> 3. Do recommendations drive viewers to increasingly extreme content?
> As I’ve explained, we actively demote low-quality information in recommendations. But we also take the additional step of showing viewers authoritative videos about topics that may interest them. Say I watch a video about the COVID-19 vaccine. In my Up Next panel, I’ll see videos from reputable sources like Vox and Bloomberg Quicktake and won’t see videos that contain misleading information about vaccines (to the extent that our system can detect them).
What is Google/YouTube's full list of "reputable sources". Is it even reasonable to maintain such a list given how often sources treated as authoritative can be wrong? Doesn't this amount to artificially converging users' information exposure towards either the reigning authority or towards whatever Google/YouTube favor?
Generalizing my concerns further, I am not comfortable with having a narrow set of monopolistic tech giants serve as king maker in our information landscape. Perhaps what we need first and foremost is a renewed set of anti-trust laws to break up companies with giant market caps and to address the reduced competition faced by widely used platforms built on network effects.
>Recommendations drive a significant amount of the overall viewership on YouTube, even more than channel subscriptions or search.
Chicken/egg. Above is true is because they flood the sidebar with algorithmic recos instead of your subscriptions, and have tuned their notifications to not give you as many, even if you are subscribed and even if you click the notification bell.
For me, it seems like youtube's recommendation system mostly gets stuck in the local optimum. Once you watch a video from a particular channel, it'll keep on recommending the videos from the same channel for months. Soon, the recommendation just consists of stuff from the channels that have you already viewed. You rarely see new types of recommendations.
In fact, I rarely find YouTube's recommendations to be useful. Occasionally, yes, but typically I just get that "more of the same" problem.
However, that may be explained by how I use YouTube. The article is pretty vague and hand-wavy about how the recommendations really work, but it's possible that the fact that I don't drive my YouTube viewing from the recommended videos list makes the video recommendations worse for me.
I often search for “scientific documentary” or “variety” but the algo clearly doesn’t want me to discover new things, and doesn’t seem to include those searches to build the suggestions. It keeps repeating the 8 usual channels I’m bored of watching.
I made a mistake of trying some jazz 5 years ago, now my feed cursed. 99% of suggested videos are not clicked yet youtube insist of showing same stuff for years.
I've noticed this too. Occasionally I'll look up a how-to/DIY thing, watch one video for it, and then all my recommendations (even the ones on the front page) revolve around that topic. But it's not like I have a consistent interest in it, it was a one-off.
Not even that, I bet. I've heard a lot about how YT is used for music by many people (myself included, sometimes), and recommending the song you just listened again probably has a good click rate.
> that very same video will be on my YouTube homepage for weeks.
I just right-click those videos and tell YouTube I'm not interested in it. That helps keep my homepage fresh while still being pretty good about recommending stuff I like.
One thing I think must be deeply challenging about recommendation on YouTube is that many videos like DIY informative stuff only warrant being watched once. But music, DJ mixes, livestreams, etc. I will watch over and over. So the signal "did I watch this" might mean "definitely do not show it again" for some videos and "definite do show it again" for others. It's probably hard for the system to distinguish those.
It's worse when it's decided that yeah, you are interested in that thing. My interests bounce between woodworking, homebrew vehicles, and strategy video games. The YT algorithm gets itself totally snarled when I watch a video from one side of that fence and assumes that that's all I want to see now. Watch a SuperfastMatt vehicle about the Jag he's retrofitting with the guts of a Tesla? Obviously you want seven more videos from his channel that you've already watched. And I like his channel! Not enough to watch the same seven videos again, though.
It also seems to have some classification issues, too. It lumps a lot of stuff into "DIY", and woodworking is part of it--but so is a lot of stuff that more fits under "construction" or "carpentry". No shade thrown, that stuff can be interesting too, but there's a large gulf between "crotchety woodworking dork going on about tablesaw safety" and "refinishing a backyard shed with glamour shots of a Home Depot sponsored miter saw set to bouncy stock music" that the algorithm does not seem to grok. Maybe it wants me to hatewatch that stuff, I dunno.
That channel is cursed. I've reset my history with new incognito profile several times and regardless of what else i watch it always comes back. Seems like everybody else has seen them also. He must be lock-picking the algorithm by creating such big amount of videos and all within that 2-3min sweet spot of attention-grab.
I occasionally get the whole front page as a list of old videos from the same channel. All of their videos Ina row for a few seconds of infinite scroll, then it jumps to another one, but, it won't show a new video from channels I'm subscribed to so I have to go poll for them
Something we’ve noticed in our house is that if YT can’t figure out who is watching, it just uses the IP address. So I get recommendations based on what my kids watch, and my wife gets random recommendations for stuff based on what I watch.
I’ve tried the “Don’t recommend this” trick, but because the kids are subbed (or otherwise watch it), it still keeps coming back.
I've found YouTube's defaults for a lightly-used profile (my work Google account) tend to be like Charlie Kirk/Ben Shapiro owning the libs type garbage.
Comes, because statistically those youtubers are able to latch on to some viewers and this drives engagement. I believe some of that has been pay-to-win stuff, where the youtubers actively advertised and paid directly for engagement. Some of those folks are subsidized by outsiders.
Goes, because YouTube knows from studying its own business that they're capable of driving more engagement by turning people into video-obsessed alt-right Nazis. And if it's too obvious, they'll be called on it, or actively punished as a platform over essentially selling themselves out as a propaganda bullhorn to whoever's able to pay.
That being the alt-right Nazis, and those who fund them.
So it goes back and forth. YouTube doesn't always do this. It does as much of this as it possibly can, but is systemically aware that running with it causes other problems, and dials it back to stay out of trouble (and because some of the people minding the algorithms are not, themselves, alt-right Nazis).
YouTube always wants to find an algorithmic answer for everything, and is not afraid to go meta and look at larger contexts for what they do. It's a google thing. So they want, and don't want, the 'own the libs' paid-for content. It's both simple capitalism, and looking at it on a larger systemic level where there are risks to allowing their ad buys to stoke outright revolution of the country YouTube is based in.
Incognito mode doesn't make their recommendation system any better, but at least it doesn't get stuck on some stupid subject because their bs algorithm deemed it important to show the same stuff several days in a row.
What this does is to tune the recommendations for that session to what you view for that session.
If you blindly follow some pratfalls or kittens video, you'll get served up junk. If you happen to be researching some specific topic (how-tos, explainers, academics, technical topics being among my favourites), you'll tend to find you're getting recommendations that follow from that initial topic.
I still treat recommendations quite warily, but at least the ones that come up in such sessions are somewhat better than standard fare.
(I never use YT whilst authenticated / logged in.)
I watch YouTube from Roku sometimes without signing in, but it still seems to somehow - by IP, presumably? - pick up related topics from searches on other devices (that are signed in).
Most systems have this issue. I've described it as a 'fear of recommending something you hate'. They know you watched X video from Y channel, so there is a good chance you'd like Z video that has a similar fanbase or content.
However, it becomes this echo chamber of only recommending the same content over and over again because they don't want to suggest something you don't like. That's because to their metrics, you don't watch it all, you don't see the ads, and then you "potentially" leave their platform because there's "nothing you like on it".
YouTube still recommends stuff I hate all the time, despite me explicitly trying to tell the system I'm not interested.
To pick an example, my YouTube recommended section is full of videos of people reacting to the things I actually like to watch. I don't want to watch people reacting to the things I like. I just want to watch the things I like. I try to tell YouTube that by saying "Not Interested" to all of the reaction videos, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.
Those types of videos still tick the box of "relevant" to current recommendation algorithms though. I sort of mean that algorithms won't branch into unfamiliar territory. So, as an example, I've never looked up "underwater basket weaving"[1] or getting into to. So from the algorithm's perspective, there is an element of uncertainty with recommending it, because it doesn't know if I'll like it, be ambivalent, or strongly dislike it. Then, it compares that rating to other content on the platform, like your reaction videos, and even though they may be disliked, if they are favorable to others in your focus group, they'd still have a higher rating than uncertainty.
The issue is that we don't really have a good method for measuring uncertain interests and since most algorithms have an underlining "make the company money", we don't get anything beyond the same ol' same ol' recommendations.
[1] Underwater Basket Weaving is a placeholder for anything - yoga, video games, cooking, politics, essentially anything you are currently NOT getting presented.
I use uBlock to stop this type of shenaningans. I set filters for specific channels or "channel networks", for instance if I don't want to see any Vice related video show up in my recomendations, i.e. "Vice Fightland", "Vice bla bla bla" etc, I set a rule such as:
www.youtube.com###dismissible:has-text(/Vice/)
This way, any channel that has the word Vice in it will never show up to me in recommendations, be it on the main page or the sidebar. This "has-text" regex is really useful, not just on Youtube. I use it a lot, all over the internet. In your case, switch "Vice" with "react" and I believe you'll get rid of 99% of these videos showing up on your feed.
I loathe videos on trending with the exception of some science content. I say “not interested” all the time but the third recommendation is always some bs I have zero interest in.
Bizarrely, I find the opposite. I follow a lot of channels. (More than a thousand, I think.) Among those, some of them I watch every time I see them, while others I hardly ever engage with. But it's always the followed channels I hardly ever engage with that show up in my Recommended feed; while the followed channels that I consistently engage with are nowhere to be seen. (Not just in Recommended; they fail to show up anywhere in all the front-page carousel categories, or any of the sub-category carousel categories, on the TV version of the app, which is the main way I interact with the site.)
Instead, I have to explicitly go into "Subscriptions", and hope that it was posted recently-enough for the channel to show up in the 6-or-so sorted-by-recency channels at the very top, rather than in the alphabetized list (since there are so many channels in that alphabetical list, that finding anything marked as new in that list is basically impractical.)
Their recommendation system is broken. Sometimes recommendations are completely unrelated, sometimes the same videos get recommended in every page for several days. Videos are usually tagged (there are browser extensions to view tags on videos), so recommendation can't even match the tags to view stuff in a similar ballpark. They demonetize and downplay recommendations for decent channels because they are deemed to geeky or are not posting videos frequently enough, I'm not at all pleased how Youtube gets more and more rotten.
