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YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

arstechnica.com

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Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#31

Post by whatshisface »

alexis_fr wrote: post #10
dgudkov wrote: post #4

Well, click-driven advertisement and emotion-driven social media have disrupted the old (and well functioned) system of information pre-filtering and pre-selection by domain experts and journalists whose salary was dependent more on reputation than "engagement". Now we're mowing the consequences of such "disruption".

Those “domain experts” were censoring men’s rights, for example. Only since Youtube are we discovering that male victims of home violence are 28% cases; If you listen to the “domain experts” they’ll pretend it is so small it’s not measurable, or pretend it’s not a problem. That’s just an example for the area I’m expert in, but the current western political blowback is massively due to information flowing with fewer c…

The mainstream media is also cozy with their advertisers and were known for helping to cover up environmental issues.

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#32

Post by manigandham »

magashna wrote: post #23

I've found that clicking "not interested" videos doesn't work, but reporting them has cleaned up my feed. Now I almost only get things from my subscriptions. It's a more brutish option that may have collateral damage but seems to work for me

Why report them? That can get videos demonetized or removed for the creator.

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#33

Post by humanrebar »

naiveai wrote: post #25

This article has a catchy title, but is absolutely terrible. Curated human recommendations and/or "YouTube staffers should think like journalists" are both two of the worst ideas for the internet I've heard in quite a long time. They don't reduce bias by any significant amount consistently (and I suspect the authors know this), and thinking of a platform where millions of seperate people upload ungodly amounts of con…

Curate it like a radio station or network then.

The curated playlists on Google Music are pretty nice. I wouldn't mind seeing something like that for video, especially targeted at kids with various age ranges, activities, moods, and interests.

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#34

Post by kup0 »

Typically almost none of my recommended videos are relevant.

The worst part is that what they do recommend are often conspiracy videos, "X destroys Y" debate videos, extremist 'alternative' news, and other similar trash.

You would think they could tell from what I've watched already that none of their recommendations are remotely relevant to me- and in fact, are often the opposite of anything I would ever want to see.

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#35

Post by patresh »

Relevant paper put up last week on Arxiv to be published at EMNLP 2019 : Auditing Radicalization Pathways on Youtube ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08313 ).

Researchers of the University of Minas Gerais and EPFL audited Youtube's recommendation algorithm in the context of alt-right content and found that users consistently migrated from milder to more extreme content throughout recommendations.

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#36

Post by danShumway »

We don't need human-curated Youtube, we need to give more control to users.

The annoying thing about Youtube is that many of the problems I have with their algorithm could very, very easily be solved if the designers gave up their relentless mantra of "never ask the user anything directly."

I watch playlists and LetsPlays, and occasionally my homepage will just turn into a massive wall of recommendations from the same playlist, rather than one recommendation for the next video in the list. That's hard to solve algorithmically, but very easy if you give me a button to press that says, "when recommending a playlist, only recommend one video."

It's very hard to algorithmically figure out whether or not a user wants repeated recommendations because repeated recommendations tend to steer users towards repeated views even if they would prefer other behavior. But Youtube has view history for users. It would be very easy to have a button to press that says, "don't recommend videos I've already watched."

But at some point, everyone working on AI/algorithms decided that the best user experience would be for users to try and on-the-fly intuit the quirks of every algorithm and then to do reinforcement training based on their partial understanding of how things work. The last thing I want as a user is to have to treat my computer like a cat.

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#37

Post by dajon »

danso wrote: post #22
donatj wrote: post #11

The majority of my YouTube recommendations are videos I’ve already watched , despite there being innumerable videos in the back catalogues of my subscriptions I have not seen. My wife has the exact same problem. Surely I haven’t seen all of YouTube. I would love if it recommended me things I would be remotely interested in watching, even if they were “garbage” over this. At this point I would almost prefer sketchy co…

I have a tendency to rewatch videos over and over, or rather, replay them because they make for good not-too-distracting background noise (I do the same with “The Big Lebowski”). Nearly my entire recommendations feed is videos I’ve seen a dozen times or more, and because I often visit YouTube to just quickly find something for background noise, I’ll just click whatever’s near the top. And next time I visit YouTube...…

I suspect this is fundamentally the same as Amazon recommending things you've already bought. Even if the likelihood of rewatching/repurchasing is small, that probability must compare favourably to the chance that their algorithm will select a 'correct' unseen item to display.

Recommendations are hard.

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#38

Post by ideonexus »

"When a video finishes playing, YouTube should show the next video in the same channel."

This is how it worked just a couple years ago. I would binge-watch a channel's entire history of videos on history, board games, or other fascinating subjects in the background while I did other things. At some point it changed, and now every video I watch gets followed by some click-bait often highly-political nonsense meant to get me outraged or shocked at something.

I've decided to turn it off and just stream documentaries on Curiosity Stream now. When I do watch YouTube, I get nagging pop-ups asking me to upgrade my service, but why would I do that when they've ruined what I enjoyed about the site?

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#40

Post by mxscho »

Regardless how to define what's garbage and what's not, YouTube seems to remove demonetized videos from recommendations. Since I don't think that good content is always necessarily advertiser-friendly, a lot of good videos are just not getting any attention because a few big companies decided that they're not helpful to market their products. Example: Historical or educational videos which are about controversial topics or just have the word "war" in their title.

Basically, their recommendations algorithm favors profit from advertising over personalized recommendations because it seems to be designed to maximize click-through rate and watch time for videos with many ads. [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=838

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