Are they banking on youtube videos being a google result, similar to the trash we see at the moment when you Google something and it has these scraped Stackoverflow answers?
Every search result spammed in favor of YouTube is an additional bit of attention to be monetized by Google. Why should they prevent people from making them more money?
Individuals at Google are incentivised to abuse the collective reputation for personal gain.
It always seems that the towering reputation of Google is an unassailable monolith that will never be shaken by any individual. So every individual harms it in their own tiny selfish way, gaining promotions, KPIs, or pay bumps as a reward for their behaviour.
Decades of promoting the selfish, commons-destroying people eventually results in an organisation that has these values entrenched in its upper echelons. At this point, the demise of the enterprise is inevitable, as the commons is destroyed in bigger, more obvious ways, by people now thoroughly empowered to do so, and surrounded by people competing with them for the right to also destroy the commons even more.
Cash reserves and the intangible value of lingering external brand perception can drag this out for a surprisingly long time, but the direction will inevitably continue downwards.
In other words, it is precisely "reputation" that enables this kind of atrocious, value-destroying behaviour and quality erosion.
Companies without reputation are too busy building it, and can't afford even the slightest slip up.
Confirmed. A good friend and colleague worked at Google. Their employees are forced to use a graphical tool to rank coworkers in comparison to each other by lining pictures of them up horizontally... and you're not allowed to put people on an equal level. The tool enforces disparity.
This after Google admitted that they've been douchebags during the interview process and claimed they were going to do better. Yeah, OK.
When your reputation is already rock bottom you have nothing left to lose.
I stopped using YouTube a while back when it decided that because I like programming, video games, and martial arts I would also enjoy misogynistic pricks like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro.
There is something deeply flawed in YouTube’s recommendations, and despite my effort to curate content it kept driving me towards alt-right drivel.
I cannot believe that this guy has made Google more money than he's cost them. Millions of videos is a huge amount of space, and almost all of them have close to no views. His most popular video of all time has 78k views.
Funny enough that I have never seen this account or videos from this account. Only few weeks ago stumbled on article about this guy. Google him, searched him on You Tube. Still no recommendations and results with his videos.
I've been searching for this comment. This is the first time I've heard of this phenomenon and I'd consider myself a heavy and long time user of YouTube
YouTube always amazes me that there can be content creator with millions of subscribers (or number of uploads in this case) that I have never heard of.
I hit his videos a couple of time, it was on really niche technical subjects for witch I would not expect a Youtube video to exist. If someone would have made one, it would be better ranked. But sometimes Youtube impress me with videos on some really niche subjects, which is amazing, but when you click on one of his videos, it's really deceiving.
Why would they? YouTube earns money on this as well. It's a bad idea long term, but the manager in charge probably focus on the bonuses they are receiving short term.
I think this is the next step in social media reductionism, as people find ways to further lower the effort to "produce" content whilst maintaining a relatively high return.
There is this thing I discovered recently, they take clips from movies (allowed under 30 seconds) and "recap" them as in snippets from a synopsis, then pass it through the Medium TTS voice... boom easy content (videos with millions of views).
Other similar "content farms" dark series, channels recapping any scientific news that comes out... ugh. I've just been mass removing these channels from my suggestions.
Fake live broadcasts eg. Elon video from 2021, classic 'give us crypto we give you back 2x'.
> Fake live broadcasts eg. Elon video from 2021, classic 'give us crypto we give you back 2x'.
Ugh, those are the worst.
I like space and rocketry, I enjoy watching space related content, so naturally, the algorithm recommends space content. Now, every time I open my feed, there are at least 10 of the fake Elon Musk crypto scam live streams. And no matter how many times I report these fake 'Space X', 'Space-X' 'Space_X' crypto scam channels, they remain up, and YT keeps recommending this junk.
Scammers have figured out that YT has a hard time moderating live streams. And it appears to be working too, many of those fake streams have lots of viewers (unless, that is fake too).
Got to give this guy some credit. It's ridiculous that videos showing StackOverflow questions and answers are more discoverable via YouTube than the underlying content via direct search. Not sure if it's Google or users to blame, probably both, but this guy is making a mockery of it and probably profiting in the process.
Quick search of one of this guy's videos "ubuntu blank screen blinking cursor" on Google (English, on a Private tab) gets me his result as the 3rd video in the main Google Search page, before I get to the original Stackoverflow answer which is 2 search results below the video.
I just did the same search and the first result is askubuntu.com, his video is the 3rd video in the "Videos" section (Not visible from initial search page, have to click on "View all") and then the second search result is SO.
A few months back I searched YouTube for PostGIS videos on a particular issue I was having. A couple of his videos came up, which were quite disappointing once I saw the format. But they gave me enough context to be able to find the actual Stack Overflow posts the videos were generated from, which I hadn't found in my previous searches due to not understanding the topic well enough to have the right keywords for good results to bubble above all the irrelevant results.
The problem of web content is the search and recommendation systems have no opinion on skill, effort, scholarship or accuracy.
It's become disconnected so much that metrics of quality are seen as arbitrary, unrelated attributes.
There is literally zero reward for hard work. It's actually more likely to hurt than help you because original scholarship or novel insights is definitionally more dissimilar to existing things than low effort derivative spam.
There needs to be a fundamental redress that combines with categorical human-based systems. Categorical not only in what they "like" but in their modalities of engagement and what the styles of flow mean.
For example, if a 4 year old watches a video 150 times over 2 weeks, they're being a 4 year old. If a 40 year old does that exact same thing, then it's a completely different meaning.
There's other modalities, do people complete it but take longer then the duration (maybe to look things up) or do they set it at 1.5 speed and scrub through it. There's ways of characterizing these interactions.
Choosing to be naive about such things in our search and recommendation systems is at our own peril and it's a big part of the SEO spam and low quality avalanche that we are all awash in.
Digging ourselves out of it will require us to somehow capture a human part of human beings we haven't appeared to digitally organize yet.
The problem of web content is the search and recommendation systems have no opinion on skill, effort, scholarship or accuracy.
They do, but only through the proxy of 'likes' and 'followers'. This leads to a bigger problem with web content, especially with video - people conflate the quality of the video production with the quality of the content. Someone who can make slick, glossy videos full of effects will almost always have a far larger following than someone who makes videos with better content but worse visuals. The same goes for a well-designed website. People literally believe that the loading speed of a webpage has an impact on the quality of what it says.
You could put 30 years into learning, understanding, and explaining a complex topic, but if you can't use AffectEffects or you haven't paid attention to your Core Web Vitals the chances are that YouTube and Google are going to rank you lower than someone who can.
On average production quality seems to correlate inversely with accuracy and actual knowledge on Youtube. It kinda makes sense, most Youtube channels seem to be one-man-shows, if the production quality is good, the dude doing it is basically an A/V person at that point and you're looking at P(A/V person AND knowledgeable in X) vs. P(knowledgeable in X).
Channels that get big for the sake of having amazing quality tend to pick up production quality at some point, probably by hiring people. So if you're watching older/larger channels, the correlation won't be as obvious. On the other hand, we can time warp! This is the oldest video on YouTube from Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU2dZz18P0c
I'm sure there were plenty of even gankier ones prior since by that time he already had his nice logo sorted out, a pretty good broadcasting setup, and more. In any case, here's his latest video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1bSDnuIPbo
Not only YT, this applies to almost everything. If a website is basic black-on-white HTML with little or no styling, it usually has high-quality content.
I wonder if it's more of a U-shaped curve - one-person/smaller shows follow the trend you suggest, but larger channels can do well in both areas, as they can afford a team of people rather than requiring someone to be proficient in multiple areas.
That would tend to fit with what I've seen, but that's a pretty small/biased sample.
I agree up to a point but what is "well written" depends to some degree on the reader. You'll find plenty of people here who basically resent literary style of writing and storytelling and would much rather have a dry paragraph or two synopsis.
> You could put 30 years into learning, understanding, and explaining a complex topic
If you put that much time and effort into a topic, please invest a month into learning how to make slick visuals! The amount of knowledge that's lost due to abhorrent presentation is probably astronomical. This includes papers and books about complex topics!
I don't know where we got the inane idea that you have to be extremely dry and boring to present a complex idea. Bob Nystrom's book Crafting Interpreters is not only a joy to read, it also teaches an incredibly complex topic. 3blue1brown makes amazing animations that explain very deep topics.
If you're going to invest a large portion of your life into learning, it might behoove you to learn how to present that material in an interesting way. Seriously, just take 1 maybe two months to partially work on improving your presentations and the world will benefit so much more because of that.
Stop writing obtuse and dry papers, books, and scripts for videos. Start learning to present well!
As someone who does photography on the side this rings very true for me (regarding quality of work).
