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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

#161

Post by AgentME »

nightski wrote: post #107
kajumix wrote: post #104

"To that end, we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11." Why take moral positions on the content of the videos? Why be the arbiter of what people should watch? Why censor?

I agree this is annoying. Personally I enjoyed watching the conspiracy theory 9/11 videos even if I didn't believe it for a second.

Maybe they should be there for people who seek them out, but YouTube shouldn't be recommending them onto people who didn't previously want them and who might not be approaching it skeptically.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#162

Post by maxxxxx »

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…

All the AI stuff is really still incredibly dumb. Same for Amazon: Buy a mixer and suddenly you will be haunted everywhere by ads offering more mixers.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#163

Post by white-flame »

I love watching crackpot conspiracy videos on YouTube, especially flat earth & moon landing denier stuff. Beyond just the curiosity to dissect their weird contrived explanations, there's tons of interesting scientific & historical context to be learned from the counterpoint experiments and such. I hope it will still be generally available & in the sidebar if you're already watching such content.

Also, generally speaking, you really should block youtube cookies. The recommender doesn't seem to track your history then, and the entire experience is FAR better, simply recommending associations from that single video, instead of always trying to railroad you back into where you've historically spent more time.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#164

Post by jobigoud »

Ivoirians wrote: post #110
atonse wrote: 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

Unless you have history disabled entirely.

Why can't we opt out completely from "recommendations"?

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#165

Post by jobigoud »

sametmax wrote: post #17
Elitroness wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know who Ben Shapiro is so I'm just using him as an example and maybe he is noteworthy, but if the system tells everyone to watch Ben Shapiro videos of course everyone is gonna know who he is. Maybe he wouldn't be 'required knowledge' if youtube didn't force it and reinforce it on everyone. The current system doesn't tell you what people are interested in, it tells you what the system made the people pay inte…

Well, I assume it recommends what other people that watched similar videos watched as well. I doubt Ben Shapiro is 'required knowledge', nor that he became popular only through youtube. Those people usually have an IRL crowd. They have IRL impacts. But I see your point.

> Well, I assume it recommends what other people that watched similar videos watched as well.

The problem is it creates a feedback loop and amplifies whatever is slightly over represented.

I also noticed that on LinkedIn profiles, on many high profiles ones the related section contains pretty girls profiles with unrelated positions, just because statistically they get more clicks I guess.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#166

Post by explainplease »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #136
webwanderings wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shari…

It may not be much help, but I've found minidlna to be a reliable, simple, lightweight media server on my LAN. I expect it could run well on a low-power device. Any DLNA/UPNP device can stream from it.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#167

Post by shaki-dora »

jlawson wrote: post #51
bengale wrote: post #3

It does seem to be getting better, for a long while I had to make sure to clear my history of any conservative leaning videos or I'd end up down a rabbit hole. Too many and all of a sudden its bloody flat earth videos and other insane conspiracies. Made it very difficult to try and watch a balanced set of videos.

This doesn't match reality. I've watched lots of conservative videos and I've never seen anything about flat Earth or "insane conspiracy theories". Honestly this comment thread seems like trying to build a narrative bridge between straightforward right-leaning content and bizarre conspiracies. The goal is to use censorship of bizarre conspiracies to justify censoring right-leaning content by conflating the two. I'm v…

> But that's just the bait, setting the narrative for the switch...

Are you sure you’re not watching too many conspiracy theory videos?

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#168

Post by NoodleIncident »

thrusong wrote: post #68

Why do they recommend the same five videos of a series (like Barefoot Contessa) over-and-over when I've watched them already? I don't want to say "not interested" because I don't know what that means... I want a feature where it's like "more like this, but not this one in particular." It's surprising they've been under Google's control for a very long time and yet their main recommendation algorithm still leaves a lo…

If I remember correctly, the "not interested" UI has an option for "I've already seen the video"

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#169

Post by shaki-dora »

manfredo wrote: post #100
jsheard wrote: 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…

Sure, if CNN is „iberal“, and QAnon is „conservative“.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#170

Post by rapind »

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…

I have the opposite problem. I'm only interested in new videos for the most part, and my recommendations are filled with videos from months ago. It would be much better if they would give us a flag or some date range options. Obviously this increases UI complexity, but maybe it doesn't need to be that prominent?
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