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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)

#221

Post by api »

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…

YouTube links and embedded videos will tilt your search experience too.

The problem is that the algorithm seems biased so that one or two visits to shit causes you to fall down into a spiral of shit. That's probably because statistically when averaged across the entire YouTube user-base, shit leads to more time on the site. Shit is usually more divisive, inflammatory, etc., and negative emotions are the easiest path to engagement.

Virtually everything wrong with social media can be summarized by "negative emotions are the easiest path to engagement." Want to keep people on your site? Anger, offend, or scare them.

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

#222

Post by CM30 »

hnarn wrote: post #205

Can we call this the Oppenheimer Syndrome? I see so many opinion pieces from software engineers lamenting how they've created this "horrible thing" by working on social media recommendation algorithm X, and it all fits neatly into this painfully predictable trope of how we should all live in a camper and use a Nokia from the 90s. Yeah, I'm jaded and of course there's merit at the bottom of all this, but I really can'…

I really want to write an article now where I say how my work as a web developer/software engineer has made the world a better place, and why we should be happy with modern technology and the internet as it is today.

Of course I've not worked at Facebook or Google, so maybe it'd be better if we saw a Facebook or Google engineer write that sort of article instead. Would be interesting to hear from someone who loves the company they work for, thinks their work improves humanity and considers their tech the coolest thing in the world.

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

#224

Post by dijksterhuis »

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.

This is my biggest pet hate of all of YouTube.

I remember waaaaaay back in 2009-ish hunting for some new electronic music.

\begin{old_man_better_in_my_day}

First video I went on had about 1000 views. Every "related" video had around the same (sometimes less).

I spent 4 hours finding a bunch of new and relatively unknown artists because, rather than dragging me back to the 100k aggregate, I was allowed to explore the graph of "other people went on to watch this".

These days I'm lucky to see any sidebar suggestions that have fewer than 100k views.

\end{old_man_better_in_my_day}

I think the problem is the "one-size-fits-all" approach can't possibly capture how I would find it useful (music discovery via graph/tree traversal) vs. someone else (e.g. regular sky sports football highlights).

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

#226

Post by yodsanklai »

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…

> But people who watch stupid and destructive stuff (even once) are doomed because they are going to get the same and worse kind of content recommended over and over.

Not really my experience. I'm not sure but I have the impression that the recommendation heuristic is very time-sensitive. Let say I watch sailing videos for a few days, it tends to forget I was interested in guitars the previous week.

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

#227

Post by vl »

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…

First of all, article is incorrect: for a long time now YT optimizes recommendations not for watch time, but for life-time engagement. YT probably has the most advanced QT ML in the world.

Second, it’s trivial to re-adjust recommendations: go to history and delete everything you didn’t like, and recommendations instantly will become much better.

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

#228

Post by domador »

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…

My big curation-related grief has to do with YouTube playlists (the ones you can create with the +Save button on YouTube.) The list of playlists can't be sorted in alphabetical order by playlist name. It seems to be ordered either by playlist creation date and/or by when I last added a video to the list (with most recent playlists first.) I'd say the playlist feature is next to useless to me, except that I keep using it, ever so masochistically.

This is a recurring grief I have with Google products: poor UI and a seeming inability to receive and/or act upon feedback from power users.

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

#229

Post by vl »

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.

The most simple way to adjust recommendations is to delete videos you didn’t like from your watch history.

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

#230

Post by vl »

gaudat wrote: post #36
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 is exactly why I browse entirely within private mode now. I always make sure I am not signed in to my Google account before clicking any YouTube link. I do not need to be constantly reminded of a single weird video I have clicked months before. YouTube recommendations haunted me for life.

Just edit your watch history, and recommendations will become instantly better.
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