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Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

youtube.googleblog.com

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Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#141

Post by abakker »

gothroach wrote: post #132
wlesieutre wrote: post #53

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 think this behavior is probably driven by people like me, who use youtube mostly for music. I repeatedly listen to/watch performances on youtube because to me it's the only streaming service I have. I frequently come to youtube just to watch stuff I've already seen. I find the recommendation in that context to be uncannily good and they keep me coming back to find new music and to see the cool performances I've already seen. Maybe youtube has trouble differentiating these use cases?

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#142

Post by izzydata »

In the last year the videos recommending on the right margin have always been the same videos regardless of what video I was on. Which are the same videos at the top of my home page recommended videos. What ever happened to video specific recommendations? That was what allowed me to discover new things related to what I was watching and not just some total aggregate of everything I've ever watched.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#143

Post by colejohnson66 »

amdanil wrote: post #65
petermcneeley wrote: post #16

If they could simply make the "Not interested" feature work that would be great.

Seems to work fine for me. You just have to click "not interested" on every video of the topic that you don't like and after 5 times or so it stops recommending that topic. Let's say you watched a video called "Top 10 most amazing things you never knew until today" and now the youtube algo recommends you a bunch of clickbait. Just hit "not interested" on every single clickbait video you see and eventually it stops sh…

Or delete the video from your watch history. Your watch history is built based on your history

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#144

Post by mistermann »

beart wrote: post #138
gothroach wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Happens to me on non-adblocked mobile all the time, it is infuriatingly dumb. Google seems to not be able to do user friendly UI's.

Don't get a started on discovery!

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#145

Post by mindcrime »

My biggest problem with YT recommendations is that they dramatically overweight recent videos when generating the recommendations. I mean, I can spend a week doing nothing but watching (well, listening) to videos of classical music performances, and my recommendations will be full of classical music, exactly as you'd expect. Then I watch one random one-off thing, like "15 funny pitbull fails" and suddenly ALL of my recommendations are animal videos. Then I have to go manually edit my feed history and remove "15 funny pitbull fails" to get my recommendations back to normal.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#149

Post by apacheCamel »

ilaksh wrote: post #71
apacheCamel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? They are changing how recommendations work, they aren't removing videos based on agenda. I am also wondering how the brainwashing comment comes into play here, just because people do not believe in a conspiracy theory doesn't mean they are brainwashed. I also do not remember ever asking to be censored.

The recommendations determine what people see. People in this thread are asking youtube remove content from their feed that does not tailor to their worldview. The problem is that the worldview many young people have is highly dictated by the government and any serious accusations toward the government are labeled as conspiracy. Conspiracy is auotomatically associated with insanity. The reason I use an extreme word l…

I would like to see where you get your information regarding young people having worldviews tailored by the government.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#150

Post by ThrustVectoring »

mindcrime wrote: post #145

My biggest problem with YT recommendations is that they dramatically overweight recent videos when generating the recommendations. I mean, I can spend a week doing nothing but watching (well, listening) to videos of classical music performances, and my recommendations will be full of classical music, exactly as you'd expect. Then I watch one random one-off thing, like "15 funny pitbull fails" and suddenly ALL of my r…

It's a combination of that and focusing on recommending videos in depth on whatever topic it thinks you're most interested in. I don't want to watch fifty videos about swords. Three is plenty for now. I want to watch a bunch of different videos and shallowly explore a lot of topics, and the YT recommendation system is extraordinarily incompetent at facilitating this exploration mode.
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