Instagram has steadily been showing my content less and less (based on their own analytics) and I see less and less of who I follow in favor of content aggregation accounts (that I don’t follow).
In the extreme case I’m actually more likely to see content by someone I follow via an aggregation account then the actual author (I do follow both in one rare occasion).
Weirdly enough I find recommendation systems getting worse and worse when it comes to content on YT/Instagram, shouldn’t we be seeing progress, it would benefit all parties involved.
Recommendation systems just mirror what the users watch - including their age - and the reality is that 99% of people have horrible taste in just about everything. They can't tell the difference between a great film and a terrible film - they walk away thinking "I enjoyed that".
My point wasn't to denigrate people for having poor taste or whatever. I don't care what people watch. And I'm not one to talk - I sometimes think of buying one of those McMansions from McMansion Hell.
But my point was that the systems are working as intended, and that there is no real failure here - people are seeing a reflection of their peers. It was hard for me to understand it until I saw how my Zoomer cousin watched Youtube like it was a TV station. Youtubers aren't "gaming" any sort of system, just like SEO isn't really "gaming" Google (for the most part) - they're both gaming people. SEO tricks work because it gets clicks. Clickbait titles have worked for 10+ years now because it STILL gets clicks.
Agreed. To go further, I think people don't even want quality content. And on the internet, they just want the feed. They don't want reccomended videos to choose from. They don't need a comment section. The search bar doesn't even matter. Turns out the best way to engage people and get them to use any platform for hours is to just give them a feed. It's why TikTok, YouTube and most Meta products all have stories that just autoplay. That's the future
I don't think that's true in general. People do want good content, but good content is hard to find, and people just don't want to put in the effort of finding it.
They watch what the algorithms suggest because it's easy, not because they really want to watch that stuff.
I mean, look at me, scrolling HN and Reddit for hours. Do I think this is quality content? No. But it would take a lot of effort to find something to better spend my time, so I just don't bother.
I also think being shown what is popular to the majority is another part of the stimulation a feed can bring. Even if you feel the content is poor quality, you now know what content is popular and that is useful.
> They can't tell the difference between a great film and a terrible film - they walk away thinking "I enjoyed that".
If I walk away and think "I enjoyed that" then by all measures that was a great film. A great film will please most of not all of its target audience. When a film is shown in Cannes the target audience is cinema enthusiasts who seek deeper meaning and interesting new ways to use the medium. When a new James Bond is shown, the target audience is anyone who enjoyed the trailer or the spy film genre enough to decide they want to see the movie.
Film critics like to be snobs about what is and isn't "real cinema", but that's not about superior taste. They may have a different taste, but that taste is no better or worse than anyone else's.
If 99% of people don't like what you like and therefore have horrible taste, maybe the problem isn't everyone else.
I always think there are at least two levels of enjoyment.
'I enjoyed that' -> mapping to the enjoyment one gets from eating junk food. It's true, but it's a lack of complexity and engagement with what you're doing or eating. I'd actually include things like beautiful views in this too. It's often characterised by being okay with blatant flaws in plot logic or coherence or plausibility.
'I enjoyed that and it made me think/engage/reflect' -> mapping to the enjoyment one gets in complexity or well-constructed crafts which is often more gradual. In this case, liking something requires active engagement and thought.
The problem is that it's easy to substitute the latter with the former (which is easier). There are only so many beautiful views one can see before the brain yearns to learn what's behind them (curiousity and our brain's requirement for novelty?). I find it similar with films. I don't think this means everything has to be 'le film artistique'. But I also don't think it's healthy to only have the first experience.
It's important to be intellectually stimulated. Feeling good is not enough. The same way drugs trigger pleasure in our brain but we can't accept a society where the majority is constantly high and a minority runs the show.
The moment we give up on pushing people to challenge themselves is the moment our society declines.
Moreover democracies require an educated populace in order to survive.
It is important be intellectually stimulated and fiction is one of the worst ways to achieve that. Read a technical book or listen to philosophers debate or brush up on complex historically significant events.
At the end of the day art is for entertainment. Whether or not you need the intellectually stimulating element in your art is subjective and unimportant.
I have been pushed in many thought provoking directions because of art. Issac Asimov ignited an interest in math, Kurt Vonnegut books laid a foundation for philosophy pursuits, and an indie film I was dragged to about a patriarch dealing with the inevitably of death completely reset my views on how to pursue life.
Life of me I cannot remember. It was french, I believe something "bastards" when translated.
Remember the plot fully. The dad was dying of an inoperable cancer, his son enlists a junkie to help him score heroin to ease his suffering. With the time they have left the family tries to cope with everything the dad was and wasn't.
Two incredible scenes stick out. The first time he does heroin the junkie tells him "pay attention. This will be the best experience you will ever have. You will spend the rest of your life chasing this." - I get gut checked everytime I start a new experience with a reminder to take it all in this first time.
The second is the ending of the move which I will not spoil without request.
of course, I don't mean to downplay the importance of entertainment - just that it isn't the activity that will intellectually challenge people. Anyone can view a painting or watch a film with their own "understanding" of it, it takes dedicated learning to understand math, physics, etc.
I've been to introductory art courses where many students were able to arrive at similar understandings of various artwork as more studied art aficionados. If you were to do the same in a STEM intro course, you'd likely get special attention and it would be noteworthy.
Disagree completely on fiction not being intellectually stimulating. It's much easier to get many different views on a subject from a fictional discussion between characters or to see something from a wildly different point of view via a fictional character. In addition, fiction gives you a hook in the form of a story, to bring you along. Many speakers are not as interesting as their ideas and a story gives you an extra incentive to keep going.
Art is certainly for entertainment but it's the intellectual stimulation that makes certain fiction great.
Feeling good is a distraction that is useful to society. We are not a population requiring 100% productivity at all times. Feeling good can help ease problems, disconnecting through "trash tv" can give your brain enough of a break to come back to a problem you couldn't solve with a clear head. Routine serves humanity very well, and watching blockbuster movies as a reason to get together and watch with your loved ones is amazing.
I think a lot about how the movies I work give breaks to people across all workforces. Those that are trying to solve humanities diseases who need a disconnect from the workload and those that do shift work away from their families both deserve to take some time off their life and be entertained by a ferry passenger trying to escape a sinking ship or a junior exec getting hit in the nuts by a goat.
When I did a sequel of a popular movie I went deep into the hashtags on instagram and found dozens of "we watched this on our first date and now we're married, can't wait to see the next." type stories. Not a bad value for a campy zombie flick.
I think I understand the comment you are responding to.
There is a difference between a great film and a terrible film — though both can be entertaining. The great film will change you, change the way you think, spur you to action, or change the way films are made. It's not just about taste.
> They may have a different taste, but that taste is no better or worse than anyone else's.
This is often repeated like it's some universal truth. Enjoying a film (or anything) doesn't mean it's great - this is a very hard to explain idea though, as it's something that is experienced in the core of your being. It's like trying to explain why small talk is important to someone from a low-context culture - there's probably a fundamental disconnect where it will never make sense. Although I can explain it with words, it really only makes sense on an emotional level. It's the difference between criticism by The Needle Drops and Lester Bangs. One is focused only on "objectivity" - "slashing guitars and crunchy snares"; the other is weaving a story.
But I guarantee you that anyone with the ability to convincingly articulate why The Office is better than Rebels of the Neon God isn't arguing in good faith. And there's a reason for that.
I'd be interested if you have link/research that can explain to me why small talk is important (or what criteria makes sense for determining why movie X is better than Y). If you want to bother explaining too I'd happily read it.
As for why one thing is better than another, it's a sense that I get when I walk away from a good book. A deeply satisfying feeling. Sugar tastes good, I could eat candy all day, but try to explain to someone who only eats candy the satisfaction you get from a good, home cooked, southern meal. Biscuits and sausage gravy, fried chicken, grits, collared greens. If someone offers me a Reese's peanut butter cup, I'll probably take it some of the time - and I definitely don't want to eat a full meal all the time.
But the vast majority of people have ONLY been eating plain sugar - they don't even realize there is a whole world of different ingredients and foods out there. Most people exposed to other foods don't go back to only eating sugar - and that's because real food is better. It's not something you can deduct with logic, and it will never be done in an academic/research setting because it's taboo in academia to make value judgements about culture.
I think you can diffuse what makes a movie good versus enjoyable by judging/basing your criteria on specific qualities. How were the actor's performances, how was cinematography used effectively to convey meaning, how was it written, and how effectively did the director translate their vision into the end product. Were all of these things well executed? Then it's a technically well made film. This is usually what film reviewers are responding to.
