The other day I watched some video from this bearded British Linux nerd about awk, and since then, YouTube just won't stop recommending me videos involving Arabic expats to English-speaking countries.
Thanks YouTube
‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
341–350 of 366 posts
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want Youtube to recommend educational videos, a la Extra History and 3B1B. That's most of what I watch on Youtube. Youtube recommends stupid crap based on what other people like. If I watch one stupid video not in incognito, ALL of the recommendations become stupid videos because those videos have better metrics. Youtube actively guides me away from educational content. Even within educational videos, if I click on…
> ALL of the recommendations become stupid videos because those videos have better metrics. Youtube actively guides me away from educational content. Back when I was not particularly into YouTube and hadn't had many great recommendations YouTube insisted I should watch Sapolsky's Harvard lectures - these probably had particularly good metrics. Once I started to watch them (and was very satisfied) more and more great…
Conversely, at some point I decided to watch Sapolsky lectures based on human recommenders, but this caused YouTube to recommend not only other science lectures but also sensational videos purporting to be about quantum mechanics, medicine, etc. but which were obviously total pseudoscience.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#343For 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…
Yeah, it is absurd. All of my youtube subscriptions (all 60+ of them) are educational or personal interest things. But let your reptilian brain click on one stupid video of a scantily clad woman and your recommendations will just go down the freaking drain...
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#344For 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…
Yeah, it is absurd. All of my youtube subscriptions (all 60+ of them) are educational or personal interest things. But let your reptilian brain click on one stupid video of a scantily clad woman and your recommendations will just go down the freaking drain...
This is why my YT feed is full of women's longjump and polejump vids, and the comment sections on those "sports" vids are a bunch of guys joking about how no one is there because they follow athletics.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#345Earlier 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.
Just curious, do you download them one at a time or do you have a "system" for handling them?
I ask because this seems like a great idea. I've already written a script to read from a list and download and now I'm wondering if I don't just use use that instead of "watch later" going forward. Curious if you do anything beyond adding them one at a time I should consider before changing my approach.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is conceivable to me, bit I've never had this happen. What sort of videos would be removed that you actually wanted to watch?
Apart from what has already been mentioned, stuff also gets copyright-struck. Sometimes for ridiculously minor infractions. Sometimes for no real infraction at all. Additionally, there are the vague and ever-changing terms of service. Also, people sometimes take stuff down themselves. Take the JRE, for a recent and rather prominent example.
Happens to me often. I don't think it even tells you what videos are gone. I know I've seen channels say they removed a video themselves because it didn't do well with views so they wanted to re-tweak it in the hope it lands better.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#347For 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…
Yeah it really is an echo chamber type algorithm. I like it too because if I see garbage I hit the back button. Hopefully that trains it more. I generally watch DIY, history, video game reviews, and a few different genres of music and youtube has certainly helped me find more of the same. However if you're watching conspiracy videos and right wing propaganda you're gonna get more of that and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy of drek and dumpster fire videos.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just curious, do you download them one at a time or do you have a "system" for handling them? I ask because this seems like a great idea. I've already written a script to read from a list and download and now I'm wondering if I don't just use use that instead of "watch later" going forward. Curious if you do anything beyond adding them one at a time I should consider before changing my approach.
FYI youtube-dl can download playlists. I heavily suspect you can even use --continue to download missing updated bits in a playlist you previously downloaded
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#349Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. The top of the list is the product of some recommendation algorithm. Clicking through https://news.ycombinator.com/newest , there were some 900 submissions in the past 24h; you probably chose from a small subset of that.
It's not personalized.
Adding on to this, the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) has information on how stories are ranked.