I found the PocketTube YouTube extension very useful for organizing my subscriptions into categories for easy searching. I had the same issue though I'm not sure I'm past a thousand subs yet - probably only about a hundred in total.
> Instead, I have to explicitly go into "Subscriptions"
This is how I've always used YouTube, and it wasn't that long ago that I learned most people don't do it that way. My usual pattern is to go to the subscriptions tab and scroll down to where the last video I viewed was, then start watching from there up towards the top of the list.
It would be really handy if the YouTube app had some way of making that easier.
It seems to me that YouTube is doing complex bucket testing with the recommendation algorithm. Some days, my recommendation list is full of obscure-but-relevant-to-my interests content that would require legitimate ML to populate, and then the next day my feed is basically
SELECT DISTINCT videos.*
FROM videos, followers
WHERE videos.creator=followers.creator
AND followers.user = $ME
I am a huge YouTube addict and get sucked into it a lot. I used to discover all kinds of great channels and really enjoyed it. But lately I have noticed I'm not really finding much and the amount of watching I am doing has gone down a lot. Not sure if they changed the algorithm, or if I've just seen everything I like. I have definitely noticed YouTube is recommending me more clickbaity and mainstream stuff lately.
It’s changed, I’m in the same boat. The only new channels I’ve found that I love are after seeing them promoted outside of YouTube. They clearly intersect with other channels I’ve subscribed to and watch regularly but were never recommended. I also notice that the recommendation queue for videos on these channels tries to steer you away to larger more mainstream channels that are only tenuously related.
Same here, I'm physically disabled and YouTube is the only form of "tv" I watch, so I watch a fair chunk of it (understatement) and I've distinctly noticed a massive drop over the last... I want to say 6 months?... where I've found the recommendations to be totally useless.
Way way more recommendations for stuff I'd never consider watching, recommendations for "big" youtubers (I almost exclusively watch smaller channels based around niche hobbies), stuff like that.
I used to think their recommendation engine was amongst the best of any service I've used, now it's junk.
One of the reasons I never logged in on youtube back when I watched it a lot. Every few weeks when the recommendations were stuck, I'd just wipe cookies and get new stuff.
I wonder if the cat and mouse game of seo is being played out again in “algorithm land” and content creators have learned how to optimize their own content for promotion. I usually blame just the algorithm but maybe i’ve been oversimplifying a larger problem.
It seems to be and a few content creators I watch have documented the process. I believe the spiffing brit and another v named science based channel showed how that swapping the title of the video many times as a kind of A/B test can increase your views by millions.
I see this a lot nowadays. It just keeps recycling the same things and feels stale.
I remember about a year ago, it got into a weird state where I watched an old Cat Power music video, then every time I looked at recommendations on other videos it was recommending it, again and again... I'd watch the video again to hopefully make it go away, and it would still keep recommending it. It was very strange. I ended up just choosing "Don't recommend this" on it.
The recommendations are better if you browse logged-out. More diverse, recommending things to satisfy curiosity about related topics rather than the same monotonous stuff you already know about.
We hypothesized this might be because you're less likely to be hooked yet, so it wants you to really get the good stuff and hope that you then want to subscribe to or comment on something? And once you're signed up, you might stay on the site longer if you need to keep looking for stuff you like and generate more ad impressions.
I should really do a comparison logged-out vs. logged-in because I could swear those ads are different amounts and durations. Also it's percentage-wise about as much as the free legacy TV channels, except of course YT doesn't need to pay the production company -- ShadyVPN already takes care of that.
It’s the worst on “Shorts”. There’s no way to pic topics and I’ll often get stuck flipping through the same 3 channel videos. For a while I thought “oh it’s in beta must not be much content.” Then after a while something I did made it recommend other channels and now I’m stuck in another set of 3-4 Short channels :/
urrgh this reminded me of the several months that the only thing YouTube wanted me to watch was WH40K videos. To make it stop I had to go through and delete every WH40K video i ever watched from my watch history then mark all on my home page as 'never recommend again' for a couple weeks.
For all the sophistication claimed in the article, it feels like my recommendations could just as accurately be driven by simple keywords. I wonder how often, if ever, they compare their current solution to much simpler algorithms?
I've thought about making several accounts, and watching different kinds of content on different accounts, so that each would have recommendations for whatever topic I'm in the mood for at that time.
Of course, that'd be a pain to manage, so I haven't gotten around to it.
yea for regular stuff but some categories YouTube will push what it wants you to watch not what you want to.. like independent news channels, on the right it will was want to play next a CNN,MSNBC or other corporate news channel. This was not the case a few years ago, now they say that they do this on purpose to give "credible" sources more views...
Mine is extra annoying. It will keep recommending videos I have already watched. If I go to my subscriptions there are new videos from the same channel, but on my recommended tab it keeps showing the same months/years old already watched video. I'm not sure how that is supposed to drive engagement.
Can we get a button to stop recommending videos that have already been watched? On the front page out of 12 videos listed, I've already seen 7 of them and have no need to watch them again.
I second this. I also wish the algorithm would throw a real curveball once in a while too, something completely different to what I have been caught in.
Yeah, but then Youtube thinks, "He hates that channel!", rather than, "He doesn't want to rewatch old videos."
I keep getting old furniture restoration videos in my feed. I've seen them already. How about different channels on the same topic with new videos posted?
It's quite a few clicks when you could just mentally skip over it, but indeed I wanted it to learn so I went through the trouble. Again and again. Probably more than a hundred times. It doesn't learn. I just pass over them now. The algorithm probably knows better than all of us what keeps us longer on the site anyway and the button is just a dummy.
When you select not interested, it gives the option of saying it's either because you already watched the video or that you don't like the channel. I don't know quite why they keep recommending videos I've watched recently, but at least telling YouTube I've seen a video (...) prevents it from spamming my recommendations.
Even without the category system, if the user never ever goes back to rewatch a video they've seen, it could perhaps realize that the user doesn't want to rewatch videos they've already seen. Or if some videos or channels have a very high re-watch rate and others don't (presumably music channels vs., say, a random furniture restoration channel), it could tune for that. Clearly they're not separating the types, and it's not because they're not capable.
That doesn’t solve the problem at all. I like and am interested in the videos I’ve watched. I want the algorithm to know I’m interested, I just don’t want it watch something I’ve watched again.
> 2. If you have set your history to expire after some amount of time, it will start re-recommending videos you've already seen once it has forgotten you have watched them.
This article started out talking about what good signals are to drive a recommendation algo, but it ended up concluding with all the different ways YouTube goes against those signals to censor videos or otherwise manually tune your feed instead.
The meaning of "recommendation" seems to have shifted from "what we think you want" to "what we want for you."
It's not a wrong use of the word, just different from what you might expect.
> The meaning of "recommendation" seems to have shifted from "what we think you want" to "what we want for you."
I think this is a pretty fantastic summary of what has gone wrong with a lot of big tech. Facebook, Twitter, youtube, Google search, iOS, Android, and Windows all have moved toward taking away user control and trying to move you toward more of what they want you to want. If it's not recommendations, it's forced updates, device scanning, or "influencers".
We badly need some of that disruption these same companies used to preach about. The current cohort is becoming ossified and user hostile, just like the companies they replaced.
The reccomendation system is absolutely dangerous. Just this summer, I watched one video on peppers out of curiousity. By the end of summer I've got multiple different varieties growing, and all the accessories to support them. I'm really enjoying my garden, but it's very unlikely I would have started one without the youtube algorithm. Similarly my doctor reccomended I exercise more, so I started running. Then I googled how to improve, and soon I'm purchasing gear, and trying supplements. The amount of economic activity driven directly from Youtube has to be HUGE.
Read it as “video on preppers” and everything still worked for the most part, but you didn’t mention freeze dried food or holsters so figured I read something wrong.
It's sad because I remember being able to find new and interesting creators passively. Now the main page is all corporate BS and the algorithm locks you in. We played a bit of WOW Classic last year and all of a sudden I was just flooded with Asmongold videos and videos of people clipping and replaying Asmongold. It took a day of "never show this again" to make it stop.
As someone who had a bit of a YouTube hobby and is trying to get back into it, I've generally found that the algorithm brings me a larger audience than I would have otherwise. I've published three videos in the last 28 days, and my analytics says I've gotten 5200 views across all my content in that time. I have about a hundred subscribers. Search is still king, but 15% of those views have come from suggested. I've got a 7.8% CTR so it's suggesting it to quite a few people.
It seems like YouTube has realized that winner-takes-all is bad for the health of the platform, and is trying to grow smaller creators. I suspect they won't do this, because they realize that it ultimately strangles growth. Mr. Beast (for example) is already spending about $4MM/month on making videos; if they allowed this kind of stuff, well... not many people could compete.
After I made the post I remembered they already do it. Brands can pay to sponsor existing videos that put them in a good light. These recomendations do have an [Ad] tag, but the extra views and impressions are allow to feed into the algorithm which then doesn't have to maintain the [Ad] tag going forward:
Occasionally I will see a "Rising Creator" section on the Explore/Trending page showcasing a single channel. This channel typically has less than 5k subscribers and posts regularly.
This seems pretty tautological. What you watch will reflect your reccomendations because there is a causal relationship there, unless you never use youtube for discovery. I alledge that what people spend time watching is more heavily shaped by reccomendations than they are aware of.
When you depart from your usual intake, some departures are a lot more powerful than others. Sometimes you watch something new and YouTube spends days pushing similar stuff into your face. Other times you watch something new and only see one or two relevant recommendations mixed into your usual fare. My hypothesis is that YouTube knows that particular topics and particular content are associated with usage patterns that make money for them, and the algorithm is alert to any possibility of pushing users into those patterns.
When opening videos that are sent to me by others, I always use a private window, so my main account is pretty low "variance".