That's still not to say film criticism or analysis is objective--there's nothing specifically quantifiable here, but it's more constructive than just saying something is good and something is bad because it's to or not to one's taste. Taste is an appropriate metaphor--a meal at your local deli tastes delicious, but probably lacks the same craft and presentation as the meal from the 5 star restaurant across the street. You can disagree with someone's taste, but you not liking mustard doesn't mean anyone who likes mustard is an idiot, or, you liking high art doesn't mean everyone who liked 'Furious 7' has bad taste.
I suspect the film critics themselves would disagree with that take. Imagine a film a generative AI would make on based on those desiderata. The critic might agree the film is, as you put it, technically well made, but they could at the same time also think it’s not a great film. For example, perhaps it lacks a deep emotional resonance, or some other airy quality that makes films “great”. Think of reviewer lingo like “slick” and “vacuous”. They don’t think of themselves as score keepers; technical proficiency is a contributing factor to the emotional impact of the film, not the goal in itself.
Which means that it’s ultimately just about how much they enjoyed the film. This is fine: they are professionals at describing how the movie affected them and why it works (or doesn’t) for them. They are also movie geeks, which means that if you’re a movie geek too, you’re likely to have similar reactions. Their opinions are especially useful, at least if they’re good at their jobs.
Like most things (think wine or cheese or cars), people who are “into” them value different elements than do casual consumers. I think this is what people are really saying when they call something a “higher taste”: it’s got those qualities you appreciate when you know a lot about the medium. And obviously there’s a significant emotional reward here: that’s why people get into things on the first place. We call this “sophistication”, which is one sense of the word accurate but in another an unwarranted value judgment. It’s the degree to which we conflate refined palettes with “good” ones that everyone is ultimately arguing about in discussions like this.
When referring to taste, if we replaced “higher” and “better” with “advanced”, I think we’d both satisfy the view that ultimately what you get out of something is its value to you, while at the same time still express the view that there’s something special about this or that movie that requires some careful thinking and experience to appreciate.
> But I guarantee you that anyone with the ability to convincingly articulate why The Office is better than Rebels of the Neon God isn't arguing in good faith. And there's a reason for that.
I'm pretty sure that Rebels of the Neon God isn't "better" at parodying office work, and I'm pretty sure there are less laughs to be had in that film too.
So yes, I'm pretty sure The Office is "better" at a lot of things, and while I have not seen Rebels of the Neon God (yet) I'm pretty sure it's also "better" than The Office, but at different things.
> Enjoying a film (or anything) doesn't mean it's great
If lots of people enjoy seeing not great films they apparently prefer enjoying themselves over seeing great films.
If so, one could argue there’s nothing wrong with suggesting people what they want.
On the other hand, if you replace ‘film’ by ‘nicotine’ or ‘opium’, many in society think it’s wrong to give people what they want, and that, instead, society should discourage their use, and aim to have its citizens use less of those.
Similarly, some people (e.g. some variants of socialist movements) will argue that society should strive to make its citizens enjoy those better films, food, music, etc.
> It's like trying to explain why small talk is important to someone from a low-context culture - there's probably a fundamental disconnect where it will never make sense.
Doesn't your analogy actually run counter to the point you are making? ie the importance of small talk (like taste) is not universal?
I enjoy late night kebab from some radom shady place after the night out. It's not a great food. But there is a reason that there is many such low-effort places and low-effort/low-cost is the main one - they just need to be good enough to scratch that itch. Same with those poorly made yt videos
The problem starts when restaurant recommendations websits starts to be filled with them based only on the number of people eating there per day. This is whats happening with youtube recommendations
Take a look at the video in question[1]- I search for some answer, I watch it and I DID NOT enjoy that. If not for the dislike button, I have no way to signal that to youtube. Algorithm just sees that I watched the video - great. Since I haven't found answer to my question I may watch even more videos on the topic (alg - great video, got him hooked on that topic).
Most recommendation system mismatches are much more subtle.
If most people enjoy a film, then it's a good film. If you think 99% have horrible taste, you just have different taste than most people.
Even being charitable with interpretation of your comment, if you dive deep enough, there is no rational argument that makes deep philosophical ponderings better than laughs. At least given our current understanding of the Universe.
Back in the G+ days (I was both an active user and critic), I hammered the importance of the Exit, Voice, Loyalty model.
Google from its inception had inspired exceptionally strong loyalty through solving technical problems (web search) well. I'd adopted and was proselytizing as of 1999.
Over the years that situation ... changed.
With Google no longer serving technical needs well (across multiple dimensions), and disabling voice (killing YouTube downvotes being only one of many examples), the remaining option is exit. And so I've exited virtually all Google products and services.
(The vibe of "my mind is going, Dave, I can feel it" as I deleted my GMail contacts one at a time was ... morbidly fascinating. I've retained that account, as a last-ditch contact. I check it every few months, perhaps.)
Google can't seem to distinguish between "short term retention" vs. "long-term reputational harm". Though they're hardly the only one --- see Reddit and Facebook as other examples.
> So you treat users like idiots and then they start acting like idiots. It really does work that way.
> Let me give an intuitive analogy for those unconvinced. We're going to use a gym, library, and bar. The same person would be exercising, studying, and drinking at those institutions, in specifically that order.
> We shape the buildings (create the context); thereafter they shape us.
> It's the difference between say assuming your customers are alcoholics and then building a bar and saying "it is of public benefit, profitable to our company, whatever, if our users studied so let us make a library and they will rise to the occasion".
so "Recommendation systems just mirror what the users watch" is not a complete statement. It's "Recommendation systems just mirror what the users watch in the <built context of the site>"
The same users on youtube, kahn academy, twitch, and xtube will follow dramatically different paths because the products are just slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. They are castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination as Fred Brooks said, true. But they do amount to a concrete form and context and it does meaningfully influence behavior.
The system encourages the bad behavior. The context is what makes it "natural" - it doesn't have to be that way.
That is an elitist viewpoint. Things that have mass appeal are just that - things that most people like/enjoy/prefer. There will always be niche areas with limited appeal to more critical audiences, or audiences who value other things like aesthetics or other highly technical aspects.
If you can't convince others of your position, then there is no reason for everyone to take it seriously. Its basically the verbal equivalent of a position paper.
I don't think that's the underlying problem. The youtube algorithm sees people searching for something, watching a video and then liking it. How should it not conclude that the content was useful for the watcher? Probably it even _was_ useful and gave them the info needed to solve their problem.
So why did they consume this content on YouTube and not on Stack Overflow?
Because that's the way they are used to searching for answers. Probably because they feel videos are in general easier to understand. Or they come from a background where YouTube videos usually provide the best quality answers (home improvement comes to mind immediately).
For those of us that know how these videos are made, they feel like spam at best and a giant scam that rips off Stack Overflow at worse (though this use is allowed by the license), but I don't see what incentives Youtube should have to ban them.
"So why did they consume this content on YouTube and not on Stack Overflow? Because that's the way they are used to searching for answers"
No, it's because they searched on a technical topic and the Stack Overflow hits ranked lower than this spam. There's a shitload of spam-bucket, search-trap sites that scrape Stack Overflow and re-host its text in a column full of ads. I mean... pages of hits of them. Now we have auto-generated videos doing it.
Again, Google's vaunted algorithms don't do shit about it; even worse, Google REMOVED the ability to block specific sites from search results. Despicable.
Yeah. On top of that google seems to prefer giving videos, categorically. Youtube results are shown first for many, but not all, types of queries. Not entirely clear what the distinction is. But it's not like it alternates video, web link, video, implying that they're sorted in terms of match rate even ignoring gross SEO. It's just video first.
100% agreed on the decline of Google's algorithm. Those SO rip off sites make me furious, too [1]!
But people know they are clicking on a video link and do so not just because it's ranked higher than the text ones, but because they feel a video is easier to understand.
I agree with you that there's a problem, but I think your solutions are kind of naive. All the logic you talk about in your proposed solution can be done with data that youtube has. In almost all cases it has a basic idea of who you are and how you view the videos. It could implement what you suggest tomorrow. In fact I suspect that it probably does do something like you suggest. The core of the problem is more about incentives and resources than the actually algorithm.
Your incentive is to find informative or entertaining content, you have about 10% of an FTE to achieve that. Youtube's incentive is monetize your attention and has ~2000 FTEs to achieve this. Creators are incentivized to try and maximize the amount of Youtube's monetization they get a share of about ~1,000,000 FTEs to achieve this.
That last category is in an adversarial relationship with the first two categories and they have way more resources. Even if Youtube's incentive was aligned with yours - which it isn't - the content creators are in a battle to the death to optimize how much share of the money they get which means they're incentivized to do almost the exact opposite of what you want.
Isn't the sort of data or at least similar already used for recommendations? I agree a large portion of the internet is garbage but there's always Wikipedia.
There’s truth in what you say, but there are plenty of counter examples, too. The Smarter Every Day channel on YouTube, for example. That guy works his ass off, and that hard work is a big part of the reason he’s successful.
