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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)

#231

Post by jw1224 »

troebr wrote: post #210
qwerty1234599 wrote: post #157

If you want a glimpse of the average person's youtube experience, open the site in incognito and go to the "trending" tab. It's a completely different site depending on what you initially search for when you start using it. The problem is, 80% of youtube userbase never really typed a search query for anything in the first place, and as a result the stuff they get recommended and watch is pure shit.

It wasn't that bad. Some influencer videos, music, prank videos, sports, a couple niche youtubers, some video games. I saw a couple educational videos in there too. Sure the influencer stuff is pretty stupid, but whatever, it's not harmful.

Influencers are very often harmful.

1. Their aspirational lifestyles perpetuate feelings of inadequacy amongst their viewers, especially when their target market is often predominantly young people. Their audiences grow up with self doubt and anxiety by comparing their lives to that of the influencers they follow.

2. They are in the pockets of their advertisers and sponsors. Any recommendations they make are inherently disingenuous.

3. They’re often just really terrible people. Being the kind of attention-seeker who is able to command a large online following often seems to correlate with being a jerk. Just look at Jake and Logan Paul — two of the biggest stars of today, and both mired in controversy and bad choices.

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

#232

Post by vl »

nobleach wrote: post #115

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 kep…

I’m repeating this comment here over and over - the trivial fix for this is to edit your watch history.

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

#233

Post by bfieidhbrjr »

qwerty1234599 wrote: post #157

If you want a glimpse of the average person's youtube experience, open the site in incognito and go to the "trending" tab. It's a completely different site depending on what you initially search for when you start using it. The problem is, 80% of youtube userbase never really typed a search query for anything in the first place, and as a result the stuff they get recommended and watch is pure shit.

Wow I just did this. It's like turning on cable TV at a motel. (I don't watch TV at home).

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

#234

Post by whywhywhywhy »

Honestly it’s all I’m watching anymore during lockdown.

I’ve exhausted Netflix and Amazon Prime. I honestly use it so much I’d love like a Reroll button to show me completely fresh algorithm picks.

Yeah they’re toxic whatever don’t care, they’re excellent. Alcohol is bad for me too but I’m not gonna stop doing that either.

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

#235

Post by rconti »

I primarily use YouTube on my AppleTV, and man, the UI is awful. The recommendations change every time the home screen comes up, and there's no easy way to flag things. So if I see 3 recommendations I need to watch, I have to try to remember what they were before I watch one, because when I finish with the first video, the others will be gone.

Netflix is even worse (and they all seem to suffer from this to some degree). When I start it, it's an ad for some random thing. To find what I was watching last I have to either remember whether that miniseries is considered a movie or a TV show or what.. or, I can scroll down to Home, and "continue watching.." will be buried 3 rows deep and 2 columns over. So incredibly strange and unintuitive.

I guess they want their algos to be drive more engagement rather than just take you back to what you almost certainly opened the app to watch?

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

#237

Post by whywhywhywhy »

renlo wrote: post #153
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…

When I watch junk on YouTube I need to open the link using Chrome's incognito mode. When are companies going to give us more control over what inputs we give their recommendation algorithms? There should be a button that says "hey, I'm going to watch this because I'm only human, but please, don't show this junk to me". Or, "hey, I understand this content creator has thousands of videos and uploads content daily, but,…

You can on YouTube. You can finally ban channels from your recommendations and tell it now to show you things like that anymore with the submenu by the video thumb.

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

#238

Post by vl »

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…

Article is just incorrect: few years ago, YT realized that optimizing for watch time decreases engagement, which is obviously most critical for life-time profits, and switched to optimizing for life-time engagement. I.e. watch less today, but return tomorrow. It’s very tricky ML problem, so by now YT ML is probably the most advanced in the world in this area.

PS. Trigger for investigation was the event named “boobacalipse” - when recommender recommended videos with boobs on the first page for couple days.

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

#239

Post by notahacker »

yodsanklai wrote: post #226
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.

It's also reasonably good at context sensitivity, so when I'm playing a backing track for my guitar 90% of the recommendations are for other backing tracks, with the rest being decent song and music theory channel recommendations rather than whatever else I've been looking at this week.

The flip side is, I somehow appear to have accidentally clicked subscribe on some insane Trumpist 'news' channel I probably stumbled on via a forum link, and it very quickly took over the push notifications on my phone. That might be subscribe functionality working as intended, but it took more effort to identify the source of nonsense spam and unsubscribe from it...

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

#240

Post by aendruk »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #219

There are chrome extensions which disable the recommendations sidebar in YouTube. I recommend using one. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-youtube-rec... Not sure if this is the one I use, because I'm on mobile ATM. But it's a similar idea, at least.

A simpler solution is to just use your ad blocker:

  www.youtube.com###related
It's worth taking moment to familiarize yourself with adding this kind of filter.
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