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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)

#111

Post by slothtrop »

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…

Uh, I had done the same you did for years - no account, cleared cookies - and consistently found conspiracy videos in recommendations. Now less than before, but all the same.

It's not from watching "stupid destructive stuff", in the least. Plenty of full music albums often link to it, and amateur stuff.

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

#112

Post by 2sk21 »

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.

Its available with YouTube premium. Complete ad removal and the ability to download videos is well worth the cost.

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

#113

Post by slothtrop »

the_snooze wrote: post #110

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.

Not only that, it's wrong. I can have zero "conspiracy" videos in my history/cookies and still sometimes see recommendations for it. Granted it was worse years ago.

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

#114

Post by scrollaway »

_0ffh wrote: post #105
scrollaway wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I rarely have that problem with watch later, but it does happen. When I want to ensure a video is available down the line, i send the url to the web archive; they have a special archiver for youtube videos.

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

#115

Post by nobleach »

At the end of 2016, I was bored and decided to watch a flat earth video. I spent a few evenings going down that conspiracy rabbit-hole as it was completely fascinating. (I couldn't tell if these folks were expertly trolling, or if they were serious). Once I was back to reality (2017) I was done wanting to see anything conspiracy related. It took a year for that stuff to disappear from my right-hand column. I just kept telling myself, "you deserve this... you asked for it".

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

#116

Post by JD557 »

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…

+1 for cleaning up the watch history. It's pretty nice that youtube let's you edit that and doesn't use a "full history" to train the recommendation algorithm.

I try to be careful and always use private browsing when opening "suspicious" videos, but every now and then, one slips and taints my recommendation.

OTOH, with a clean history, I barely subscribe to channels, since new videos usually end up in the recommendations, anyway.

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

#117

Post by silicon2401 »

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…

This is exactly how I feel about many things in our modern world. People complain about so many things, but don't realize that it's often their fault, or at least they often have more influence than they realize. I'm glad to hear you have such a great experience with youtube. I generally have the same experience: great videos that relate surprisingly well to my interests, the worst I ever see is ads if I'm on the mobile app since I block ads on browsers.

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

#118

Post by em500 »

tmakks wrote: post #59
ceejayoz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID misinformation is a bit of an outlier in how the various social networks are treating content, though.

I agree but still a good example that OP's statements are questionable.

Note that the article dates to June 2019, based on Chaslot's experiences from earlier years (which were probably still largely true when the article was written, but hard to check right now one way or another).

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

#119

Post by eecks »

gfxgirl wrote: post #44

I know I'm old but dang for some reason I really dislike recommendations from almost any company. For media I grew up in the 70s and had the TV Guide. I'd look through to see what I wanted to watch, circle some things and then watch. No spying what-so-ever. So, I like for example HN where AFAIK I'm not tracked so much and I choose what I want from the top of the list. Conversely I mostly hate Amazon, Netflix, Amazon…

I've never been into recommendations and I find most are awful. TikTok is addicting but it's all rubbish content.

I feel like I am in the minority in how I use YouTube. If someone shows me a video I'll watch it, but I don't browse YouTube.

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