That's what PageRank was supposed to do, though. 4 year olds may be WATCHING in volume, but they're not LINKING content. Links are the lifeblood of the web, a point majorly abused in the Web2/SPA fad over the last 10 years or so.
YouTube have begun asking people for their opinion on videos in quick surveys.
Every so often (for me, every 2 days or so) there is a blue prompt with a video you watched recently. "What did you think of this video?" You're asked for a rating from 1 to 5, and then you can provide a little more data to contextualise your rating. For instance, if you vote 5, you're presented with a list of adjectives like "heart-warming", "motivational", "entertaining", etc, and you can choose as many as you like. If you vote 1, you're asked "did you regret watching this video?"
YouTube are optimising for user time on site, not time on video, so they use these surveys to steer people away from videos that you might binge but regret, and leave YouTube.
Right now, at least, the surveys have an enormous impact on which videos are pushed by the algorithm. I use the surveys personally to tailor my recommendations (and try to push creators who I think deserve more views). That is, I basically answer them honestly.
"There is literally zero reward for hard work. It's actually more likely to hurt than help you because original scholarship or novel insights is definitionally more dissimilar to existing things than low effort derivative spam."
I use social media quite effectively within my industry circles to promote myself and stay relevant. It's a grind, but 100% get a ROI in the form of brand awareness leading to more work opportunities.
I disagree that the formula "make something good and reap rewards" has ever been effective outside of lucky breaks. If the reward of making something good is not enough for an individual, then extra effort is required in the form of market research, promotion, and sales.
The stuff you're seeing seem to exploit the back half, but I have always found that making something good and doing any marketing at all has huge benefits.
It's the "Market for Lemons" paradox --- itself a form of Gresham's Law.
High-effort and low-effort content receive ... roughly ... similar compensation as YouTube videos. Or, for that matter, much online Web content.
Given the costs of high-effort media are vasstly greater, the market "prefers" low-effort, high-volume crap.
A market solution would be to effectively bid far less for the crap. The problem is that assessing content quality is itself expensive and error-prone. This is amongst the reasons the publishing world evolved toward publishers and editors, who carry a long-term reputation and face reputational damage from fielding crap.
In cases such as YouTube, Google Web Search, and the Amazon marketplace, this reputational harm has been escallating and catching up with the "publisher", in this case, Google's YouTube subsidiary, Google Web Search itself, and Amazon.
Much of the dysfunction of skilled labour markets follows a similar pattern.
The problem of web content is the search and recommendation systems have no opinion on skill, effort, scholarship or accuracy.
I'm OK with the rest of what you say, but the portion about "effort" seems to be echoing Marx's labor theory of value. This has been debunked any number of ways. But I think for the population here, used to building things as efficiently as we can, it's perverse to try to reward someone for working harder, i.e., doing things the slow and inefficient way.
Given a product equal in the other measures - skill, scholarship, accuracy, and probably some other variables as well, we should probably prefer the one that took less effort to achieve that bar.
videogamedunkey had a great video making fun of the issue of content spam vs quality content [0]. It takes a ton of time and effort to create new content. Meanwhile some people just make low-effort reaction videos every day, getting way more views.
If something is highly popular, no matter how utterly trash it is in your opinion, they must be doing something correctly. The right content at the right time for the right audience.
The next step should be to post spam content in stack overflow replies to get them posted as video on yt so that they can be embedded in TikTok so that, etc...
Thank God the advertisers and investors of the world use their hard-borrowed money to fund this kind of crap, instead of paying their employees. So much value would be wasted ! /s
It's only a matter of time before we'll see auto-generated content that uses AI-generated imagery, text and voice synthesis to produce content that appears vaguely intelligble enough to fool people to watch it. And as the downvote count is private information now it will be very hard to distinguish these videos from legitimate ones.
Personally I think creative-commons licensed content is a double-edged sword. It seems every month there's a new Stackoverflow clone popping up, which just blatantly copies all content from there, remixes it a bit and spams the Google index with it. And surprisingly, Google seems unable or unwilling to filter this stuff out.
Videos of some of my conference talks were also published under a creative commons license (without my explicit consent) as the organizers wanted to make them available to the world for free, which in principle is a good thing. This only led to people blatantly reposting them on Youtube and misattributing them to farm views. I no longer not agree to any of my talks being released under such a license therefore.
If it's a good video why should people care. If my favorite content creator turned out to be an AI that wouldn't suddenly cause me to think that their content is now garbage.
It feels like there are already audiences who are already fooled by content narrated by robots, I've seen some where they don't sound totally robotic, they just mispronounce particular terms that you know it's speech synthesis...
I keep getting those reddit story reads recommended to me, because I accidentally clicked on one ages ago. Just pure text to speech, hell, probably completely automated (scrub top of week of x subreddit, then make the TTS read it out)
> And surprisingly, Google seems unable or unwilling to filter this stuff out.
A little OT, but I find this very surprising too. In general I'm (still) a big fan of Google Search, which I think is amazing and miles above the competition.
But it's true that SO clones are everywhere, often in the first five results.
How can this be? How hard is it to detect that if the exact same content appeared first on SO, and then later on ten different sites that have zero content that's not already on SO, those are spam clones??
How is it even in Google's interest to upset users that way? Beats me.
I suspect the problem is that Google can't fully crawl stackoverflow/github etc. There are plenty of pages which appear unindexed. I find it a lot when doing a google search for a code snippet and getting no results, only to find that exact piece of code/text is in a public github repo or bugreport.
Then, the clones copy those pages, and do manage to get indexed. Which in turn means that when you search for something, the clone appears to be first.
I think Google just needs to make their indexer 10x more aggressive, especially for big popular sites.
They probably need to hard code in some trust levels of sites. I suspect they want everything to be algorithmic through and not involve human judgment.
Same content on SO and other site means always prefer SO even if it was indexed second
Yeah that's probably a factor. They don't want to go the route of manual intervention. But they should have other sources of information that they can use.
I suspect the problem is that Google can't fully crawl stackoverflow/github etc.
How is this possible, given their insane resources and expertise? If they can't crawl fast enough, can't they simply make a deal with Microsoft to get the public data from Github the moment it is created? I assume they have similar deals with other companies (Twitter maybe? for their firehose?).
This particular thing doesn't seem to be a tech limitation. Most likely Google doesn't care enough to fix the issue, they could probably fix it in a week if they wanted to.
At this point, nothing is going to improve until a serious competitor to Google comes along. And I don't see that happening anytime soon, so all the issues that users have with Google are likely going to stay.
> It's only a matter of time before we'll see auto-generated content that uses AI-generated imagery, text and voice synthesis to produce content that appears vaguely intelligble enough to fool people to watch it.
This is already happening, look at the following of Hololive. For now there are humans behind the animated figures but they aren't much more than story writers and it shouldn't take long for the company to figure out that they could automatically generate this content.
I got inspired after watching it. There is a clever piece of script behind it.
I've planned a full coding session today in order to implement it.
Cooking recipes, philosophy quotes, Wikipedia articles (?) and daily news headlines. Still looking for more content.
I'm also thinking about TTS functions like the one used in Sir Reddit YT channel.
Hate me or join me. Risso.gabriele@protonmail.ch
No hate, no join. I doubt this is going anywhere. You seem to be in a stage of fishing for things to do[1] which is a great place to learn new skills but not that great to actually get anything done. Been there, done that.. a few times!
Personally I'd pick something easier to do if you're after cash rather than skills, get yourself eased into making stuff. Spam the hell out of YouTube or whatever later, haha
You gotta keep in mind this is just one channel that got successful at spamming YouTube in this way, of probably thousands of channels trying, and managed a channel best of 79k views on a video. What's that in 2022 YouTube CPM? $60-100 or so, depending on which bucket of ads you get put into? That's like 10x less than making a decent 10 minute tech tutorial.
Much less effort once the code is written, sure, not much more reward. That's not factoring in your script randomly breaking and needing maintenance.
Back to Van de Paar - there's only a few videos with that level of viewcount, the rest topping out around 20k or so. I imagine the channel has some terrible watch time stats too as people will be jumping past his little piece to camera to get the answer they were searching, then dipping as soon as they got the answer or realised the video was guff. That probably wont do you any favours long term.
To also note that the high view counts are videos that have all been up for over a year. Don't be thinking this is quick money!
It's true you have a greater chance of hitting a lottery video by spamming 2 million videos into the void but even that's not guaranteed if nobody ever watches the video in the first place! Focus your brain cycles on video titles and the thumbnail once you've got the code bit down. If nobody clicks the video, nobody watches, algorithm doesn't care about the video, nobody is suggested the video, nobody clicks the video, nobody watches, etc.
