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Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

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Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-vaxers are from all over the political spectrum I am sad to say.

From my personal experience they've always tended to be further right, since often the anti-vaccine fear comes as a result of government mistrust as well as not trusting scientists. Very similar to the people against climate change in my opinion. Though it's true that the anti-GMO and even anti-Nuclear sentiments I see accross the spectrum but those differ a bit from conspiracy theories in that it stems from junk sci…

My experience couldn’t have been further from yours. Most of the anti-vaxxers I encountered both irl and online were of the kind that is all about natural remedies and distrusting of GMOs and such (as opposed to those distrusting of government and believing in conspiracies; that kind i mostly encountered online only).

Just google for outbreaks in the US that are linked to anti-vaxxing and take a note of their locations. Most will start in heavily left-leaning areas. To clarify my point, I personally believe that anti-vaxxing is about evenly distributed between left and right wing, just for different reasons.

P.S. As I was trying to find an article about an outbreak in Seattle that I remembered from a few years ago, I realized there is another one happening right this moment https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/an-anti-vaccinatio...

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#132

What really bugs me is when a video literally has "Episode 18" in the name, but somehow the recommendation list on the right side fails to find the one with "Episode 19". But if I want to go watch Episode 5 again or jump ahead to Episode 26, it's happy to help. Awesome.

As I remember at least some series videos used to be recommended in order, but I haven't seen that in a while.

The behavior that really gets me now is having the top recommended videos on my YT homepage ones I've watched... Recently. I can watch a video from my notifications, and then have it stay at the top of my homepage until I hide it manually. Refreshing the page changes some videos, but rarely the top few.

Of course, hiding the video helps but I get tired of having to do it constantly. I think I'm resigned to my YT homepage being useless at this point.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#133
post #40

We currently don't allow our son to watch anything on youtube, simply because it's a cesspool of horrible videos for children. You're always almost one click away from some violent video where cartoon characters are getting their limbs chopped off, etc. And it's sickening that Google's done nothing about it. Secondly, I can't watch any video without it taking over my recommendations. Alex Jones for example. I still h…

What do you want them to do? I'm an adult who uses YouTube and I don't want sanitized kid-friendly recommendations just so that you can protect your son's eyes from cartoon violence. In fact, several of the creators I like have been pinched hard by changes to the All-Powerful Algorithm which seem to be deliberately de-emphasizing anything that could be remotely considered offensive, and it's not fair to them at all.

There should be a "parental controls" toggle.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#134

What really bugs me is when a video literally has "Episode 18" in the name, but somehow the recommendation list on the right side fails to find the one with "Episode 19". But if I want to go watch Episode 5 again or jump ahead to Episode 26, it's happy to help. Awesome.

As I remember at least some series videos used to be recommended in order, but I haven't seen that in a while. The behavior that really gets me now is having the top recommended videos on my YT homepage ones I've watched... Recently. I can watch a video from my notifications, and then have it stay at the top of my homepage until I hide it manually. Refreshing the page changes some videos, but rarely the top few. Of c…

I wondered how many others experienced this. It really makes it demotivating to use YT

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#135
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way the algorithm pushes steadily more radical content is really concerning. Try making a completely fresh browser profile and deliberately browsing around right-leaning or "anti-SJW" channels and see how long it takes before YouTube starts pushing videos about white genocide and the impending destruction of western civilization by the muslim hordes (not very long in my experience). edit: I just tried this again…

Interestingly, YouTube actually recommends liberal content at a rate substantially higher than conservative content. Centrists content links to liberal content about three times more frequently than it links to conservative content. Is there evidence to corroborate the claim that YouTube is pushing people to extreme content? The data seems to indicate otherwise. https://www.thepostmillennial.com/does-youtube-facilita…

[deleted]

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#136

It's worth noting that this blog post appeared less than 24 hours after BuzzFeed News posted an article explicitly highlighting the conspiracy theories in the recommended section: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/down-y... I helped contribute to that article, feel free to ask any questions!

Have you investigated their rabbit hole for children? YT for Kids simply needs to die. They are evil.

Tangent: I'm expecting a kid, and time will come in couple years, when I'll want to show them kid videos. I fully intend to set this up as streaming from a library curated by my wife & me, populated with youtube-dl and through other means.

I know some people on HN have such setups; could you share recommendations for hardware and software stack? I suspect a Raspberry Pi may not be enough (having network and USB sharing capacity), especially if we want to simultaneously stream movies for ourselves. But I also don't want to turn it into some $1k+ server build, the way they do on /r/plex and elsewhere. Could anyone recommend a "compromise" setup, that would allow to comfortably stream HD videos to 2-3 devices simultaneously?

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#138

What really bugs me is when a video literally has "Episode 18" in the name, but somehow the recommendation list on the right side fails to find the one with "Episode 19". But if I want to go watch Episode 5 again or jump ahead to Episode 26, it's happy to help. Awesome.

As I remember at least some series videos used to be recommended in order, but I haven't seen that in a while. The behavior that really gets me now is having the top recommended videos on my YT homepage ones I've watched... Recently. I can watch a video from my notifications, and then have it stay at the top of my homepage until I hide it manually. Refreshing the page changes some videos, but rarely the top few. Of c…

It's possible your adblocker is preventing YouTube from tracking your watched video history. I know pi-hole does this by default unless you whitelist certain domains.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#139
post #40

We currently don't allow our son to watch anything on youtube, simply because it's a cesspool of horrible videos for children. You're always almost one click away from some violent video where cartoon characters are getting their limbs chopped off, etc. And it's sickening that Google's done nothing about it. Secondly, I can't watch any video without it taking over my recommendations. Alex Jones for example. I still h…

If you delete a video from your Youtube watch history, it doesn't get used for recommendations anymore. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725?hl=en

My anecdotal experience agrees. I cleared my watch history and then all my recommendations changed from being tech related to more pop culture oriented for a few weeks

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#140

Say what you want about YouTube recommended political videos, but I have found some absolutely great music because it showed up in my recommended. A small Canadian band showed up in my recommended and that first song captivated me. Then I listened to their other singles and two albums, and now I'm going to their show next month. Also, I just found an artist from Belarus that makes fantastic synthpop. The weird thing…

> an artist from Belarus that makes fantastic synthpop

Alright, I'm gonna need a link.

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