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I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

towardsdatascience.com

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Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#131

Post by AR_14 »

If you want a non-coding approach to build a filter, take a look at the Firefox Extension "Distraction Free Youtube".

It allows you to hide the Feed, disable Autoplay, hide the Sidebar and related Videos etc., and thus completely filter out every recommendation, now you would just have to subscribe to all the Channels that interest you - tada personalized feed. Of course this has some short comings: Likewise you won´t discover new interesting channels and other novel videos etc., so to speak you´d have to subscribe to every channel that could contain a video of your interest

That´s my system for not wasting so much time on Youtube; thank you Chris for sharing the post, it inspired me to undertake the coding approach, if i have time in the near future, to build a good filter.

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#132

Post by Alphaeus »

ianbooker wrote: post #129
gibolt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have two options under the triple dot menu (at least on Android feed) that you are not interested in this video or this channel. May help curate once you start getting those recommendations.

Then you cut out videos you were interested in the first place.

When it asks you why you're not interested, one of the options is "I've already watched this video".

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#133

Post by timc3 »

rasz wrote: post #116
dastx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest annoyance is that it suggests videos I've already watched. Old and new. I totally understand if a recently uploaded video gets suggested several times a day or over a few days, but it suggests videos I've watched years ago, and also months ago. Over and over again. Their "don't suggest this video" or channel doesn't work for shit either.

inject those two styles into YT website: a #video-title { color: red !important;} a:visited #video-title { color: black !important;}

That doesn’t help across multiple devices

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#134

Post by xiphias2 »

robotresearcher wrote: post #126
bra-ket wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed, it's strange that with all their legions of machine learning PhDs Youtube recommendations still suck. The worst part is when it gets stuck on particular video/topic and just keeps recommending the same thing for months.

Their recommendations are not designed to make you happy, but to optimize their business. They are driving you to ads, not joy. The ML PhDs could be working just fine. You won’t know.

I pay for YouTube premium, so I don't have ads. Still, I'm seeing many of the problems other people are talking about, especially 10 minute videos where the content could be explained in 10 seconds.

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#135

Post by ChrisLovejoy »

krmmalik wrote: post #46

How does a non-coder use what you've created? I want something that will allow me to add interesting videos to my "watch later" playlist. That way I can then watch the videos on the normal YouTube app on my apple tv

Yeah, it's not that easy to at the moment. I was planning to build a front-end site, where you could just type your search terms and parameters and it would show you the videos, but to honest I ran out of steam after I couldn't get the code to run on Lambda.

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#136

Post by noodles_nomore »

pantelisk wrote: post #25

The youtube algorithm is working extremely well, to the point where I find hard to believe it does not have any human in the loop or active moderation. I have discovered so many interesting types of music and documentaries and subculture/subgenres on it. It manages to hit my interests so well, that I rarely go to netflix nor spotify anymore for discovery. I 'll either directly go watch something that I 've chosen on…

(Edit: I'm talking about related videos here. Maybe that's not the same thing.)

5 to 10 years ago I would frequently get lost in Youtube's music recommendations, just going down one rabbit hole after the other with dozens of tabs of untrodden paths. Nowadays everything seems to loop you back to the same tightly knitted clusters of popular music. I suspect that if you were to graph the video recommendations, the resulting graph would be of a devastatingly low complexity.

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#137

Post by st1ck »

AR_14 wrote: post #131

If you want a non-coding approach to build a filter, take a look at the Firefox Extension "Distraction Free Youtube". It allows you to hide the Feed, disable Autoplay, hide the Sidebar and related Videos etc., and thus completely filter out every recommendation, now you would just have to subscribe to all the Channels that interest you - tada personalized feed. Of course this has some short comings: Likewise you won´…

Even better, don't login and clear cookies frequently (Cookie AutoDelete addon, or just incognito mode). I just hid recommendations div with adblock. Still, in the end of every video there are 9 top recommendations displayed, so I'm not losing on anything.

I have maybe 4 channels I check out from time to time, and all of them post new videos pretty irregularly, so there is not much point in managing subscriptions. That said, I recently started using NewPipe on mobile and have subscriptions there.

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#138

Post by PopeDotNinja »

Alphaeus wrote: post #132
ianbooker wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you cut out videos you were interested in the first place.

When it asks you why you're not interested, one of the options is "I've already watched this video".

I used to do that, but it was a lot of work & I didn't notice an improvement to the search results.

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#139

Post by powerapple »

dancek wrote: post #124
powerapple wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't ever recommend videos from 9 years ago please. This is the part I don't understand, how is Google doing so bad at this. You get slightly better experience if you use Chrome. It (on purposely?) keeps asking you to click 3 buttons to play a video Edge, and won't even show comments.

Our tastes are so different. I'd much rather watch a great video from 2005 than a good one from 2020. I'm irritated by the recommendation algorithms pushing new content. Why would I care whether the video was published last night or last year?

Yes, recommendation should be personalized anyway, so you can get videos from 9 years ago and I don't.

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#140

Post by bryanrasmussen »

kortilla wrote: post #125
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unless one can prove that there is something special about being on HN that makes a person intrinsically different than other consumers I don't think this is a reasonable conclusion. It may be that this can be proven but I would like to see the proof. If someone posts on a crafting forum, complains about youtube being broken is the conclusion that they are not the customer that most companies are targeting? or any nu…

Yes, just posting on a forum alone puts you in the tiny minority of consumers. There are huge swaths of people that barely like to read content, let alone write. Look at how many youtube videos dominate search results with hundreds of thousands of views for “how to” X when X is trivially described in a few lines of text.

>Yes, just posting on a forum alone puts you in the tiny minority of consumers. There are huge swaths of people that barely like to read content, let alone write.

My stepfather was an idiot, a drunkard, a gambling addict, a drug addict, easily conned by direct marketing and ponzi schemes, with not a large number of friends, and poorly educated.

He read, as far as I have been able to figure out, 1 book in his life and he read that book 75% of the way finished (It was some sort of crime book - pretty thick though so about the 600-800 pages length)

But when the internet came around he got himself an online identity and was out on forums of people who shared his interests all the time posting his views on things.

There are really not very many people out there less capable than my stepfather, percentage wise. I do not believe there are huge swathes of people that he beat.

>Look at how many youtube videos dominate search results with hundreds of thousands of views for “how to” X when X is trivially described in a few lines of text.

given that youtube is owned by the Google, not sure what to take from that other than they put results from one of their properties at the top for purposes of their own.

although I often take a how to X video over text because even though the X is trivially described there are a lot of extra things you can find out from the video really quick - for example if you search for how to do X in Y

and you read a tutorial, it can be that the tutorial is slightly off from your version of Y, and you spend time trying to figure out if it is the tutorial that is wrong, if you have misunderstood their trivial few lines of text because the text might not be clearly written and so on and so forth, but when you look at the video if it shows a menu entry being clicked on that just does not exist then you know they have something different than you do and if you can't immediately figure out what your system change has been try to go find some other solution.

It is the extra information that a video gives that can make the video useful. As to which to choose is dependent on a lot of things.

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