You're in high likelihood only going to learn how to play with ffmpeg and improve your code skills off the back of this. Good luck with that bit, it should be fun! I love tinkering with ffmpeg :)
If you do go for it I'd love to know how the end result pans out time and tech wise! Was the juice worth the squeeze? If you'd done minimum wage somewhere else would it have turned out better financially? I bet that article would get some front page HN attention! :)
E: Oh man don't even get me started on the admin side of things if you find yourself on YouTube's radar. Did you know if your Adsense account gets banned.. that's it? You can't re-register, can't appeal, you're just done now. Can't ever use Google ads as yourself again. Not on YouTube, not on your website. You gotta register a new legal entity (LLC etc) if you ever need them again.
I am somewhat surprised he only has 80k subscribers and 20M views. Not a lot considering the amount of videos. But he is probably making a nice side income from this.
As a comparison I have done youtube "the honest way", and I posted around 200 videos and have 66k subscribers and 7M views.
Based in my own experience, the amount of videos uploaded at once will affect the initial number of views in a video, and the number of subscribers in the long term. Spamming the YouTube subscriptions feed with multiple videos at once is not something that many subscribers will receive good. At least in my experience as an uploader myself, I see that if I upload a video every couple days or weeks I get positive feedback, but if I upload multiple videos at once, maybe 3 or 4, I often receive negative feedback from my viewers.
Looking at his feed right now [1] I see a lot of videos uploaded 4 days ago, on 2022-05-20. I stopped counting rows after reaching 200 videos. I guess that not a lot of people would enjoy to have their feed blasted like this if it's going to cause disruption on keeping up with other subscriptions in the feed.
Meanwhile, Google has removed RedFrost Motivation[1] (over 1.5 million subs and =>120 million views) from the YouTube Partner program stating reason "uses someone else's content without adding significant value for viewers". I kid you not. This is one of my favourite motivational channels with an orignal artistic take. According to post[1], they claim to use talented voice artists and musicians to produce our exclusive poetry readings and narrated quote collections. Their appeal is rejected and ignored by YouTube[2]. So one must wonder why Google allows spam but closes down real content creators?
No. I am not affiliated with them. But, I have been following them for a long time, and I enjoy poem readings and content created by them. That quote is from their YouTube post. Sorry about the confusion.
The posted explanation doesn't mention copyright, though. It complains that the channel was delivering the content without "adding significant value," but meanwhile Google allows this asshole to perpetrate the same offense MILLIONS of times.
I haven't watched any of these videos, but to get away with using a copyright poem or other content as part of a video (to be fair use) the video would need to add something enough that they would stand if they didn't include the copyright content (artistic, discussion, criticism, humour etc) - I'm guessing in this case that YouTube has decided the poems are too large a part of the videos (Probably one or more of the poem copyright holders has lodged a copyright violation against some of them) and the content creator isn't added significant value to content owned by others.
I am not someone who spends much time on YouTube at all, perhaps a few hours a year. But after looking at that channel it just seems to be some line drawn images with a poem read in the background. If it’s not autogenerated content, I bet it absolutely could be by someone on HN.
Comparatively, a suggested video came up below when I was checking out the red frost channel, and I ended up watching most of it. Some guy restoring a vintage mechanical watch from start to finish, which seemed to be (to me) high quality content. The person seemed to know a ton about watch movements and I learned a lot.
Not saying the red frost channel should be banned or anything, but imo it’s not too different than the guy auto posting stack overflow questions and answers, just replace stack overflow with poetry.
This is super dismissive of both the hard work put into the content and the people that want to listen to poetry, short stories and even entire books.
Voice acting is difficult and expensive work, and this person is putting out narrations of anything from Sun Tsu's Art of War to Hercules: The Twelve Labours, along with illustrated narrations of short stories and poems for free.
If people will pay five pounds for a copy of the very hungry caterpillar, there is value in this work. Don't dismiss it just because you don't understand it or like it.
I hate this trash. If you search for some obscure math topic on YouTube you'll 100% get these type of Wikipedia-to-speech videos instead of actual lectures.
I wonder how much engagement with the downvote button has decreased since the counter has been removed. Seems like they harmed the vast majority of the YouTube ecosystem to save the feelings of a very small number of politically powerful individuals.
Does a YouTube video TTS voice work better than the software they use daily?
In hearing it in action I gotta imagine a YouTube video version is a hellishly slow way to get information for someone used to interacting with a computer via accessibility software, even if you were playing the video at full speed.
Is there any other similar channel please? I was using this channel to see if my data stream (about new ytb videos is working) and now I lost point of reference. Any suggestions?
You might hate him, but his videos brought value to me.
As an amateur YouTuber myself, this is disconcerting. A real video takes quite a lot of effort to do properly, especially if you try to aim for depth.
The guy is obviously smart, but not doing the world a favour. It is similar to what happened to text-based sites when AdSense showed up. I expect that at some point he will be banned, but still...
Free storage space. I wonder how much it costs for Google to store all those 2M videos.
Here’s an idea. Encode your data/backups into a video (it’ll display as noise but that doesn’t matter). Store on YouTube for free instead of paying for terabytes on Google Drive.
They will re-encode it and it might not be reversible I guess ? Also they regularly delete videos/channels with no warning and have absolutely 0 concern about backups.
at quick glance, the videos seem to be in 1.5 - 4 minute range, so taking 2.5 minutes as average, youtube-dl fetches 8 MiB. I don't know what policy does youtube use for storing lower bitrate encodings, but I figure they only keep them temporarily for some time since it was last requested and encode it live. so 2000000*8 MiB = 16 TiB, not counting whatever redundancy they have. with the 20M views that guy has got in total, they probably make more money off him than the storage/bandwidth/compute costs
I'm surprised Youtube doesn't rate limit uploads per user.
Of course that won't remedy the larger problem of search results ranking, but it strike me as odd that they don't have such limit set up.
If no rate limit exists on private videos as well, it could be a fun project to implement a filesystem based on a hierarchy of videos using QR codes as video frames.
Another example of auto-generated video is perhaps this channel[0] that has videos of only "Happy Birthday" songs with names. I visit it once a year :-)
The guy in question appears even stranger if you try to look up "what he is". According to the information he puts up on the internet about himself, he is presumably (..?) an accomplished individual, being affiliated with MariaDB and seemingly being knowledgable about linux/IT stuff (this latter not surprising, to the extent he is the one that has set up that youtube monstrosity.)
But then again, if you try to browse his twitter, he comes across as some sort of deranged markov-chain AI. He posts a weird mixture of religious banalities and truisms, and weird vague news/political "news", and again random links to technical topics.
I get an uneasy feeling looking at it, like T-800 Schwarzenegger imitating human voices on the phone.
Maybe there is no deeper truth than that it is a 'legal' scam he is making money from, but I find it repelling.
This comes across as somewhat bullying, intentionally or unintentionally. The person may be neurodivergent and the Twitter account may be a reflection of that.
199 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadIndividuals at Google are incentivised to abuse the collective reputation for personal gain.
It always seems that the towering reputation of Google is an unassailable monolith that will never be shaken by any individual. So every individual harms it in their own tiny selfish way, gaining promotions, KPIs, or pay bumps as a reward for their behaviour.
Decades of promoting the selfish, commons-destroying people eventually results in an organisation that has these values entrenched in its upper echelons. At this point, the demise of the enterprise is inevitable, as the commons is destroyed in bigger, more obvious ways, by people now thoroughly empowered to do so, and surrounded by people competing with them for the right to also destroy the commons even more.
Cash reserves and the intangible value of lingering external brand perception can drag this out for a surprisingly long time, but the direction will inevitably continue downwards.
In other words, it is precisely "reputation" that enables this kind of atrocious, value-destroying behaviour and quality erosion.
Companies without reputation are too busy building it, and can't afford even the slightest slip up.
This after Google admitted that they've been douchebags during the interview process and claimed they were going to do better. Yeah, OK.
Oh wait ;)
I stopped using YouTube a while back when it decided that because I like programming, video games, and martial arts I would also enjoy misogynistic pricks like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro.
There is something deeply flawed in YouTube’s recommendations, and despite my effort to curate content it kept driving me towards alt-right drivel.
YouTube always amazes me that there can be content creator with millions of subscribers (or number of uploads in this case) that I have never heard of.
The correct action is to not ban him, but not show him very high up in results. The same with Expert Sex Change of yesteryear.
I think this is the next step in social media reductionism, as people find ways to further lower the effort to "produce" content whilst maintaining a relatively high return.
Other similar "content farms" dark series, channels recapping any scientific news that comes out... ugh. I've just been mass removing these channels from my suggestions.
Fake live broadcasts eg. Elon video from 2021, classic 'give us crypto we give you back 2x'.
Ugh, those are the worst.