When I find a creator I like, I do a "fake binge", by queuing all their recent videos and some old ones too and playing them unattended.
I also try to minimize my use of the recommendation sidebar, since it usually shows content related to the current video rather than the more general recommendations of the home page.
When something foreign sneaks its way to my home page, I immediately click "not interested", paying attention to not hover the thumbnail.
Overall, Youtube has got me trained pretty well, but at least I get some nice recommendations out of it, so much so in fact that over half the recommendations I get are usually videos I have already watched (even if Youtube thinks I haven't yet for whatever reason).
Personal experience sharing time. I use YouTube heavily, and even pay for YT Premium.
The other day a little modal appeared on the side of youtube.com desktop saying something like, "Curious for new stuff? Explore content that isn't what you usually watch."
It ended up being sorta like an alternate reality. It was all the topics I usually watch, but with different channels I don't normally see at all. In other words, it was as if all the channels I normally watch don't exist, what else would exist to fill the void.
YouTube premium is the best streaming service. There’s so much content of high quality content that’s relatively niche. I recently stumbled on SummoningSalt’s videos about speed runners and I can’t imagine any other medium that would create incentives for that type of content. Of course you don’t need premium, but no ads is great! I’ve gone on to support people on patreon from YouTube, from cgp grey to stuffmadehere. I can’t imagine finding that kind of content on Hulu, Netflix, et al. It’s possible there are YouTube alternatives as I’m quite old compared to a teenager.
What they watch is shaped by recommendations, but I think most are also aware of it. For example, when I want to watch something about basketball I typically go to YouTube and there are recommendations of what to watch. There are probably millions of basketball videos, but YouTube is going to show me a handful based on previous videos I've watched and liked. I'm not surprised to see certain content creators more than others. But at the same time if they did a poor job of recommendation (like Spotify) then I'd probably just go and search through channels that I know I like.
The Explore page seems to be globally-curated stuff not based on personal taste, so it seems like the opposite of recommended.
And is that the main page for you? When I open the website or the Android app I get "Home". "Explore" is a separate tab. "Home" is pretty much filled with recommendations from channels I've watched recently, no corporate stuff (excluding ads).
I do see the issue of recommendations being flooded with one topic you've watched recently, but I generally don't have too much of a problem with it. When the recommendations stop being relevant/interesting to me, I tend to shut off YouTube.
yea but its like 100% contend that is corporate... if i want to watch late night talk shows i would do that on my TV.... and most of those videos don't get the most views anyways on YouTube so its basically YouTube promoting corporate media
> Mine is all pretty much filled with content that matches what I watch.
it should know that I don't want to watch the same things every day over and over relentlessly. There's hardly anything (by topic) I want to watch again the next day, except some news and political commentary which I do watch and it NEVER offers me.
if you try watch any independent news, YouTube will never recommend more of it but will give you MSNBC,CNN etc its bad, years ago the algorithm was very good,it would give you a mix of what your into and new interesting stuff now it seems like its pushing corporate content.
The majority of "independent news" have a highly partisan or highly unreliable tilt (both to the Left and to the Right): https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/
Interestingly enough, most people complain about the opposite: that if you watch some piece of slightly tilted piece of content on YouTube, the recommendation goes wholehog and pushes you towards the same radicalization direction, and so you start by watching someone complaining about Feminist Frequency and before you notice you're getting recommended White Nationalist content.
If anything it's probably good that if you're watching "independent news", that the algorithm tries to moderate you with some mainstream content...
Anything news related is mostly corporate now when searching. Either it's a mainstream news channel for serious news or one of the checkmarked talk shows for satire.
I’m hitting never show this again on one type of content all the time. There are days where my feed consists of like 33% of that stuff and it happens all the time. I’m at the point where it only recommends me my subscribed channels or the stuff I tell it not to show at all some days too. It’s so frustrating.
I think there are some intersections of interest that make the algorithm hypothesize that you're a certain kind of person. Like if you watch a lot of strength training content, and then you watch one lecture on Heidegger, YouTube is like, oh, we finally figured this guy out, he's a white supremacist or at the very least a gun nut. But if I watch a video about cupcakes, I'll only get a few suggestions about baking, not any associated interests, because cupcakes don't combine with any of my other interests to trigger a stereotype.
I always get those "calming meditation" music videos in recommendations, or "5 Powerful Psalms to Help You Sleep" which is on my homepage right now. Every video is from a different channel named something like "Calming Truth", and I can tell at one glance of the thumbnail that it's one of "those" videos.
I have never, ever watched one, and I always click Not Interested, or Don't Recommend Channel. But they keep on coming. There seems to be an endless supply of them.
That's why I started using multiple accounts, makes it a lot easier to keep the algorithm on topic and not get side tracked just because you searched for a song or game once.
In the end the core problem with the recommendation system is simply that there is only one list of recommendations, which makes it damn near impossible to switch to a different topic unless you start account hopping. The new topic-bar helps a little, but still offers no way to get rid of an unwanted topic completely.
„Using multiple accounts“
„Makes it easier“
That may work indeed, but i wouldnt call it easy in any way, or convenient.
Instead try to subscribe to as many channels you find interesting as possible. Thats what worked for me in the end getting rid of the clutter that is suggested.
I find subscriptions completely useless when it comes to recommendation, as the recommendations seem to be build up of what I watched in the last week, while my subscriptions have little to no visible impact at all.
There are numerous channels I am subscribe to that I haven't seen in months or years, just because I didn't watch them for a week or two and they fell out of the recommendation cycle.
You started playing WoW Classic and it was able to recommend WoW-related videos. It did its job. What else do you expect from a recommendation system? Predict what you're interested next or what you're going to do tomorrow? That's not recommendation, that's mass surveillance and psychological manipulation.
But on a useful note, maybe YouTube needs to provide a function to see a list of random videos that are unexplored or new.
> What else do you expect from a recommendation system? Predict what you're interested next or what you're going to do tomorrow?
Actually, I think they kind of are trying to do this (in a sense), if you read the article:
> Our system then compares your viewing habits with those that are similar to you and uses that information to suggest other content you may want to watch. So if you like tennis videos and our system notices that others who like the same tennis videos as you also enjoy jazz videos, you may be recommended jazz videos, even if you’ve never watched a single one before.
Imagine if I went to church for the first time in a decade and the next day three monks show up at my door with a cassock and vows.
...that's the YouTube algorithm in my experience. I show a passing interest in one thing so it floods me with every drop of content they have on the subject to the exclusion of things that I have watched every week for years.
There are creators I watch every week or every drop. Somehow the algorithm chooses to not surface their videos regularly and surface 46,123 videos on Terraform because I watched a quick tutorial.
Yes, few people realize it but fixing Google's algorithms could be the best thing that ever happened to the climate, and the worst thing that ever happened to our economy (depending on how you look at it).
Running is a hobby that feels like it should be cheap but gets surprisingly expensive. Two quick pieces of advice to save you from a bit of hurt. 1. Track your miles, shoes need to be replaced every 300-500 and 2. Go get a foot orthotic and gait assessment done. Wearing the right type of shoes and finding out if you require orthotics is a easy way to prevent injuries that won't pop up for another year or two down the line.
I know quite a few casual runners (5K to 10K) and been running for over 15 years myself. Other than a $120 pair of running shoes every year or two, what is the expense? Maybe the water backpack things if you are into extreme running?
It is not even a separate expense for me, as I just use my running shoes as my regular shoes. Also, maybe it is my gait or my lack of weight, but I estimate my shoes last 1k miles.
I suppose things aren't as expensive if you are a casual but I'm still surprised you can get 1k out of a pair of shoes. My mother also runs and is significantly lighter than myself and she gets shin splints if she doesn't change runners out at 500 miles. My current system is to run a pair of shoes for about 350 - 450 miles then downgrade them to a pair of walking shoes in till they fall apart.
I started running fairly casually but eventually started doing marathons. I run about 110 miles a month so I'm switching out shoes every 3 months. My feet suck so I'm also replacing a pair of orthotics every 2 years. I got a full set of summer and winter running gear and enough of each to last me a week. I also have a hydration vest, a GPS watch (not necessary but very useful), a set of Aftershokz bone conductive headphones so that I can listen to music while maintaining situational awareness, a pair of good sunglasses specifically for running (I sweat a lot and would not want to ware the same pair for everyday use), I have a few soft flasks that go in my hydration vest, and I've had to invest in a pretty decent treadmill to run on during the worst parts of winter.
Not everything I've listed is 100% necessary but as with most hobbies it finds ways to become expensive the more dedicated you are to it.
Yes, that sounds like it would add up! I feel like I would dissuade myself from going on a run if I had to get all that stuff ready. Even putting sunscreen on sometimes feels like a bummer.
The truth is that you don't. All that's required for almost any training run is a pair of shoes[*]. Everything else is an extra; it's up to you to decide whether each of those extras is worth carrying.
[*] That's true where I live (northern Europe) for pretty much all of my runs up to ~20km. In hotter or sunnier climates it may be necessary to carry water for shorter runs and/or put on sunscreen.
I like them but for me the biggest advantage is they don't funnel sweat into my ears, at night when I walk I still prefer my regular earbud headphones. The sound quality with bone conductive noticeably worse, and sadly they stopped making the cheaper wired version that I started with so then getting a pair to try out is expensive now.
All it means that it is working as intended. Few years ago YT switched to life-time-value optimization. But when you get it to the logical end, ideal consumer for Google is a healthy person with disposable income that spends all of it.
Since Google/YT essentially are shaping you thoughts and behaviours, logical optimization for them is to shape you to be a working sportsman that spends all disposable income on services, experiences and goods bought online.
No irony, it’s dangerous. Wait until you get into woodworking youtube … you might be missing parts of your fingers, and you’ll definitely be missing most of your wallet.
YouTube's recommendation system (and googles search engine if you see the comments in the other post today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764) somehow escapes the flak that other systems, such as Facebook news & posts, get but I find it's equally damaging to society.
