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‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)

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Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)

#71

Post by dkersten »

hackeraccount wrote: post #11

I find youtube recommendations crap because if I watch something on one subject it seems to assume the subject is now the love of my life and proceeds to offer a zillion on just that subject. regarding what the article is talking about ... eh, it seems like they're saying it works fine but sometimes puts up videos whose politics they don't like. Short of going in and removing the stuff you don't like so that other pe…

Yeah, the recommendations are completely useless for me. They get stuck in some random topic I’m not even interested in just because I watched a video once.

Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)

#72

Post by jcutrell »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #60

For me YouTube recommendations are not toxic, they are so amazing I some times wonder how comes the world around is not heaven when everybody has free access to this. That's because I always watch high-quality educational content and some beautiful comforting and inspiring music. So for me YouTube is a fountain of knowledge, visual and musical aesthetics etc. Every day I get inspiration, healthy kind of fun and learn…

The problem is that most people don’t understand The chain reaction problem here.

Watching one calming video is unlikely to lead you to become addicted to calming videos. YouTube is optimized for the hook, and calming videos aren’t hooky.

The much more salient videos tend to be the sensational ones, and people who don’t have the understanding of that fact are much more easily hooked.

So while it can be a fountain of knowledge for one group of people, the insidious nature of the hooking algorithms still lurk beneath that surface.

Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)

#74

Post by jacknews »

hackeraccount wrote: post #11

I find youtube recommendations crap because if I watch something on one subject it seems to assume the subject is now the love of my life and proceeds to offer a zillion on just that subject. regarding what the article is talking about ... eh, it seems like they're saying it works fine but sometimes puts up videos whose politics they don't like. Short of going in and removing the stuff you don't like so that other pe…

Exactly this, they're not toxic, just sh*t.

search for a famous song, and the recommendations are for a zillion cover versions of the same song, or other music by the same artist.

Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)

#75

Post by scrollaway »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #60

For me YouTube recommendations are not toxic, they are so amazing I some times wonder how comes the world around is not heaven when everybody has free access to this. That's because I always watch high-quality educational content and some beautiful comforting and inspiring music. So for me YouTube is a fountain of knowledge, visual and musical aesthetics etc. Every day I get inspiration, healthy kind of fun and learn…

Same experience here. I have to actively curate them by removing some one-off dumb videos from my watch history, but my YouTube recommendations are by far extremely high quality. Youtube is the only service I know of that has actually achieved working content recommendations for me.

My Watch Later has hundreds of hours of content from things that I definitely want to watch but I'm either not yet in the mood for or too long to get to now.

Seriously, youtube for all its flaws is an incredible human achievement on par with wikipedia.

Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)

#76

Post by jimktrains2 »

aphexairlines wrote: post #58
H8crilA wrote: post #27

Protip if this annoys you: go to myactivity.google.com, delete everything and pause all further collection. Now only your subscriptions and likes count (and maybe a few other things that are not considered "activity"). It's so much better! Did it once and now I don't want to go back.

It's too bad YouTube doesn't let you keep your history (so you can go back and find something you saw before) without it feeding into recommendations.

Just like how google maps won't store your search history or use your current location to help narrow search results if I don't let it store my location history indefinitely?

Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)

#77

Post by m_mueller »

georgyo wrote: post #49
pm215 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes; in particular it would be nice if the algorithm mixed in "here's some videos on a topic you watched a bunch of six months or a year ago" sometimes. But it's so fixated on the very short term of your history that if a topic ever ages out of that it's gone forever, unless you personally remember it and go searching for it...

It doesn't ever seem to be short term for me... It shows me the same uninteresting videos for months. Oh, you watched a game streams? How about I show you three of that game on the top of the page until you stop coming back. The only thing that works to get rid of them is to downvote it. I don't want to give the downvote, but it's the only way to make the algorithm understand I don't care about what they are showing…

It's kinda picky though in what it spams you with. For example I watch tons of space engineering bids, will watch anything from Scott Manley as soon as it comes out, yet it often doesn't recommend it to me, I gotta hunt it down somehow.

Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)

#78

Post by jimktrains2 »

Retric wrote: post #54
gaudat wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like the media company is taking the driver seat of your mind and decides you need to watch these videos over and over. Where have individualism and creativity gone?.

The search function still exists, recommendations are really aimed at low effort engagement. YouTube recommendations are only aiming for the equivalent quality of channel surfing when most user generated content is really bad. Sadly, it’s largely your own history that clogs the recommendations. The less you use a recommendation engine the more relevant it becomes.

How does one search for what one doesn't know exists?

Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)

#80

Post by AlchemistCamp »

The one that really annoys me is when $famous_author is on a book tour and I watch a talk. After doing so, YT recommendations repeatedly include more videos of the same author giving the same talk on the same book at various other locations in the book tour.

The algorithm delivers far, far less novelty than I want in anything except music. I very,very rarely want to see a dozen nearly identical videos on the same topic.

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