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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

#221

Post by dragonwriter »

EpicEng wrote: post #182
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 terrible. I have to completely log out when I watch videos which put me to sleep a couple times /week because I don't want my suggestions filled with dry history lectures.

> I have to completely log out when I watch videos which put me to sleep a couple times /week because I don't want my suggestions filled with dry history lectures.

Why not just pause your watch history (or, in case you forget, remove the items after the fact)?

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725?hl=en

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#223

Post by jalgos_eminator »

aasasd wrote: post #206
jalgos_eminator wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypknY6nIDe0 Check the comments. It looks like there were plenty of people who had the same experience as me.

Ah, I'm not sure that this recommendation is tied to user's history of watched videos. Because I've also seen it in my ‘recommendations’―and though I tend to occasionally listen to a couple tracks of Gary Numan or a vaporwave mix, I don't think a 2018 release would follow from that dataset.

Well, I did watch a couple "yugowave" videos, so maybe that has something to do with it.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#224

Post by fzeroracer »

fvdessen wrote: post #217
fzeroracer wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna need you to explain how 'The Patriarchy' ,'The Privileged', 'Systemic Racism' etc are somehow conspiracy theories considering they're more like social critiques around very real issues people face. Unless you mean things you don't like are conspiracy theories in which case we might as well just call everything a conspiracy.

Being poor is a very real issue somebody can face. Attributing the cause of this state of affairs as being the intentional result of a coordinated group of people, without real evidence that this is the case, is a conspiracy theory. I seems to me that 'The Patriarchy' / 'The Privileged' on the left are conceptually quite similar to 'The Deep State' or 'The Jews' on the right. And those are most often described as con…

If you think they're conceptually quite similar then I don't know what else to say except that you would just be objectively wrong.

The difference between a conspiracy theory and a social critique is the personal nature of it. People that believe that the 'Jews' or that 'The Deep State' is responsible for everything believe that there are specific actors, people doing things explicitly to stop someone.

When people complain about the patriarchy or systemic racism they're complaining about a large tangled of social contracts and norms that result in certain people, races, genders etc being disenfranchised. For example it's a statistical fact that a black man smoking marijuana is not only more likely to be thrown in jail but also more likely to face harsher sentences than a white man smoking marijuana. What else would you call this, other than systemic racism?

You can't point to a similar statistic, study or what not that shows 'The Deep State' is specifically targeting Donald Trump or that 'The Jews' are attempting to kill all white people. You can, however, point to specific actions and trends the FBI has taken in the past to disenfranchise black people, including actions taken against Martin Luther King Jr.

One side explicitly has a factual basis behind it. The other does not. That's what makes one a conspiracy theory, and the other something worthy of scrutiny.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#225

Post by elihu »

paulddraper wrote: post #203
maxxxxx wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You think that's dumb, but I bet the marketing data behind that says otherwise. You think "I already have a mixer, idiot!" but in reality the chance that you are interested in buying a mixer just went from 1% to 2%. (Because you want another one, because you want to gift one, because you returned yours, etc.)

I think the problem here is that "recommendations that maximize expected marketing revenue" and "recommendations that maximize user experience" are not the same. Most of us would prefer Google to present us the latter, but they have considerable financial incentives to present the former instead.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#226

Post by aphextron »

I don't want YouTube to reccomend anything for me. I don't want Facebook to show me the news stories they think I should see. I don't want Google to show me the ads they think are more relevant to me. None of this improves my life in any way whatsoever, and in fact is leading to the dumbing down of society. We have completely handed over individual taste, interest, and curiosity to algorithms that do nothing but optimize for engagement. I'm done. I want the old internet back. A place where you were presented with a variety of information, indexed by it's content, from which I am able to pick and choose, and then discuss with other human beings.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#227

Post by Yetanfou »

slig wrote: post #209
EpicEng wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's terrible. I have to completely log out when I watch videos which put me to sleep a couple times /week because I don't want my suggestions filled with dry history lectures.

If you're on mobile, there's an incognito mode (at least on Android).

If you're on mobile there's alternative ways of watching Youtube videos, at least if you're on Android:

https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

No ads, no direct tracking [1], just videos.

[1] Google can still watch your device downloading videos of course...

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#228

Post by [deleted] »

minimaxir wrote: post #43

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!

[deleted]

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#229

Post by [deleted] »

minimaxir wrote: post #43

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!

[deleted]

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#230

Post by tyfon »

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.

That's even worse when you make videos, especially when they search for something that is episodic like a let's play.

I'd much rather have youtube recommend episode 1 or the first video of the playlist to people but instead it gives them a random one in the middle. This causes the viewer to get mad and press thumbs down. This also makes the "average viewed minutes" go drastically down.

That's probably the source of most of my thumbs downs.. It also causes ridiculous stats like episode 27 of 50 has 100 times the number of views as the first episode but not more view time.

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