There seems to exist a downward spiral where content that is prioritized to be attention grabbing over all else gets the most clicks and then drives more content to focus on this. The quality of the content itself seems to be increasingly inconsequential and has fallen off a cliff in the face of click spam.
Anecdotal evidence 1: I used to watch youtube videos for investment ideas and now all of these streamers pump out the same low quality, not very researched content with their face plastered on top with a shocked look on their mug.
Anecdotal evidence 2: My son was shown youtube by one of our nannies (despite my rules on no youtube) and has since become semi-addicted to the most brain dead content of toys being made into knock offs of the reasonable shows he used to watch or some adult man child being a weird clown in public.
Kara Swisher of The New York Times (previously ReCode) has been absolutely biting in her criticisms of Google generally, Youtube specifically, and other current tech monopolies.
I came to a similar conundrum and concluded that a split across two Google accounts was necessary to keep youtube subscriptions and recommendations in check. Initially, I wanted to separate betwween personal and work but it has now more or less turned into a generic filter between intelligent and casual topics. Incidentally, political content along with it's secondary and tertiary discourse gets the same treatment with little to no exceptions.
I'd recommend anyone looking to take better control of their habits in this regard to install the DF Youtube extension. Turn it off when you want to tumble down rabbitholes and keep it on at all other times. Really makes a difference in how youtube usage works over time.
On a related note it would be interesting if someone has made some "rabbithole resolving" software - I've noticed that these things terminate in extremely similar ways for most people, and have had a number of conversations laughing with others about how we've gone down the exact same content route. Write some code to find the bottom for us and save all the headache (fun)!
I got in the same situation with videos on otters (popular in South Korea, it seems) by watching accidentally one in the feed, but the music recommendations are either missing or missing my preferences, so the system does not really work for me.
The same thing happened to me with plants. I knew nothing about plants last year. Now I tell people I was radicalized by youtube into a house plant and pepper plant obsession.
What makes you share such an unrelated anecdotal story here?
Seriously? Is it 'telling 'cute' stories to distract from the black box youtube algorithm that creates white supremacists' -time? It comes across as incredibly unempathetic, gaslighty and dismissive, posting on a thread that is discussing an important societal problem; especially using the word 'dangerous' in the sarcastic way in which you used it here.
It's frustrating that the readers themselves have to replace YouTube's cryptic and doublespeak-y 'borderline' label in this article with the word 'white supremacist' and/or 'alt-right' to get the real picture.
It doesn't have any "the key words I'm interested are" section. It doesn't have any fine grained "show me less like this" or "show me more like that" options.
That all the filters of net (Google, FB, etc) have convinced users that an out-of-their control recommendation system is a triumph of this sort of system. If you just demand the recommendation system be different, you're just asking users be controlled in a different way.
Edit: whenever I mention this, I get "but the users are morons and need to be lead". I'd say instead, users are often unthinking and need to be educated.
Downvotes on Youtube do nothing, as the system still counts them as engagement and continues to recommend the videos.
The issue with the "Not interested/Don't recommend channel" is that it's the nuclear option. It does make content go away, but more often than not, what I really want is just to watch something else right now. The content might be perfectly fine and up to my taste, but when Youtube keeps recommending the same stuff again and again, there is no easy way to just reduce that a little without nuking it completely.
But the main thing missing isn't video-by-video like/dislike.
The thing that's missing is something like a control panel. It would show "these are topics/tags I'm especially interested in", "these are topics/tags I want to avoid entirely", "these are things to show occasionally" "show topics similar to what I'm current watch" or not.
All "but they have that objections" here seem very around "but it does have ways to give the opaque recommender suggestions" - yes, but how the recommender works is still unknown, "magical", opaque and how the suggestions will effect the recommender is also unknown.
I mean, I happen to know the only way the only affect the recommender is to actually remove items from your history. That's pretty klunky. And it makes it impossible to say "give me X but not Y kind of X"
> I watched one video on peppers out of curiousity.
I watched one video on preppers out of curiousity - and my feed is now full of videos about machine guns, shot guns and the correct military gear to pretend you are in the army.
Weird. If I watch a music video I get recommendations to watch crackpots challenging vaccines or claiming that Nancy Pelosi is passing Sharia Law. Maybe I should watch more supplements videos, that seems to be the sell from the recommended videos.
On a more serious side, I searched for a 20s video of a funny gaffe by the President of my country, and immediately my feed was flooded by videos from the local right-populist party's fake news propaganda channel. It's that easy for an unwary person just out to watch a funny video to become exposed to a torrent of bullshit.
Anecdotally (n=1, I know), I watch/listen to a lot of leftist lectures and speeches and my feed does not get inundated with them nearly as much... Really makes you think.
I know for a fact that a sizable portion (if not a majority) of far-right content gets heavily downranked (and in many cases filtered completely from) in the algorithm as "low quality content".
The problem is that the right is much better at producing flashy, low-attention/low-commitment content - the kinds of things that excel in the metrics the algorithm would naively optimize for. Case in point, the lectures you watch are nearly the exact opposite of that popular, easily-digestible content.
Hmm, that makes sense. I actually watch plenty of non-leftist lectures and speeches too (keeping my mind open, you know), and neither those start flooding my feed x) I guess the problem lies in the metrics the algorithm is optimising for.
I watched "Triumph of will" once. The youtube started to push on me nazi apologists, holocaust did not happen conspiracy theorists and what not. And for some reason, gaming videos. It was seriously disturbing. I watched that movie because I read about it in a book.
Now they removed movie and left there only very bad unwatchable commentary of it. Let's pretend it solves the problem.
I can totally relate to this myself. My father also recently just purchased a small sawmill which I think Youtube had a not so insignificant role in...
I have the same problem. We watched the videos about those 13 Thai kids that were stuck in a cave. Since then, YouTube has assumed that I'm into cave diving and mountclimbing, so my feed has filled up with videos of related topics. I've never cave dived, never will, and mountain climbing makes my palms sweaty.
But all of that pales in comparison to their Tik-Tok clone attempt of short videos. Talk about "chum"! They're clearly highly optimised to pull people in and get them hooked.
Luckily, I know digital drugs when I see them. I was one of those freaky people that could recognise the "hooks" in games like World of Warcraft and simply stop playing before the "endgame" mechanics sucked your life down the drain just so that Blizzard can get their recurring revenue.
Seems like this data driven optimisation for addicting people to low-quality content is the mental opiod epidemic of the current era...
And as I got on YouTube just now, the recommendations are just utter junk. It is a bunch of clickbait on things I don't even like and find annoying and repulsive. This is why I use things like youtube-dl, NewPipe, etc.
I use uBlock on a slightly different way. I set filters for specific channels or "channel networks", for instance if I don't want to see any Vice related video show up in my recomendations, i.e. "Vice Fightland", "Vice bla bla bla" etc, I set a rule such as:
www.youtube.com###dismissible:has-text(/Vice/)
This way, any channel that has the word Vice in it will never show up to me in recommendations, be it on the main page or the sidebar. This "has-text" regex is really useful, not just on Youtube. I use it a lot, all over the internet.
I hide what I like from YouTube because their recommendations are junk. If they default recommendations are going to be more junk then I don't want them knowing what I watch as I can only assume that they promote what they are paid to.
> 3. Do recommendations drive viewers to increasingly extreme content?
> As I’ve explained, we actively demote low-quality information in recommendations. But we also take the additional step of showing viewers authoritative videos about topics that may interest them. Say I watch a video about the COVID-19 vaccine. In my Up Next panel, I’ll see videos from reputable sources like Vox and Bloomberg Quicktake and won’t see videos that contain misleading information about vaccines (to the extent that our system can detect them).
When my parents watch 30 consecutive videos that mention that you can't trust the mainstream media, what good is suggesting to them a Bloomberg video?
My parents aren't on FB or any other social media. But over the last 10 years they have gone off the deep end after watching more and more insane videos on Youtube. It started with hours of Ron Paul videos. Then Alex Jones videos. Who knows what cretins it offered up after that.
They've stopped talking to me recently. It's because I've gotten the "Kill Shot" after they've explicitly told me not to. I'm apparently going to die from the covid vaccine within the next 6 months to 3 years... On my last phone call, they've told me that 300 old money families (who are all also insane environmentalists) have hatched and are executing a plan to depopulate the planet to 500 million... as told on the "Georgia Guide Stones".
The US Government also has mind-control devices that are convincing people to get the shot. They told me the mind control devices were first used during the Iraq War, because it convinced so much of the Iraqi Army to surrender en masse.
Also, all of our technology comes from the wreckage of crashed UFOs, most famously the Roswell UFO. My Dad thinks I'm naive for not believing this.
Both my parents have college degrees. My Dad has a masters in an engineering field. They were once relatively un-political and rode out the Great Recession without any harm. Maybe they just didn't handle retirement well. But I have a decade of nearly daily emails from them... "Watch this! [youtube link]". When they are gone, I'll have documentation of their decent into madness, with hyperlinks all going to 1 domain. I'm sure YouTube is doing all they can.
I'm sorry that you're in this painful situation. Personally I don't think the root problem is YouTube — rather, it's your parents' confirmation bias. They want to believe these things.
I've watched Alex Jones videos myself. I did not leave wanting more and no recommendation algo could change that. (Lest I leave the wrong impression, the same is true of AOC going live on IG.)
This may be true. Ultimately my personal story is not worth much. I do know that there is a growing community of people who share this story, though. One does not personally need to be affected to notice an uptick in anti-knowledge behavior recently.
The greater point is that if X percent of the population has biases that if fed would lead them to deranged behavior, is it responsible to take advantage of that?
The reasonable discussion of course goes to how big of a number is X. If 100,000 families get destroyed per decade, no big deal in relation to those sweet advertising impressions, I guess. But if FB, YT, Reddit, etc collectively take the mostly hands off approach, does X become big enough to achieve history-book-level harm? Like making [effective representative democracy, pandemic response, ecologic collapse mitigation] impossible.
