Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube • Hacker News Board

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#231

Post by tyfon » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 12:29 AM UTC

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…

Whatever you do, keep the kids off youtube unless you want to deal with nightmares and other unpleasantness.

(I have a seven year old and a three year old)

In the end we just settled on netflix and the national broadcasting company (NRK), but I do have a synology nas with some stuff that I can stream to mobiles/ps4 via dnla or apps which would do most of what you want.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#232

Post by beezischillin » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 12:31 AM UTC

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 fully understand that experience. I somehow always manage to sucker myself into free-falling into a rabbit-hole (ha, pun) of cute bunny videos.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#233

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 12:32 AM UTC

endofcapital wrote: post #64

Causality1 wrote: post #38

YouTube suggestions are worthless now. Used to be if you were watching "Jack cooks a 4 course meal part 2" the recommended videos would be "Jack cooks a 4 course meal part 3", Part 1, and some other videos by the same user. Now it's a host of other unrelated bullshit.

A few weeks back I got a weird fan biopic of Himmler created by some account with the SS logo in their picture recommended to me after watching a video on some obscure DNS features. I reported it but it's still there. Google is beyond broken. Chasing those engagement numbers on a forever treadmill, just hoping they inch up a little more at any cost.

[deleted]

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#234

Post by mcrittenden » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 12:34 AM UTC

mactrey wrote: post #133

brianpgordon wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

YouTube Kids is a separate app. Does that not suffice?

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#235

Post by discreditable » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 12:34 AM UTC

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).

Tried it, annoying because it forgets I have YouTube Premium and starts showing me ads. Now I just turn history off forever.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#236

Post by beezischillin » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 12:36 AM UTC

tyfon wrote: post #230

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 m…

That recommendation issue you point out is extremely annoying since YouTube has no way to reverse the order of videos in a playlist. More often than not for some reason Let's Play and other chronological video authors create their playlists in a reverse chronological order, latest first so it's basically impossible to binge them unless you manually click on the next episode yourself.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#237

Post by gwern » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 12:36 AM UTC

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!

I see the Sinicization of US technology & media continues apace, and we're now thoroughly into the "encourage virtue, chastise vice" phase.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#238

Post by platzer » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 12:41 AM UTC

brianpgordon wrote: post #123

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…

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.

How about employing 10 people of this massive platform to curate some channels that people can easily subscribe to? It could literally be advertised to be kids-friendly and not dumb etc.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#239

Post by fvdessen » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 12:52 AM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #224

fvdessen wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

> You can't point to a similar statistic, study or what not that shows 'The Deep State' is specifically targeting Donald Trump

It usually gets more personal at the extreme. People will show you stats that shows a disproportionate majority of federal employees supporting the Democratic party and infer that there is 'systemic bias', some will point at specific cases and make leaders of hidden conspiracy out of them. I've seen enough of 'Kill All Cops' to know that there is similar extremes on the left.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#240

Post by neetdeth » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 1:01 AM UTC

jsheard wrote: post #31

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.

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…

Ok, I'll bite. What exactly did Google do wrong here?

I'd be persuaded if you could show that a random walk through the recommendations ended up in far-right opinion some disproportionate percentage of the time. What you did was a goal directed search. At every point you selected the most right leaning perspective, and in the end you got where you wanted to go.

The only way to stop this from happening is to ban objectionable opinions from the platform entirely, or alternatively to disconnect them from the graph of recommendations. The latter is what YouTube's "limited state" already does.