer to get mad and press thumbs down. This also makes the "average viewed minutes" go drastically down.
That's probably the source of most of my thumbs downs.. It also causes ridiculous stats like episode 27 of 50 has 100 times the number of views as the first episode but not more view time.
It's actually just a playlist setting for the creator but the default is reverse and that makes the whole list useless. You even have chrome and firefox plugins to fix it.
I also link the playlist in each youtube description but unfortunately they are not so easy to spot on app/tv/game consoles.
Also, in this case I think it's OK to youtube-dl the list and play them in order locally.
Unfortunately I use Safari so it's not an option for me, sadly one of the very few downsides to using Safari is relatively weak extension support.
You know the exact date of Episode 18 so you assume Episode 19 was published soon afterwards. So you go into the profile and click videos.
You realize that the date is not even listed, it just says "x months ago", or "x years ago". And since this video was from two years ago you have to sift through all videos of the last two years. And you can't just ctr+f. You have to go to the bottom to load the next 30 or so videos.
The user interface for these kinds of sites are just incomprehensible poor.
I don't want to say "not interested" because I don't know what that means... I want a feature where it's like "more like this, but not this one in particular."
It's surprising they've been under Google's control for a very long time and yet their main recommendation algorithm still leaves a lot to be desired.
How to ban all videos per country of origin or/and per language?
edit:
Moreover, how to bless my native language in Youtube and Google?
I can only assume that it's an intentional marketing thing to get people to watch other things.