> Personally I don't think the root problem is YouTube — rather, it's your parents' confirmation bias. They want to believe these things.
The thing is, most people, including likely you and me, have some defect. Some aspect of constructing a "good" society[1] is setting up systems to counter the effect of these defects. If you have a system that fosters a person's defects, it is fair to be critical of it.
Or put a simpler way: It's as fair to criticize the Youtube algorithm as it is to criticize a newspaper that only prints positive news about white people and negative news about non-whites. Sure - any given reader can choose which newspaper he/she will read, and the root cause is the reader's bias, but I think most would agree it's a problematic newspaper that is making a bad problem worse.
but in your analogy, there is both positive and negative news about white and non-white people.
the reader just goes to the sections for positive news about white people and negative news about non-whites. He tears up the rest.
--
Is it not like one goes to breakfast at his local diner, and every day, eats a plateful of bacon. Should the server knowing his patterns take away his bacon?
This isn't exactly new. When I was growing up, there were tabloid newspapers in the supermarkets with wacky headlines like "woman gives birth to two-headed bat", "aliens abduct CEO of GM and replace him with robot clone" or "Elvis is alive and acting as president of the United Nations". They've moved online, but they were always there. Somebody was buying them, even back then - enough to justify the costs of printing them and paying to have them placed in supermarket checkout counters.
What's also not new is the influence of unelected, unaccountable busybodies interjecting themselves wherever and whenever they can to suppress whatever they personally don't happen to like on your behalf (always, always, "for the children" as we see here). Back then it was Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Tipper Gore with their "moral majority" - they didn't care much who believed that they needed to wear tinfoil hats to protect their brains from being reprogrammed by government radio waves, but they sure did care about anything that undermined the position of the christian church in daily life, and they were really successful with it. Now all the people who opposed them back then are… doing the same things themselves.
I've found some good stuff from YouTube recommendations, but the reccs are mostly pretty dumb -- tons of repeats, tons of "hey, here's something EXACTLY LIKE what you just watched." It's nowhere close to as good as the recommendations for TikTok (which seem to read your mind and your subconscious). Would love to see TikTok make a YouTube competitor.
Genuinely curious, would you actually want that product to exist?
I'm at a point where I don't want better recommendations to tell me what to think. I'm already having enough of a challenge keeping my focus with the status quo.
I would. Not because I necessarily even want to use it. But at this point, I consider any competition to Youtube to be a good thing. It's been over a decade without Youtube having a single viable alternative, and I want that to end.
I feel you on the focus challenge -- my heroin is twitter, which I struggle to not read compulsively. (Right now I'm in a "delete my account" phase, but I know I'll go back.)
But for whatever reason, YouTube and TikTok are both very easy for me to consume in small amounts, deliberately.
Perhaps the thing I love most on YouTube is music. I've discovered so much great stuff there. But I'm sure there's more, if I only knew about it!
Beyond music, tons of other weird and/or life-enriching stuffL An old documentary on spanish gypsies. How to make an omlette. Programming live streams. Surreal russian war movies. Old Hunter Thompson interviews. Etc. etc. etc.
But mostly the new stuff I find these days doesn't come from YouTube reccs (which tend to just repeat the same things over and over, or show mainstream fluff, more akin to advertising than a personalized recommendation), but off-site sources, like blogs or twitter links. Which is a shame!
(Sort of tangentially, if I had to restart civilization from scratch and got to pick one single source of information to use, I'd pick YouTube for sure. I just wish Google were a better steward of that rather remarkable collection. (They really seem to be on a vendetta against the "You" part of YouTube...))
> For my oldest daughter, it was finding laughter and community with the Vlogbrothers. And for my oldest son, recommendations brought about a better understanding of linear algebra through animated explainers by 3Blue1Brown—with breaks to watch KSI videos.
My first thought reading this was about reinforcing a stereotype as the son learning hard sciences and the daughter watching fun shows about people things.
Or maybe it's just what HAPPENS in real life when you have a son and a daughter, and it's effects can be seem on a societal level through, for instance, the number of male vs female hard science college applicants for instance. Different genders have different interests on AVERAGE. The fact that nature doesn't conform to a idealized view of an equal world does not make it "wrong".
equality of outcome vs equality of opportunity. you are never going to get the first because psychology and biology you can only provide for the second.
Why don't they let me tell them the interests that they are trying to infer? I'd be really happy to review sets of recommendations and indicate the kind of videos i like and the kind i don't.
Because this way YOU would have the power to decide what you see, and why, I ask, would the biggest corporation in the world not use this power themselves? They can literally change minds and public opinion using it. Imagine the implications in terms of public police, elections, even the general zeitgeist of the population about the company itself. Google will NEVER allow it's users to decide for themselves what they want to see.
The latest Facebook [leaks](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039) by the WSJ has made it clear that these large social platforms have the intent and actively do shape public opinion. YouTube is no different. It's clear that they have political/ideological leanings and intend to use the platform to bend the world to their views.
In some vein they kind of do this by letting you like or dislike videos. The problem is almost all of them see this as an opportunity to signal others. Which means that your likes and dislikes are also value judgements, that you may or may not be comfortable making.
They have at least have "not interested" but it's a clunky system.
TikTok is having more luck because they're getting this data by watching WHEN you stop watching a video. Video's automatically play, so the default signal when you swipe past something is "no".
Except for the meager controls they already give you, the data flows only one way: from their db of history to your screen. You fencing off your interests would complicate this immeasurably. I would guess that it would raise the same problem that Google Search found with its domain blacklist feature 10+? years ago.
I don't think personal recommendations are a good use of developer effort, I think I'd be fine if it just showed me videos liked by other people who have liked the same videos I have.
I hate how it has now started slipping Hollywood movies into my recommendation feed. All of a sudden i'm seeing the credits on a 2 hour movie after watching a 15 minute UrbanX video. NO YOUTUBE, BAD. If I wanted to watch shitty movies I wouldn't be on YouTube.
In general I hate how YouTube is now filled with videos from high production studios. And most of these aren't even full-length episodes, but rather ~2 minute excerpts. I miss the old YouTube when most content was produced by individuals.
I’ve started getting sub-1minute videos popping up constantly on YouTube. If I wanted that I’d use Tiktok (I don’t). On mobile you can hide a video but it doesn’t prompt you to stop the channel entirely. So I just keep getting these dumb recommendations.
it recommended me (to rent) what I thought was a science documentary about space and the cosmos once and i just trusted it wouldn't recommend me some crazy conspiracy theory and rented it... NOPE.
It was about how ancient aliens mined out the moon and control us or some other crazy pills kind of idea
My actual normal video recommendations are quite good and shift alongside my interests over time quite well without prolific use of "not interested" or incognito shrugs. Rented movies seems bad though, especially since I'm already a paying premium user!
Personally, I carefully guard my youtube feed (same as twitter). I vigorously cull (`dont recommend/not interested`) dull videos whenever they pop up. Once a month, I will go over my history and remove items that I didn't particularly care for in retrospect. Youtube's recommendation has gotten really useful for me overtime. It keeps my curiosity well-satisfied.
I did not know about this feed. It's a HUGE improvement over the algo, really what many of us wanted all along, a feed of the most recent videos published by our subscribed channels. Tx
This link is displayed on the homepage from the button labeled "Subscriptions" and is part of the main site-wide hamburger menu. How is it people miss this feature? I have always used it as my main YouTube home page
1. If you don't have your YouTube activity history enabled, the algorithm doesn't remember what you've watched and you'll probably get clickbaity/junky recommendations.
2. If you have set your history to expire after some amount of time, it will start re-recommending videos you've already seen once it has forgotten you have watched them.
I have viewing history tracking disabled and 90% of videos I see are new/popular videos from channels I subscribe to. It's not so bad, definitely less clickbait.
I'm pretty sure Youtube knows that people who did one of the things you mentioned get fed up with their crappy recommendations and enable the recommendations, just to be 'fed' with new content. Which in turn is great for their monetization strategy.
It would be nice if Youtube offered a feature where the recommended lists are completely removed and youtube simple loads as a search bar. Where you find what you are looking for without distractions.
I've done this myself by adding the following rules to ublockorigin:
Or you’re underestimating the difference between what appeals to you and what appeals to the average visitor.
It wouldn’t make sense for them to show objectively “crappy” content to every new visitor, just to get OP to turn on their recommendations. What we consider crappy is what other people consider entertaining.
I have my watch history turned off so the red bar doesn't appear in thumbnails of videos I left a quarter way through. YouTube still shows me videos that I've watched years ago (Primitive Technology for example a channel which has stopped producing content) and left likes on. How is it that their algorithm doesn't factor in likes/ dislikes at all?!
I always watch logged-out. (Occasionally on iOS I will be unknowingly logged-in, not sure how that happens. I log out if I notice I am logged-in.) YouTube seems to maintain an identity for me, and auto-constructs playlists using past items viewed. Recommendations appear to relate to past viewing.
I’m uncertain on how cookies are maintained. Are these Safari cookies behind the scenes?
My point is, contrary to GP’s claim, there is some mechanism for viewing history even if it is turned off.
I always wonder if those big platforms commercialize recommendations. I'm pretty sure it happens one way or another with the music app. The auto generated playlist always have some artists that I really dislike and would never listen, but are pretty popular.
Best decision I ever made was installing an extension to get rid of the recommendations (they're such crap - I wish they would actually try to recommend me things with a high likelihood of me enjoying rather than whatever propaganda youtube wants me to see).
You can accomplish this without a dedicated extension by using either uBlock Origin's element blocker, or if you're handy with CSS, the Stylus CSS manager.
Using uBlock Origin, right-click the part of the page you want removed, select the "remove element" option, confirm it's got the right bits selected, and nuke.
Using Stylus, you'll be opening up the element inspector and finding the relevant selectors. Fastest option is to apply a "display: none important!;" directive to that.