I like space and rocketry, I enjoy watching space related content, so naturally, the algorithm recommends space content. Now, every time I open my feed, there are at least 10 of the fake Elon Musk crypto scam live streams. And no matter how many times I report these fake 'Space X', 'Space-X' 'Space_X' crypto scam channels, they remain up, and YT keeps recommending this junk.
Scammers have figured out that YT has a hard time moderating live streams. And it appears to be working too, many of those fake streams have lots of viewers (unless, that is fake too).
There must the millions of them.
His YouTube channel also only has 20M views in total. It seems very likely the SO posts he used would have more than 20M page views.
It's become disconnected so much that metrics of quality are seen as arbitrary, unrelated attributes.
There is literally zero reward for hard work. It's actually more likely to hurt than help you because original scholarship or novel insights is definitionally more dissimilar to existing things than low effort derivative spam.
There needs to be a fundamental redress that combines with categorical human-based systems. Categorical not only in what they "like" but in their modalities of engagement and what the styles of flow mean.
For example, if a 4 year old watches a video 150 times over 2 weeks, they're being a 4 year old. If a 40 year old does that exact same thing, then it's a completely different meaning.
There's other modalities, do people complete it but take longer then the duration (maybe to look things up) or do they set it at 1.5 speed and scrub through it. There's ways of characterizing these interactions.
Choosing to be naive about such things in our search and recommendation systems is at our own peril and it's a big part of the SEO spam and low quality avalanche that we are all awash in.
Digging ourselves out of it will require us to somehow capture a human part of human beings we haven't appeared to digitally organize yet.
They do, but only through the proxy of 'likes' and 'followers'. This leads to a bigger problem with web content, especially with video - people conflate the quality of the video production with the quality of the content. Someone who can make slick, glossy videos full of effects will almost always have a far larger following than someone who makes videos with better content but worse visuals. The same goes for a well-designed website. People literally believe that the loading speed of a webpage has an impact on the quality of what it says.
You could put 30 years into learning, understanding, and explaining a complex topic, but if you can't use AffectEffects or you haven't paid attention to your Core Web Vitals the chances are that YouTube and Google are going to rank you lower than someone who can.
Or if there is a progress bar [1], which was discussed on HN back then [2]. The top comment in the HN thread is so utterly ridiculous it hurts.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-s...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16289380
No way for that sample to be biased.
On the other hand, your sample may be also biased, so it goes both ways.
1. Produced-for-broadcast-TV content has the highest production costs, and the lowest technical detail. Example: Scrapheap Challenge / Junkyard Wars.
2. Midrange youtube has medium-low production costs, and medium technical detail. Example: Project Binky.
3. University lecture youtube has low production costs, and high technical detail. Example: Look up 'laplace smoothing'
Of course, it's far from an absolute rule - clearly, you can find low-technical-detail content in any production cost band :)
I'm sure there were plenty of even gankier ones prior since by that time he already had his nice logo sorted out, a pretty good broadcasting setup, and more. In any case, here's his latest video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1bSDnuIPbo
That would tend to fit with what I've seen, but that's a pretty small/biased sample.
If you put that much time and effort into a topic, please invest a month into learning how to make slick visuals! The amount of knowledge that's lost due to abhorrent presentation is probably astronomical. This includes papers and books about complex topics!
I don't know where we got the inane idea that you have to be extremely dry and boring to present a complex idea. Bob Nystrom's book Crafting Interpreters is not only a joy to read, it also teaches an incredibly complex topic. 3blue1brown makes amazing animations that explain very deep topics.
If you're going to invest a large portion of your life into learning, it might behoove you to learn how to present that material in an interesting way. Seriously, just take 1 maybe two months to partially work on improving your presentations and the world will benefit so much more because of that.
Stop writing obtuse and dry papers, books, and scripts for videos. Start learning to present well!
Instagram has steadily been showing my content less and less (based on their own analytics) and I see less and less of who I follow in favor of content aggregation accounts (that I don’t follow). In the extreme case I’m actually more likely to see content by someone I follow via an aggregation account then the actual author (I do follow both in one rare occasion).
Weirdly enough I find recommendation systems getting worse and worse when it comes to content on YT/Instagram, shouldn’t we be seeing progress, it would benefit all parties involved.
Most likely because spammers are getting better and better to exploit them.
I'm not saying that they (YT/IG) couldn't do better, but it's a two players competition: the recommendation system vs spammers.
I really enjoyed reading your comment :)
But my point was that the systems are working as intended, and that there is no real failure here - people are seeing a reflection of their peers. It was hard for me to understand it until I saw how my Zoomer cousin watched Youtube like it was a TV station. Youtubers aren't "gaming" any sort of system, just like SEO isn't really "gaming" Google (for the most part) - they're both gaming people. SEO tricks work because it gets clicks. Clickbait titles have worked for 10+ years now because it STILL gets clicks.
> My point wasn't to denigrate people for having poor taste
These are directly contradictory. "horrible taste" is a denigrating term.
From his four great Reith lectures https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03969vt
I don't think that's true in general. People do want good content, but good content is hard to find, and people just don't want to put in the effort of finding it.
They watch what the algorithms suggest because it's easy, not because they really want to watch that stuff.
I mean, look at me, scrolling HN and Reddit for hours. Do I think this is quality content? No. But it would take a lot of effort to find something to better spend my time, so I just don't bother.
If I walk away and think "I enjoyed that" then by all measures that was a great film. A great film will please most of not all of its target audience. When a film is shown in Cannes the target audience is cinema enthusiasts who seek deeper meaning and interesting new ways to use the medium. When a new James Bond is shown, the target audience is anyone who enjoyed the trailer or the spy film genre enough to decide they want to see the movie.
Film critics like to be snobs about what is and isn't "real cinema", but that's not about superior taste. They may have a different taste, but that taste is no better or worse than anyone else's.
If 99% of people don't like what you like and therefore have horrible taste, maybe the problem isn't everyone else.
'I enjoyed that' -> mapping to the enjoyment one gets from eating junk food. It's true, but it's a lack of complexity and engagement with what you're doing or eating. I'd actually include things like beautiful views in this too. It's often characterised by being okay with blatant flaws in plot logic or coherence or plausibility.
'I enjoyed that and it made me think/engage/reflect' -> mapping to the enjoyment one gets in complexity or well-constructed crafts which is often more gradual. In this case, liking something requires active engagement and thought.
The problem is that it's easy to substitute the latter with the former (which is easier). There are only so many beautiful views one can see before the brain yearns to learn what's behind them (curiousity and our brain's requirement for novelty?). I find it similar with films. I don't think this means everything has to be 'le film artistique'. But I also don't think it's healthy to only have the first experience.
The moment we give up on pushing people to challenge themselves is the moment our society declines.
Moreover democracies require an educated populace in order to survive.
At the end of the day art is for entertainment. Whether or not you need the intellectually stimulating element in your art is subjective and unimportant.
Everything is everywhere in everything.
Remember the plot fully. The dad was dying of an inoperable cancer, his son enlists a junkie to help him score heroin to ease his suffering. With the time they have left the family tries to cope with everything the dad was and wasn't.
Two incredible scenes stick out. The first time he does heroin the junkie tells him "pay attention. This will be the best experience you will ever have. You will spend the rest of your life chasing this." - I get gut checked everytime I start a new experience with a reminder to take it all in this first time.
The second is the ending of the move which I will not spoil without request.
I've been to introductory art courses where many students were able to arrive at similar understandings of various artwork as more studied art aficionados. If you were to do the same in a STEM intro course, you'd likely get special attention and it would be noteworthy.
Art is certainly for entertainment but it's the intellectual stimulation that makes certain fiction great.
I think a lot about how the movies I work give breaks to people across all workforces. Those that are trying to solve humanities diseases who need a disconnect from the workload and those that do shift work away from their families both deserve to take some time off their life and be entertained by a ferry passenger trying to escape a sinking ship or a junior exec getting hit in the nuts by a goat.
When I did a sequel of a popular movie I went deep into the hashtags on instagram and found dozens of "we watched this on our first date and now we're married, can't wait to see the next." type stories. Not a bad value for a campy zombie flick.
There is a difference between a great film and a terrible film — though both can be entertaining. The great film will change you, change the way you think, spur you to action, or change the way films are made. It's not just about taste.
This is often repeated like it's some universal truth. Enjoying a film (or anything) doesn't mean it's great - this is a very hard to explain idea though, as it's something that is experienced in the core of your being. It's like trying to explain why small talk is important to someone from a low-context culture - there's probably a fundamental disconnect where it will never make sense. Although I can explain it with words, it really only makes sense on an emotional level. It's the difference between criticism by The Needle Drops and Lester Bangs. One is focused only on "objectivity" - "slashing guitars and crunchy snares"; the other is weaving a story.
