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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)

#101

Post by 082349872349872 »

barrkel wrote: post #5

I find YT does a gradient ascent into more popular videos. I start out listening to a song with 1000 views, I get recommended 10k view songs, then 100k, and before you know it it's back in the mainstream. There's no way to surf a niche, to hunt in a pile of bin ends. I imagine it's similar for conspiracy stuff. It'll point you in the direction of the most convincing nonsense.

If you search in non-latin scripts, maybe it still ascends into a mainstream, but it probably won't be your mainstream.

(YT does much more cross-script indexing now than it did when I first started playing around with this, but it still tends to silo by writing system, and if it's relevant search works much better in the original script than relying upon auto-transliteration.)

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

#102

Post by saberdancer »

QuesnayJr wrote: post #47
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…

This isn't my experience at all. On certain subjects, YouTube will start relentlessly pushing an agenda. If I watch some videos where people talk about sci-fi movies or TV, my recommendations become flooded with videos about how SJWs are ruining Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who, etc. It's gotten to the point that I now only watch such videos in Incognito Mode.

This might be because there is a lot of content like that.

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

#103

Post by dijit »

traverseda wrote: post #97
dijit wrote: post #95

This feels a bit like stating the obvious. I felt the "pull" of the alt-right because of YouTube; It begins innocuously enough, someone shares something that's a thoughtful piece on "googles culture" or something which is left leaning, then in the recommendations there is a response, usually a passionate argument against SJW's or whatever, once you watch one it's basically game over (at least this was the case 1-2 ye…

Why don't you just delete the underlying videos from your youtube history? I've had history turned off for a while, so my recommendations are only based on likes, subscriptions, and the actual content I'm watching at that moment. It seems like cleaning/clearing the history would solve the problem?

It could, but I’ve watched a lot of videos since then.

I was not aware that this was possible back then.

Good advice though, I would suspect it works, I would hope it would. :)

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

#104

Post by 082349872349872 »

bArray wrote: post #90

The recommendations are now almost completely inescapable if you want to continue using their service. They recently did away with email notifications for new content [1] and now the RSS export feature for subscriptions has been removed [2]. I refuse to interface with their algorithm, so I've begun hunting down alternative video hosts and the personal sites of the creators I can find and am preparing to leave their p…

recommendations are entirely escapable via search. (but I never subscribe to anything, so maybe you want a different experience?)

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

#105

Post by _0ffh »

scrollaway wrote: post #75
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 to…

I don't use the "watch later" feature anymore. It's always a bit irritating when you want to catch up on the list only to find that a video has been removed in the mean time. So I switched to archiving using youtube-dl. Also nice to have a few backup videos in case of an internet outage.

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

#106

Post by 082349872349872 »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #64
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.

The scary thing is that I don’t have any type of Google account at all, yet they clearly still track me and amass a profile of my history and choices.

It doesn't take them long to figure out to link a new device to their previous un-accounted profile, either.

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #69
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…

It doesn't seem that hard to get out of a pit, even with the account. It just takes a couple of days of browsing of the new type of content, along with maybe clicking "don't recommend this channel"/"not interested" 3-4 times, and the algorithm switches to the new things... The algorithm doesn't care, it just recommends.

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

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…

Everyday I open a private browsing window on Firefox and keep YouTube whatever on that. Same for Amazon and other stuff. At the end of the day, close the window and all gone.

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

#109

Post by jowsie »

em500 wrote: post #92

I skimmed/read the entire article (dated June 2019). It does not not contain anything new or surprising for most of the HN audience (not a critique of the article itself, which is aimed at a broad audience). There are some very fundamental questions that I don't think we have really good answers to yet. - Like all social media, Youtube's algo is aimed at maximizing aggregate view time, and people working there are di…

Nit picky, but nicotine itself isn't really harmful unless you have blood pressure issues to start with. It's tobacco (specifically smoking it) that's the real danger.

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

#110

Post by the_snooze »

A lot of the comments here are in the spirit of "just clear your history" or "just be careful about what you watch." If you have to go out of your way to step over eggshells in order to get good recommendations, that indicates the problem is with the designers and decision-makers instead.
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