Stylus is by far the more powerful and flexible of the two, and you can do far more with it if you care to. uBlock should be sufficient though.
Kind of. Mr. Beast videos make Youtube tons of money. Shouldn't be a surprise that Youtube pushes them harder than videos that don't make a ton of money.
> With all that, why don’t we simply remove borderline content? Misinformation tends to shift and evolve rapidly, and unlike areas like terrorism or child safety, often lacks a clear consensus. Also, misinformation can vary depending on personal perspective and background.
This is a weird way to say "ideas that we suppress for being misinformation are sometimes actually true."
I don't get this one. How can something be true for only some people?
If you say "people shower every day on average" then that might be true in hot sweaty climates more than in temperate ones where people might shower every other day instead, but that's not really what's meant with misinformation. So I'm not understanding how the things that one means when talking about misinformation -- e.g. that lemon juice cures cancer or that homeopathic medicine works better than placebo pills, those kinds of things is what we're talking about right? Isn't that universally false (or true, if something is not actually misinformation but only labeled as such because people don't like the facts)?
I mean, context really is important. "Ivermectin won a Nobel prize" is an objectively true fact, but depending on who you are that either means basically nothing or go eat horse de-wormer
"videos from reputable sources like Vox" - yeah, right...
I wonder who that article is addressed to? At first it may seem they want to reassure viewers that they will get shown the best content. But the longer the article goes on, the more it sounds like a reassurance that they will absolutely block out unwanted political views.
Why do they feel the need to put out such an article? To stave of government regulation? Or for their own political activism? To reassure the leftist mob that they won't be part guilty of electing another Trump?
I mean as a user, I'd like reassurance that the algorithm tries to show me videos I want to see, not videos that others want me to see.
I am not afraid of being shown a flat-earther video, so I don't get the appeal of the promise to not show me certain things.
exactly, they are proud to tell you they block videos that are "problematic" from being recommended. But problematic to whom or what is not described. As this would surely reveal their bias in their algorithms. And also who our overlords are.
There's a pretty solid consensus that white supremacists, vaccine-deniers, and election deniers are "problematic" and YT isn't going out on a limb to make that call.
That's a lot of text just to bury the question "why does Youtube never ever stop shoving literal Nazis onto my front page all the time?" a thousand words down and then... not answer it.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] thread> As I’ve explained, we actively demote low-quality information in recommendations. But we also take the additional step of showing viewers authoritative videos about topics that may interest them. Say I watch a video about the COVID-19 vaccine. In my Up Next panel, I’ll see videos from reputable sources like Vox and Bloomberg Quicktake and won’t see videos that contain misleading information about vaccines (to the extent that our system can detect them).
What is Google/YouTube's full list of "reputable sources". Is it even reasonable to maintain such a list given how often sources treated as authoritative can be wrong? Doesn't this amount to artificially converging users' information exposure towards either the reigning authority or towards whatever Google/YouTube favor?
Generalizing my concerns further, I am not comfortable with having a narrow set of monopolistic tech giants serve as king maker in our information landscape. Perhaps what we need first and foremost is a renewed set of anti-trust laws to break up companies with giant market caps and to address the reduced competition faced by widely used platforms built on network effects.
Thanks Algorithm™
Chicken/egg. Above is true is because they flood the sidebar with algorithmic recos instead of your subscriptions, and have tuned their notifications to not give you as many, even if you are subscribed and even if you click the notification bell.
In fact, I rarely find YouTube's recommendations to be useful. Occasionally, yes, but typically I just get that "more of the same" problem.
However, that may be explained by how I use YouTube. The article is pretty vague and hand-wavy about how the recommendations really work, but it's possible that the fact that I don't drive my YouTube viewing from the recommended videos list makes the video recommendations worse for me.
At this moment, my homepage's first 10 videos include 7 that I've already watched.
I just right-click those videos and tell YouTube I'm not interested in it. That helps keep my homepage fresh while still being pretty good about recommending stuff I like.
One thing I think must be deeply challenging about recommendation on YouTube is that many videos like DIY informative stuff only warrant being watched once. But music, DJ mixes, livestreams, etc. I will watch over and over. So the signal "did I watch this" might mean "definitely do not show it again" for some videos and "definite do show it again" for others. It's probably hard for the system to distinguish those.
It also seems to have some classification issues, too. It lumps a lot of stuff into "DIY", and woodworking is part of it--but so is a lot of stuff that more fits under "construction" or "carpentry". No shade thrown, that stuff can be interesting too, but there's a large gulf between "crotchety woodworking dork going on about tablesaw safety" and "refinishing a backyard shed with glamour shots of a Home Depot sponsored miter saw set to bouncy stock music" that the algorithm does not seem to grok. Maybe it wants me to hatewatch that stuff, I dunno.
I’ve tried the “Don’t recommend this” trick, but because the kids are subbed (or otherwise watch it), it still keeps coming back.
Comes, because statistically those youtubers are able to latch on to some viewers and this drives engagement. I believe some of that has been pay-to-win stuff, where the youtubers actively advertised and paid directly for engagement. Some of those folks are subsidized by outsiders.
Goes, because YouTube knows from studying its own business that they're capable of driving more engagement by turning people into video-obsessed alt-right Nazis. And if it's too obvious, they'll be called on it, or actively punished as a platform over essentially selling themselves out as a propaganda bullhorn to whoever's able to pay.
That being the alt-right Nazis, and those who fund them.
So it goes back and forth. YouTube doesn't always do this. It does as much of this as it possibly can, but is systemically aware that running with it causes other problems, and dials it back to stay out of trouble (and because some of the people minding the algorithms are not, themselves, alt-right Nazis).
YouTube always wants to find an algorithmic answer for everything, and is not afraid to go meta and look at larger contexts for what they do. It's a google thing. So they want, and don't want, the 'own the libs' paid-for content. It's both simple capitalism, and looking at it on a larger systemic level where there are risks to allowing their ad buys to stoke outright revolution of the country YouTube is based in.
Separately there is nothing wrong with people who have opinions different from yours.
If you blindly follow some pratfalls or kittens video, you'll get served up junk. If you happen to be researching some specific topic (how-tos, explainers, academics, technical topics being among my favourites), you'll tend to find you're getting recommendations that follow from that initial topic.
I still treat recommendations quite warily, but at least the ones that come up in such sessions are somewhat better than standard fare.
(I never use YT whilst authenticated / logged in.)
However, it becomes this echo chamber of only recommending the same content over and over again because they don't want to suggest something you don't like. That's because to their metrics, you don't watch it all, you don't see the ads, and then you "potentially" leave their platform because there's "nothing you like on it".
To pick an example, my YouTube recommended section is full of videos of people reacting to the things I actually like to watch. I don't want to watch people reacting to the things I like. I just want to watch the things I like. I try to tell YouTube that by saying "Not Interested" to all of the reaction videos, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.
The issue is that we don't really have a good method for measuring uncertain interests and since most algorithms have an underlining "make the company money", we don't get anything beyond the same ol' same ol' recommendations.
[1] Underwater Basket Weaving is a placeholder for anything - yoga, video games, cooking, politics, essentially anything you are currently NOT getting presented.
www.youtube.com###dismissible:has-text(/Vice/)
This way, any channel that has the word Vice in it will never show up to me in recommendations, be it on the main page or the sidebar. This "has-text" regex is really useful, not just on Youtube. I use it a lot, all over the internet. In your case, switch "Vice" with "react" and I believe you'll get rid of 99% of these videos showing up on your feed.
A has-text condition always has this risk of matching too much.
Instead, I have to explicitly go into "Subscriptions", and hope that it was posted recently-enough for the channel to show up in the 6-or-so sorted-by-recency channels at the very top, rather than in the alphabetized list (since there are so many channels in that alphabetical list, that finding anything marked as new in that list is basically impractical.)
This is how I've always used YouTube, and it wasn't that long ago that I learned most people don't do it that way. My usual pattern is to go to the subscriptions tab and scroll down to where the last video I viewed was, then start watching from there up towards the top of the list.
It would be really handy if the YouTube app had some way of making that easier.
Way way more recommendations for stuff I'd never consider watching, recommendations for "big" youtubers (I almost exclusively watch smaller channels based around niche hobbies), stuff like that.
I used to think their recommendation engine was amongst the best of any service I've used, now it's junk.
I remember about a year ago, it got into a weird state where I watched an old Cat Power music video, then every time I looked at recommendations on other videos it was recommending it, again and again... I'd watch the video again to hopefully make it go away, and it would still keep recommending it. It was very strange. I ended up just choosing "Don't recommend this" on it.
We hypothesized this might be because you're less likely to be hooked yet, so it wants you to really get the good stuff and hope that you then want to subscribe to or comment on something? And once you're signed up, you might stay on the site longer if you need to keep looking for stuff you like and generate more ad impressions.
I should really do a comparison logged-out vs. logged-in because I could swear those ads are different amounts and durations. Also it's percentage-wise about as much as the free legacy TV channels, except of course YT doesn't need to pay the production company -- ShadyVPN already takes care of that.
Of course, that'd be a pain to manage, so I haven't gotten around to it.
They probably hate this idea but who knows, that might even increase vid views.
If you are not logged in you can't do this, for obvious algo manipulation reasons.
I keep getting old furniture restoration videos in my feed. I've seen them already. How about different channels on the same topic with new videos posted?
You probably don't have kids.
Though it feels like both scenarios should be pretty easy to handle algorithmically.
Even without the category system, if the user never ever goes back to rewatch a video they've seen, it could perhaps realize that the user doesn't want to rewatch videos they've already seen. Or if some videos or channels have a very high re-watch rate and others don't (presumably music channels vs., say, a random furniture restoration channel), it could tune for that. Clearly they're not separating the types, and it's not because they're not capable.
> 2. If you have set your history to expire after some amount of time, it will start re-recommending videos you've already seen once it has forgotten you have watched them.
The meaning of "recommendation" seems to have shifted from "what we think you want" to "what we want for you."
It's not a wrong use of the word, just different from what you might expect.