But I guarantee you that anyone with the ability to convincingly articulate why The Office is better than Rebels of the Neon God isn't arguing in good faith. And there's a reason for that.
But the vast majority of people have ONLY been eating plain sugar - they don't even realize there is a whole world of different ingredients and foods out there. Most people exposed to other foods don't go back to only eating sugar - and that's because real food is better. It's not something you can deduct with logic, and it will never be done in an academic/research setting because it's taboo in academia to make value judgements about culture.
That's still not to say film criticism or analysis is objective--there's nothing specifically quantifiable here, but it's more constructive than just saying something is good and something is bad because it's to or not to one's taste. Taste is an appropriate metaphor--a meal at your local deli tastes delicious, but probably lacks the same craft and presentation as the meal from the 5 star restaurant across the street. You can disagree with someone's taste, but you not liking mustard doesn't mean anyone who likes mustard is an idiot, or, you liking high art doesn't mean everyone who liked 'Furious 7' has bad taste.
Which means that it’s ultimately just about how much they enjoyed the film. This is fine: they are professionals at describing how the movie affected them and why it works (or doesn’t) for them. They are also movie geeks, which means that if you’re a movie geek too, you’re likely to have similar reactions. Their opinions are especially useful, at least if they’re good at their jobs.
Like most things (think wine or cheese or cars), people who are “into” them value different elements than do casual consumers. I think this is what people are really saying when they call something a “higher taste”: it’s got those qualities you appreciate when you know a lot about the medium. And obviously there’s a significant emotional reward here: that’s why people get into things on the first place. We call this “sophistication”, which is one sense of the word accurate but in another an unwarranted value judgment. It’s the degree to which we conflate refined palettes with “good” ones that everyone is ultimately arguing about in discussions like this.
When referring to taste, if we replaced “higher” and “better” with “advanced”, I think we’d both satisfy the view that ultimately what you get out of something is its value to you, while at the same time still express the view that there’s something special about this or that movie that requires some careful thinking and experience to appreciate.
I'm pretty sure that Rebels of the Neon God isn't "better" at parodying office work, and I'm pretty sure there are less laughs to be had in that film too.
So yes, I'm pretty sure The Office is "better" at a lot of things, and while I have not seen Rebels of the Neon God (yet) I'm pretty sure it's also "better" than The Office, but at different things.
If lots of people enjoy seeing not great films they apparently prefer enjoying themselves over seeing great films.
If so, one could argue there’s nothing wrong with suggesting people what they want.
On the other hand, if you replace ‘film’ by ‘nicotine’ or ‘opium’, many in society think it’s wrong to give people what they want, and that, instead, society should discourage their use, and aim to have its citizens use less of those.
Similarly, some people (e.g. some variants of socialist movements) will argue that society should strive to make its citizens enjoy those better films, food, music, etc.
Doesn't your analogy actually run counter to the point you are making? ie the importance of small talk (like taste) is not universal?
Yes it does. What is your definition of great, and why is it better than mine?
Sounds like by only one measure it was a great film.
The problem starts when restaurant recommendations websits starts to be filled with them based only on the number of people eating there per day. This is whats happening with youtube recommendations
Giving people what they want as a primary objective is the fast-track to mediocrity. "Good is the enemy of great," as they say.
Most recommendation system mismatches are much more subtle.
If most people enjoy a film, then it's a good film. If you think 99% have horrible taste, you just have different taste than most people.
Even being charitable with interpretation of your comment, if you dive deep enough, there is no rational argument that makes deep philosophical ponderings better than laughs. At least given our current understanding of the Universe.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyIKRuSDgIc
Google from its inception had inspired exceptionally strong loyalty through solving technical problems (web search) well. I'd adopted and was proselytizing as of 1999.
Over the years that situation ... changed.
With Google no longer serving technical needs well (across multiple dimensions), and disabling voice (killing YouTube downvotes being only one of many examples), the remaining option is exit. And so I've exited virtually all Google products and services.
(The vibe of "my mind is going, Dave, I can feel it" as I deleted my GMail contacts one at a time was ... morbidly fascinating. I've retained that account, as a last-ditch contact. I check it every few months, perhaps.)
Google can't seem to distinguish between "short term retention" vs. "long-term reputational harm". Though they're hardly the only one --- see Reddit and Facebook as other examples.
I opted not to participate. The actions speak for themselves.
It's scaled poorly as the Web has broadened.
Given enough eyeballs, all content is shallow.
The reality is that a context is created, either intentionally or not, and then people behave in the context.
I commented on this phenomena 4 months ago in a different thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30184653) and 7 months ago somewhere else (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28972157)
Quoting one of them
> So you treat users like idiots and then they start acting like idiots. It really does work that way.
> Let me give an intuitive analogy for those unconvinced. We're going to use a gym, library, and bar. The same person would be exercising, studying, and drinking at those institutions, in specifically that order.
> We shape the buildings (create the context); thereafter they shape us.
> It's the difference between say assuming your customers are alcoholics and then building a bar and saying "it is of public benefit, profitable to our company, whatever, if our users studied so let us make a library and they will rise to the occasion".
so "Recommendation systems just mirror what the users watch" is not a complete statement. It's "Recommendation systems just mirror what the users watch in the <built context of the site>"
The same users on youtube, kahn academy, twitch, and xtube will follow dramatically different paths because the products are just slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. They are castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination as Fred Brooks said, true. But they do amount to a concrete form and context and it does meaningfully influence behavior.
The system encourages the bad behavior. The context is what makes it "natural" - it doesn't have to be that way.
If you can't convince others of your position, then there is no reason for everyone to take it seriously. Its basically the verbal equivalent of a position paper.
So why did they consume this content on YouTube and not on Stack Overflow? Because that's the way they are used to searching for answers. Probably because they feel videos are in general easier to understand. Or they come from a background where YouTube videos usually provide the best quality answers (home improvement comes to mind immediately).
For those of us that know how these videos are made, they feel like spam at best and a giant scam that rips off Stack Overflow at worse (though this use is allowed by the license), but I don't see what incentives Youtube should have to ban them.
No, it's because they searched on a technical topic and the Stack Overflow hits ranked lower than this spam. There's a shitload of spam-bucket, search-trap sites that scrape Stack Overflow and re-host its text in a column full of ads. I mean... pages of hits of them. Now we have auto-generated videos doing it.
Again, Google's vaunted algorithms don't do shit about it; even worse, Google REMOVED the ability to block specific sites from search results. Despicable.
But people know they are clicking on a video link and do so not just because it's ranked higher than the text ones, but because they feel a video is easier to understand.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26436490
Your incentive is to find informative or entertaining content, you have about 10% of an FTE to achieve that. Youtube's incentive is monetize your attention and has ~2000 FTEs to achieve this. Creators are incentivized to try and maximize the amount of Youtube's monetization they get a share of about ~1,000,000 FTEs to achieve this.
That last category is in an adversarial relationship with the first two categories and they have way more resources. Even if Youtube's incentive was aligned with yours - which it isn't - the content creators are in a battle to the death to optimize how much share of the money they get which means they're incentivized to do almost the exact opposite of what you want.
There’s truth in what you say, but there are plenty of counter examples, too. The Smarter Every Day channel on YouTube, for example. That guy works his ass off, and that hard work is a big part of the reason he’s successful.
Every so often (for me, every 2 days or so) there is a blue prompt with a video you watched recently. "What did you think of this video?" You're asked for a rating from 1 to 5, and then you can provide a little more data to contextualise your rating. For instance, if you vote 5, you're presented with a list of adjectives like "heart-warming", "motivational", "entertaining", etc, and you can choose as many as you like. If you vote 1, you're asked "did you regret watching this video?"
YouTube are optimising for user time on site, not time on video, so they use these surveys to steer people away from videos that you might binge but regret, and leave YouTube.
Right now, at least, the surveys have an enormous impact on which videos are pushed by the algorithm. I use the surveys personally to tailor my recommendations (and try to push creators who I think deserve more views). That is, I basically answer them honestly.
I use social media quite effectively within my industry circles to promote myself and stay relevant. It's a grind, but 100% get a ROI in the form of brand awareness leading to more work opportunities.
I disagree that the formula "make something good and reap rewards" has ever been effective outside of lucky breaks. If the reward of making something good is not enough for an individual, then extra effort is required in the form of market research, promotion, and sales.
The stuff you're seeing seem to exploit the back half, but I have always found that making something good and doing any marketing at all has huge benefits.
High-effort and low-effort content receive ... roughly ... similar compensation as YouTube videos. Or, for that matter, much online Web content.
Given the costs of high-effort media are vasstly greater, the market "prefers" low-effort, high-volume crap.
A market solution would be to effectively bid far less for the crap. The problem is that assessing content quality is itself expensive and error-prone. This is amongst the reasons the publishing world evolved toward publishers and editors, who carry a long-term reputation and face reputational damage from fielding crap.
