On a slightly related note, I really am enjoying the browser extension "remove youtube suggestions" My home page and completely blank and any video that I watch has no recommendations on the side. I like it this way because I won't get sucked into a rabbit hole of youtube videos. I also have comments turned off
‘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)
#312On a related note, I'm surprised nobody mentioned the Clickbait Remover for YouTube addon. Highly recommended! It's on Mozilla addons (and probably Chrome, not sure):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...
I always use YouTube signed out anyways, but there's also this Privacy Redirect addon that redirects YouTube links to Invidious, Twitter to Nitter, etc:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redir...
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#313If 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).
Are you telling me the first recommendation engine of the world with a billion-dollars AI and 2 billion users optimizing for addiction returns the same results as cable channels whose offices look like a « Dunder Mufflin » environment, with only yearly feedback on whether customers trended upwards or downwards? Good job on the cable guys.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#314If 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.
Watch two or three e.g. flying saucer videos, then it's saucers recommended for the next three months.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#315The Paperclip Maximizer is a thought experiment that shows that if you apply a powerful AGI to something completely innocuous, things can go hilariously wrong over time. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer People are amused to read the story, and then go on their way. But what happens if you apply a rather less powerful AI to something else even just a little bit less innocuous? (like optimizing to grab…
I once contemplated a notion of optimization process risks where we should consider how narrow a target out of the space of all possible universes the process could pull ours into.
Unfortunately, I realized that even a simple phase-locked loop -- like what you use to condition an oscillator to be in sync with TAI using GPS -- can actually hit absurdly narrow targets... e.g. two oscillators a continent apart humming away within parts per billion of each other, yet that kind of process isn't particularly dangerous. Even brining millions of oscillators into sync isn't going to cause some great harm.
I'm not sure how to reason about it, but I think people are much too concerned about AGI risks relative to dumb optimization process risks. It's similar to fretting about movie-plot villains when most actual evil in the world comes from indifference and bad incentives or people trying to "help".
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#316Found tons of good music via YouTube recommendations. As an adult I know enough not to blindly start watching flat earth videos should they be recommended and lose all sense of reality. Please don't destroy the good in a vain hope of protecting everyone from themselves.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a fan of Reddit's AmITheAsshole and I'm always stunned by the stories of teens whose life plan is to become an influencer. As a sociological phenomenon, it's fascinating: celebrity distilled down to an implausibly pure form, like Paris Hilton rendered into uncut white powder. But as somebody who feels responsibility to the kids in my extended family, it's a worry. I'm not even sure how to explain to them that it…
You know what's worse than aspirations to become a celebrity? No aspirations at all. I know people like that. They just seem to see the future as a regular life with nothing particularly to do in it except exist and perform normal regular practical activities to sustain it. I can't imagine how dull it must be, but they seem to cope, and get all their excitement from immediate events. I hope you can be happy that your…
I don’t know, I have quite a lot of respect for the fathers around me. I’d rank climbing Mount Lenin, being a CEO or hitchiking from Paris to Sydney an order of magnitude easier than being a father ;)
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#318For 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…
>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.
after months of having a fairly normal youtube experience basically only playing music I clicked on one Jordan Peterson video that was in a news article, and for the next few weeks all I got was alt-right content in my feed. I even tried to get rid of it by explicitly saying I don't want it recommended to me, which gets rid of the individual channels but similar stuff just keeps popping up.
Youtube overfits what people click on so badly, I have no idea how this isn't fixable by honstly just turning the recommendation system off and just giving me random crap, even that would be an improvement.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The algorithm doesn't care, it just recommends. And isn't that terrifying, in the Parable of the Paperclip Maximizer kinda way? We can make the well-its-your-individual-responsibility bootstraps argument, but that kinda works only if you believe in the supremacy of an individual's autonomy and that the mind can't be hacked or hijacked. Everything from addictive products to the marketing industry shows that isn't th…
It is only terrifying if you assume people are mindless spiritless bots. In which case (if you truly believe that), we are all fucked anyway. Then who cares? Is youtube really your biggest problem? > is maximizing for your mind's engagement. So has media been doing for a long time, also all writers and poets, etc. Mind's engagement is not the only meaning of life, and most people act out this deep knowledge. I don't…
Yes, it was called "yellow journalism" before it was called "clickbait". I agree, that's not new.
What's new and disturbing is 1) the degree of algorithmic personalization, and 2) that personalization goes to the highest bidder. Put together, we've built a marketplace for population-scale behavioral nudges, and the people who play that game have war-chests, not human-sized wallets.
The Facebook/Myanmar genocide is the Godwin's Law reference of the social media debate, but you don't need to look any further than the politicization of what should be neutral medical facts being fueled by recommendation-hole conspiracy theories to see the danger of all this.
I don't believe people are mindless spiritless bots, but I do believe our industry thrives on engineering ways to hack people's attention circuits. And what's terrifying is we've put a paperclip maximizing machine at the helm of all this.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh the ads. I cannot underestimate the annoyance it has caused to viewers. Seeing the numerous memes making fun of those asset flip adware turned "games" makes me die a little inside. Now I actively push my normie friends to install uBlock Origin on their devices. And Vanced or NewPipe when it worked.
You could just pay for youtube premium?
I pay for YouTube Premium in Rupees. It's £1.36 a month.
One of the weird things tho, is that I didn't see Ads with Ad Blocker. Is there some regional thing that ad blocker doesn't work in the USA but it works elsewhere?