I think this is a pretty fantastic summary of what has gone wrong with a lot of big tech. Facebook, Twitter, youtube, Google search, iOS, Android, and Windows all have moved toward taking away user control and trying to move you toward more of what they want you to want. If it's not recommendations, it's forced updates, device scanning, or "influencers".
We badly need some of that disruption these same companies used to preach about. The current cohort is becoming ossified and user hostile, just like the companies they replaced.
We'll see though!
https://support.google.com/google-ads/thread/10007177/using-...
https://i.imgur.com/XIRW4U2.jpeg
When opening videos that are sent to me by others, I always use a private window, so my main account is pretty low "variance".
When I find a creator I like, I do a "fake binge", by queuing all their recent videos and some old ones too and playing them unattended.
I also try to minimize my use of the recommendation sidebar, since it usually shows content related to the current video rather than the more general recommendations of the home page.
When something foreign sneaks its way to my home page, I immediately click "not interested", paying attention to not hover the thumbnail.
Overall, Youtube has got me trained pretty well, but at least I get some nice recommendations out of it, so much so in fact that over half the recommendations I get are usually videos I have already watched (even if Youtube thinks I haven't yet for whatever reason).
The other day a little modal appeared on the side of youtube.com desktop saying something like, "Curious for new stuff? Explore content that isn't what you usually watch."
It ended up being sorta like an alternate reality. It was all the topics I usually watch, but with different channels I don't normally see at all. In other words, it was as if all the channels I normally watch don't exist, what else would exist to fill the void.
And is that the main page for you? When I open the website or the Android app I get "Home". "Explore" is a separate tab. "Home" is pretty much filled with recommendations from channels I've watched recently, no corporate stuff (excluding ads).
I do see the issue of recommendations being flooded with one topic you've watched recently, but I generally don't have too much of a problem with it. When the recommendations stop being relevant/interesting to me, I tend to shut off YouTube.
Home page is the one that's being promoted to you.
it should know that I don't want to watch the same things every day over and over relentlessly. There's hardly anything (by topic) I want to watch again the next day, except some news and political commentary which I do watch and it NEVER offers me.
The majority of "independent news" have a highly partisan or highly unreliable tilt (both to the Left and to the Right): https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/
Interestingly enough, most people complain about the opposite: that if you watch some piece of slightly tilted piece of content on YouTube, the recommendation goes wholehog and pushes you towards the same radicalization direction, and so you start by watching someone complaining about Feminist Frequency and before you notice you're getting recommended White Nationalist content.
If anything it's probably good that if you're watching "independent news", that the algorithm tries to moderate you with some mainstream content...
I have never, ever watched one, and I always click Not Interested, or Don't Recommend Channel. But they keep on coming. There seems to be an endless supply of them.
In the end the core problem with the recommendation system is simply that there is only one list of recommendations, which makes it damn near impossible to switch to a different topic unless you start account hopping. The new topic-bar helps a little, but still offers no way to get rid of an unwanted topic completely.
There are numerous channels I am subscribe to that I haven't seen in months or years, just because I didn't watch them for a week or two and they fell out of the recommendation cycle.
But on a useful note, maybe YouTube needs to provide a function to see a list of random videos that are unexplored or new.
Actually, I think they kind of are trying to do this (in a sense), if you read the article:
> Our system then compares your viewing habits with those that are similar to you and uses that information to suggest other content you may want to watch. So if you like tennis videos and our system notices that others who like the same tennis videos as you also enjoy jazz videos, you may be recommended jazz videos, even if you’ve never watched a single one before.
Imagine if I went to church for the first time in a decade and the next day three monks show up at my door with a cassock and vows.
...that's the YouTube algorithm in my experience. I show a passing interest in one thing so it floods me with every drop of content they have on the subject to the exclusion of things that I have watched every week for years.
There are creators I watch every week or every drop. Somehow the algorithm chooses to not surface their videos regularly and surface 46,123 videos on Terraform because I watched a quick tutorial.
me: art, philosophy, religion, culture -- avidly
me on youTube: Rizin/UFC re-runs, live concerts of commercially successful bands, D&D themed games
It is not even a separate expense for me, as I just use my running shoes as my regular shoes. Also, maybe it is my gait or my lack of weight, but I estimate my shoes last 1k miles.
I started running fairly casually but eventually started doing marathons. I run about 110 miles a month so I'm switching out shoes every 3 months. My feet suck so I'm also replacing a pair of orthotics every 2 years. I got a full set of summer and winter running gear and enough of each to last me a week. I also have a hydration vest, a GPS watch (not necessary but very useful), a set of Aftershokz bone conductive headphones so that I can listen to music while maintaining situational awareness, a pair of good sunglasses specifically for running (I sweat a lot and would not want to ware the same pair for everyday use), I have a few soft flasks that go in my hydration vest, and I've had to invest in a pretty decent treadmill to run on during the worst parts of winter.
Not everything I've listed is 100% necessary but as with most hobbies it finds ways to become expensive the more dedicated you are to it.
[*] That's true where I live (northern Europe) for pretty much all of my runs up to ~20km. In hotter or sunnier climates it may be necessary to carry water for shorter runs and/or put on sunscreen.
It is recommended anytime you are outside when the sun is out.
Since Google/YT essentially are shaping you thoughts and behaviours, logical optimization for them is to shape you to be a working sportsman that spends all disposable income on services, experiences and goods bought online.
Also your original examples seem more positive. If more people started exercising and gardening because of YouTube, I think that would be amazing.
There seems to exist a downward spiral where content that is prioritized to be attention grabbing over all else gets the most clicks and then drives more content to focus on this. The quality of the content itself seems to be increasingly inconsequential and has fallen off a cliff in the face of click spam.
Anecdotal evidence 1: I used to watch youtube videos for investment ideas and now all of these streamers pump out the same low quality, not very researched content with their face plastered on top with a shocked look on their mug.
Anecdotal evidence 2: My son was shown youtube by one of our nannies (despite my rules on no youtube) and has since become semi-addicted to the most brain dead content of toys being made into knock offs of the reasonable shows he used to watch or some adult man child being a weird clown in public.
Idiocracy will be due to memes as much as genes.
Directly to Susan Wojcicki's face in a live public interview: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zKrQzJgFWdw
(Starting about 1:50 into the interview.)
Also numerous times in her column and podcast (I can chase those down if requested, though they should be prominent).
See "Algorithms Won’t Fix What’s Wrong With YouTube" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/opinion/youtube-algorithm... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20184282)
Guess it had good acting, surely no one in their right mind is that excited to eat 5 kilos of meat with water in 5 minutes or whatever...
Just kinda felt disgusting, why does this have a million views? This guy's channel was all about eating shit fast... Wat
On a related note it would be interesting if someone has made some "rabbithole resolving" software - I've noticed that these things terminate in extremely similar ways for most people, and have had a number of conversations laughing with others about how we've gone down the exact same content route. Write some code to find the bottom for us and save all the headache (fun)!
Seriously? Is it 'telling 'cute' stories to distract from the black box youtube algorithm that creates white supremacists' -time? It comes across as incredibly unempathetic, gaslighty and dismissive, posting on a thread that is discussing an important societal problem; especially using the word 'dangerous' in the sarcastic way in which you used it here.
It's frustrating that the readers themselves have to replace YouTube's cryptic and doublespeak-y 'borderline' label in this article with the word 'white supremacist' and/or 'alt-right' to get the real picture.
It doesn't have any "the key words I'm interested are" section. It doesn't have any fine grained "show me less like this" or "show me more like that" options.
That all the filters of net (Google, FB, etc) have convinced users that an out-of-their control recommendation system is a triumph of this sort of system. If you just demand the recommendation system be different, you're just asking users be controlled in a different way.
Edit: whenever I mention this, I get "but the users are morons and need to be lead". I'd say instead, users are often unthinking and need to be educated.
Oh, is that all?
The issue with the "Not interested/Don't recommend channel" is that it's the nuclear option. It does make content go away, but more often than not, what I really want is just to watch something else right now. The content might be perfectly fine and up to my taste, but when Youtube keeps recommending the same stuff again and again, there is no easy way to just reduce that a little without nuking it completely.
But the main thing missing isn't video-by-video like/dislike.
The thing that's missing is something like a control panel. It would show "these are topics/tags I'm especially interested in", "these are topics/tags I want to avoid entirely", "these are things to show occasionally" "show topics similar to what I'm current watch" or not.
All "but they have that objections" here seem very around "but it does have ways to give the opaque recommender suggestions" - yes, but how the recommender works is still unknown, "magical", opaque and how the suggestions will effect the recommender is also unknown.
I mean, I happen to know the only way the only affect the recommender is to actually remove items from your history. That's pretty klunky. And it makes it impossible to say "give me X but not Y kind of X"
I watched one video on preppers out of curiousity - and my feed is now full of videos about machine guns, shot guns and the correct military gear to pretend you are in the army.
Anecdotally (n=1, I know), I watch/listen to a lot of leftist lectures and speeches and my feed does not get inundated with them nearly as much... Really makes you think.
The problem is that the right is much better at producing flashy, low-attention/low-commitment content - the kinds of things that excel in the metrics the algorithm would naively optimize for. Case in point, the lectures you watch are nearly the exact opposite of that popular, easily-digestible content.
Now they removed movie and left there only very bad unwatchable commentary of it. Let's pretend it solves the problem.
But all of that pales in comparison to their Tik-Tok clone attempt of short videos. Talk about "chum"! They're clearly highly optimised to pull people in and get them hooked.
Luckily, I know digital drugs when I see them. I was one of those freaky people that could recognise the "hooks" in games like World of Warcraft and simply stop playing before the "endgame" mechanics sucked your life down the drain just so that Blizzard can get their recurring revenue.
Seems like this data driven optimisation for addicting people to low-quality content is the mental opiod epidemic of the current era...
www.youtube.com###dismissible:has-text(/Vice/)
This way, any channel that has the word Vice in it will never show up to me in recommendations, be it on the main page or the sidebar. This "has-text" regex is really useful, not just on Youtube. I use it a lot, all over the internet.