In cases such as YouTube, Google Web Search, and the Amazon marketplace, this reputational harm has been escallating and catching up with the "publisher", in this case, Google's YouTube subsidiary, Google Web Search itself, and Amazon.
Much of the dysfunction of skilled labour markets follows a similar pattern.
https://viterbi-web.usc.edu/~shaddin/cs590fa13/papers/Akerlo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
I'm OK with the rest of what you say, but the portion about "effort" seems to be echoing Marx's labor theory of value. This has been debunked any number of ways. But I think for the population here, used to building things as efficiently as we can, it's perverse to try to reward someone for working harder, i.e., doing things the slow and inefficient way.
Given a product equal in the other measures - skill, scholarship, accuracy, and probably some other variables as well, we should probably prefer the one that took less effort to achieve that bar.
[0] https://youtu.be/VZzZKuQUguk
If something is highly popular, no matter how utterly trash it is in your opinion, they must be doing something correctly. The right content at the right time for the right audience.
Thank God the advertisers and investors of the world use their hard-borrowed money to fund this kind of crap, instead of paying their employees. So much value would be wasted ! /s
Personally I think creative-commons licensed content is a double-edged sword. It seems every month there's a new Stackoverflow clone popping up, which just blatantly copies all content from there, remixes it a bit and spams the Google index with it. And surprisingly, Google seems unable or unwilling to filter this stuff out.
Videos of some of my conference talks were also published under a creative commons license (without my explicit consent) as the organizers wanted to make them available to the world for free, which in principle is a good thing. This only led to people blatantly reposting them on Youtube and misattributing them to farm views. I no longer not agree to any of my talks being released under such a license therefore.
1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis...
So far as your downvote is concerned, should there be crowdsourced information of a video made out of AI on it? I could get inspired from -
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
The video will have a small "%/absolute numbers think this is an AI fused video." beneath it.
I think we can wait on this until a more robust solution comes along.
A little OT, but I find this very surprising too. In general I'm (still) a big fan of Google Search, which I think is amazing and miles above the competition.
But it's true that SO clones are everywhere, often in the first five results.
How can this be? How hard is it to detect that if the exact same content appeared first on SO, and then later on ten different sites that have zero content that's not already on SO, those are spam clones??
How is it even in Google's interest to upset users that way? Beats me.
Then, the clones copy those pages, and do manage to get indexed. Which in turn means that when you search for something, the clone appears to be first.
I think Google just needs to make their indexer 10x more aggressive, especially for big popular sites.
Same content on SO and other site means always prefer SO even if it was indexed second
How is this possible, given their insane resources and expertise? If they can't crawl fast enough, can't they simply make a deal with Microsoft to get the public data from Github the moment it is created? I assume they have similar deals with other companies (Twitter maybe? for their firehose?).
This particular thing doesn't seem to be a tech limitation. Most likely Google doesn't care enough to fix the issue, they could probably fix it in a week if they wanted to.
At this point, nothing is going to improve until a serious competitor to Google comes along. And I don't see that happening anytime soon, so all the issues that users have with Google are likely going to stay.
And in a more general way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
You seem to readily assume this content isn't worth watching. People consume all sorts of content for all sorts of reason.
This is already happening, look at the following of Hololive. For now there are humans behind the animated figures but they aren't much more than story writers and it shouldn't take long for the company to figure out that they could automatically generate this content.
I ran into it before when I was uploading a bunch of videos to run songs through content id to see what was okay to play for an upcoming live event.
[Looks like someone silently updated the submission URL to point to the video. The original URL was: https://thenewleafjournal.com/leaf/man-uploads-2000000-youtu...]
No hate, no join. I doubt this is going anywhere. You seem to be in a stage of fishing for things to do[1] which is a great place to learn new skills but not that great to actually get anything done. Been there, done that.. a few times!
Personally I'd pick something easier to do if you're after cash rather than skills, get yourself eased into making stuff. Spam the hell out of YouTube or whatever later, haha
You gotta keep in mind this is just one channel that got successful at spamming YouTube in this way, of probably thousands of channels trying, and managed a channel best of 79k views on a video. What's that in 2022 YouTube CPM? $60-100 or so, depending on which bucket of ads you get put into? That's like 10x less than making a decent 10 minute tech tutorial.
Much less effort once the code is written, sure, not much more reward. That's not factoring in your script randomly breaking and needing maintenance.
Back to Van de Paar - there's only a few videos with that level of viewcount, the rest topping out around 20k or so. I imagine the channel has some terrible watch time stats too as people will be jumping past his little piece to camera to get the answer they were searching, then dipping as soon as they got the answer or realised the video was guff. That probably wont do you any favours long term.
To also note that the high view counts are videos that have all been up for over a year. Don't be thinking this is quick money!
It's true you have a greater chance of hitting a lottery video by spamming 2 million videos into the void but even that's not guaranteed if nobody ever watches the video in the first place! Focus your brain cycles on video titles and the thumbnail once you've got the code bit down. If nobody clicks the video, nobody watches, algorithm doesn't care about the video, nobody is suggested the video, nobody clicks the video, nobody watches, etc.
You're in high likelihood only going to learn how to play with ffmpeg and improve your code skills off the back of this. Good luck with that bit, it should be fun! I love tinkering with ffmpeg :)
If you do go for it I'd love to know how the end result pans out time and tech wise! Was the juice worth the squeeze? If you'd done minimum wage somewhere else would it have turned out better financially? I bet that article would get some front page HN attention! :)
E: Oh man don't even get me started on the admin side of things if you find yourself on YouTube's radar. Did you know if your Adsense account gets banned.. that's it? You can't re-register, can't appeal, you're just done now. Can't ever use Google ads as yourself again. Not on YouTube, not on your website. You gotta register a new legal entity (LLC etc) if you ever need them again.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31385531
As a comparison I have done youtube "the honest way", and I posted around 200 videos and have 66k subscribers and 7M views.
Looking at his feed right now [1] I see a lot of videos uploaded 4 days ago, on 2022-05-20. I stopped counting rows after reaching 200 videos. I guess that not a lot of people would enjoy to have their feed blasted like this if it's going to cause disruption on keeping up with other subscriptions in the feed.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/RoelVandePaar/videos
[1] https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxqHIIcsQM91HSVme5jE5PlYQp6Zk...
[2] https://twitter.com/RedFrost_m/status/1526561792243138560
... are you telling us you're affiliated with RedFrost Motivation?
Every answer on StackOverflow is under Creative Commons SA-BY, and this guy follows exactly the terms of the license.
I won't say that this Youtube channel isn't a parasite, but it's doing something 100% legally and the one you talk about is not.
Comparatively, a suggested video came up below when I was checking out the red frost channel, and I ended up watching most of it. Some guy restoring a vintage mechanical watch from start to finish, which seemed to be (to me) high quality content. The person seemed to know a ton about watch movements and I learned a lot.
Not saying the red frost channel should be banned or anything, but imo it’s not too different than the guy auto posting stack overflow questions and answers, just replace stack overflow with poetry.
In other words, "the bad man can't hurt me if the bad man is outside my field of vision."
Voice acting is difficult and expensive work, and this person is putting out narrations of anything from Sun Tsu's Art of War to Hercules: The Twelve Labours, along with illustrated narrations of short stories and poems for free.
If people will pay five pounds for a copy of the very hungry caterpillar, there is value in this work. Don't dismiss it just because you don't understand it or like it.
In hearing it in action I gotta imagine a YouTube video version is a hellishly slow way to get information for someone used to interacting with a computer via accessibility software, even if you were playing the video at full speed.
Not speaking for anyone of course, just a hunch.
She uploads tens of videos per day due to her mental illness.
You might hate him, but his videos brought value to me.
The guy is obviously smart, but not doing the world a favour. It is similar to what happened to text-based sites when AdSense showed up. I expect that at some point he will be banned, but still...
Here’s an idea. Encode your data/backups into a video (it’ll display as noise but that doesn’t matter). Store on YouTube for free instead of paying for terabytes on Google Drive.
You can encode information into the audio of video that is resistant to re-encoding.
> Also they regularly delete videos/channels with no warning and have absolutely 0 concern about backups.
You could use a level of redundancy in the videos which would resist that too, like the [2] RAID concept in hard-drive storage.
[1] https://asmp-eurasipjournals.springeropen.com/articles/10.11...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
An old idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid
Store on YouTube for free instead of paying for terabytes on Google Drive.
Also been done: https://github.com/dzhang314/YouTubeDrive
If no rate limit exists on private videos as well, it could be a fun project to implement a filesystem based on a hierarchy of videos using QR codes as video frames.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/c/HappyBirthdaySongwithNames/videos
https://timecube.2enp.com/