Perhaps this is the reason the recommendations are junk? How can Youtube recommend you videos if you hide what you like from Youtube?
I watch a lot of Youtube, signed in, on Youtube.com, and my recommendations are great.
> As I’ve explained, we actively demote low-quality information in recommendations. But we also take the additional step of showing viewers authoritative videos about topics that may interest them. Say I watch a video about the COVID-19 vaccine. In my Up Next panel, I’ll see videos from reputable sources like Vox and Bloomberg Quicktake and won’t see videos that contain misleading information about vaccines (to the extent that our system can detect them).
When my parents watch 30 consecutive videos that mention that you can't trust the mainstream media, what good is suggesting to them a Bloomberg video?
My parents aren't on FB or any other social media. But over the last 10 years they have gone off the deep end after watching more and more insane videos on Youtube. It started with hours of Ron Paul videos. Then Alex Jones videos. Who knows what cretins it offered up after that.
They've stopped talking to me recently. It's because I've gotten the "Kill Shot" after they've explicitly told me not to. I'm apparently going to die from the covid vaccine within the next 6 months to 3 years... On my last phone call, they've told me that 300 old money families (who are all also insane environmentalists) have hatched and are executing a plan to depopulate the planet to 500 million... as told on the "Georgia Guide Stones".
The US Government also has mind-control devices that are convincing people to get the shot. They told me the mind control devices were first used during the Iraq War, because it convinced so much of the Iraqi Army to surrender en masse.
Also, all of our technology comes from the wreckage of crashed UFOs, most famously the Roswell UFO. My Dad thinks I'm naive for not believing this.
Both my parents have college degrees. My Dad has a masters in an engineering field. They were once relatively un-political and rode out the Great Recession without any harm. Maybe they just didn't handle retirement well. But I have a decade of nearly daily emails from them... "Watch this! [youtube link]". When they are gone, I'll have documentation of their decent into madness, with hyperlinks all going to 1 domain. I'm sure YouTube is doing all they can.
I've watched Alex Jones videos myself. I did not leave wanting more and no recommendation algo could change that. (Lest I leave the wrong impression, the same is true of AOC going live on IG.)
The greater point is that if X percent of the population has biases that if fed would lead them to deranged behavior, is it responsible to take advantage of that?
The reasonable discussion of course goes to how big of a number is X. If 100,000 families get destroyed per decade, no big deal in relation to those sweet advertising impressions, I guess. But if FB, YT, Reddit, etc collectively take the mostly hands off approach, does X become big enough to achieve history-book-level harm? Like making [effective representative democracy, pandemic response, ecologic collapse mitigation] impossible.
The thing is, most people, including likely you and me, have some defect. Some aspect of constructing a "good" society[1] is setting up systems to counter the effect of these defects. If you have a system that fosters a person's defects, it is fair to be critical of it.
Or put a simpler way: It's as fair to criticize the Youtube algorithm as it is to criticize a newspaper that only prints positive news about white people and negative news about non-whites. Sure - any given reader can choose which newspaper he/she will read, and the root cause is the reader's bias, but I think most would agree it's a problematic newspaper that is making a bad problem worse.
[1] Whatever that means.
the reader just goes to the sections for positive news about white people and negative news about non-whites. He tears up the rest.
--
Is it not like one goes to breakfast at his local diner, and every day, eats a plateful of bacon. Should the server knowing his patterns take away his bacon?
This isn't exactly new. When I was growing up, there were tabloid newspapers in the supermarkets with wacky headlines like "woman gives birth to two-headed bat", "aliens abduct CEO of GM and replace him with robot clone" or "Elvis is alive and acting as president of the United Nations". They've moved online, but they were always there. Somebody was buying them, even back then - enough to justify the costs of printing them and paying to have them placed in supermarket checkout counters.
What's also not new is the influence of unelected, unaccountable busybodies interjecting themselves wherever and whenever they can to suppress whatever they personally don't happen to like on your behalf (always, always, "for the children" as we see here). Back then it was Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Tipper Gore with their "moral majority" - they didn't care much who believed that they needed to wear tinfoil hats to protect their brains from being reprogrammed by government radio waves, but they sure did care about anything that undermined the position of the christian church in daily life, and they were really successful with it. Now all the people who opposed them back then are… doing the same things themselves.
I'm at a point where I don't want better recommendations to tell me what to think. I'm already having enough of a challenge keeping my focus with the status quo.
But for whatever reason, YouTube and TikTok are both very easy for me to consume in small amounts, deliberately.
Perhaps the thing I love most on YouTube is music. I've discovered so much great stuff there. But I'm sure there's more, if I only knew about it!
Beyond music, tons of other weird and/or life-enriching stuffL An old documentary on spanish gypsies. How to make an omlette. Programming live streams. Surreal russian war movies. Old Hunter Thompson interviews. Etc. etc. etc.
But mostly the new stuff I find these days doesn't come from YouTube reccs (which tend to just repeat the same things over and over, or show mainstream fluff, more akin to advertising than a personalized recommendation), but off-site sources, like blogs or twitter links. Which is a shame!
(Sort of tangentially, if I had to restart civilization from scratch and got to pick one single source of information to use, I'd pick YouTube for sure. I just wish Google were a better steward of that rather remarkable collection. (They really seem to be on a vendetta against the "You" part of YouTube...))
They got it by paying money and meeting the other new-gTLD compliance requirements during the new gTLD gold rush.
None of those requirements involved current use or a forward commitment to heavy use, so the “while barely using it” is irrelevant.
https://icannwiki.org/Brand_TLD
It's pretty strange to me that ICANN allowed the "brand TLD" concept.
I remember being impressed that the Aga Khan has his own TLD under this program:
https://icannwiki.org/.agakhan
My first thought reading this was about reinforcing a stereotype as the son learning hard sciences and the daughter watching fun shows about people things.
Did anyone else notice or think about that that?
But it is also telling his reality. It wouldn't be honest for him to say his daughter watches 3Blue1Brown if she doesn't, would it?
They have at least have "not interested" but it's a clunky system.
TikTok is having more luck because they're getting this data by watching WHEN you stop watching a video. Video's automatically play, so the default signal when you swipe past something is "no".
I don't think personal recommendations are a good use of developer effort, I think I'd be fine if it just showed me videos liked by other people who have liked the same videos I have.
“Old YouTube” was mostly full Simpsons episodes before they got taken down
>“Old YouTube” was mostly full Simpsons episodes before they got taken down
I'm not sure I see the problem there.
It was about how ancient aliens mined out the moon and control us or some other crazy pills kind of idea
My actual normal video recommendations are quite good and shift alongside my interests over time quite well without prolific use of "not interested" or incognito shrugs. Rented movies seems bad though, especially since I'm already a paying premium user!
1. If you don't have your YouTube activity history enabled, the algorithm doesn't remember what you've watched and you'll probably get clickbaity/junky recommendations.
2. If you have set your history to expire after some amount of time, it will start re-recommending videos you've already seen once it has forgotten you have watched them.
You can set both options here:
https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols/youtube
It would be nice if Youtube offered a feature where the recommended lists are completely removed and youtube simple loads as a search bar. Where you find what you are looking for without distractions.
I've done this myself by adding the following rules to ublockorigin:
www.youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer.style-scope.ytd-watch-flexy
www.youtube.com###comments.ytd-watch-flexy.style-scope
www.youtube.com##ytd-browse.ytd-page-manager.style-scope[page-subtype="home"]
www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-renderer
www.youtube.com##ytd-vertical-channel-section-renderer
It wouldn’t make sense for them to show objectively “crappy” content to every new visitor, just to get OP to turn on their recommendations. What we consider crappy is what other people consider entertaining.
I’m uncertain on how cookies are maintained. Are these Safari cookies behind the scenes?
My point is, contrary to GP’s claim, there is some mechanism for viewing history even if it is turned off.
1 Iv had my YT history disabled for >5 years now. Recommendation still works just like for everyone else.
2 Even when enabled it will always keep recommending videos you already watched.
Using uBlock Origin, right-click the part of the page you want removed, select the "remove element" option, confirm it's got the right bits selected, and nuke.
Using Stylus, you'll be opening up the element inspector and finding the relevant selectors. Fastest option is to apply a "display: none important!;" directive to that.
Stylus is by far the more powerful and flexible of the two, and you can do far more with it if you care to. uBlock should be sufficient though.
Also, what is the deal with mrbeast and other video always being on default? Did they pay for that exposure or what.
Kind of. Mr. Beast videos make Youtube tons of money. Shouldn't be a surprise that Youtube pushes them harder than videos that don't make a ton of money.
This is a weird way to say "ideas that we suppress for being misinformation are sometimes actually true."
If you say "people shower every day on average" then that might be true in hot sweaty climates more than in temperate ones where people might shower every other day instead, but that's not really what's meant with misinformation. So I'm not understanding how the things that one means when talking about misinformation -- e.g. that lemon juice cures cancer or that homeopathic medicine works better than placebo pills, those kinds of things is what we're talking about right? Isn't that universally false (or true, if something is not actually misinformation but only labeled as such because people don't like the facts)?
I wonder who that article is addressed to? At first it may seem they want to reassure viewers that they will get shown the best content. But the longer the article goes on, the more it sounds like a reassurance that they will absolutely block out unwanted political views.
Why do they feel the need to put out such an article? To stave of government regulation? Or for their own political activism? To reassure the leftist mob that they won't be part guilty of electing another Trump?
I mean as a user, I'd like reassurance that the algorithm tries to show me videos I want to see, not videos that others want me to see.
I am not afraid of being shown a flat-earther video, so I don't get the appeal of the promise to not show me certain things.
And what is a "solid consensus"? Trump was elected in 2016, for example, presumably by a significant number of voters.
Why does YT have to make any call at all? Why not let me see what I want to see?