Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A man who uploaded 2M videos to YouTube [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 201 posts

Re: A man who uploaded 2M videos to YouTube [video]

#61

Post by bazhova »

trh0awayman wrote: post #41
kristopolous wrote: post #7

The problem of web content is the search and recommendation systems have no opinion on skill, effort, scholarship or accuracy. It's become disconnected so much that metrics of quality are seen as arbitrary, unrelated attributes. There is literally zero reward for hard work. It's actually more likely to hurt than help you because original scholarship or novel insights is definitionally more dissimilar to existing thin…

Recommendation systems just mirror what the users watch - including their age - and the reality is that 99% of people have horrible taste in just about everything. They can't tell the difference between a great film and a terrible film - they walk away thinking "I enjoyed that".

Agreed. To go further, I think people don't even want quality content. And on the internet, they just want the feed. They don't want reccomended videos to choose from. They don't need a comment section. The search bar doesn't even matter. Turns out the best way to engage people and get them to use any platform for hours is to just give them a feed. It's why TikTok, YouTube and most Meta products all have stories that just autoplay. That's the future

Re: A man who uploaded 2M videos to YouTube [video]

#62

Post by SilverBirch »

kristopolous wrote: post #7

The problem of web content is the search and recommendation systems have no opinion on skill, effort, scholarship or accuracy. It's become disconnected so much that metrics of quality are seen as arbitrary, unrelated attributes. There is literally zero reward for hard work. It's actually more likely to hurt than help you because original scholarship or novel insights is definitionally more dissimilar to existing thin…

I agree with you that there's a problem, but I think your solutions are kind of naive. All the logic you talk about in your proposed solution can be done with data that youtube has. In almost all cases it has a basic idea of who you are and how you view the videos. It could implement what you suggest tomorrow. In fact I suspect that it probably does do something like you suggest. The core of the problem is more about incentives and resources than the actually algorithm.

Your incentive is to find informative or entertaining content, you have about 10% of an FTE to achieve that. Youtube's incentive is monetize your attention and has ~2000 FTEs to achieve this. Creators are incentivized to try and maximize the amount of Youtube's monetization they get a share of about ~1,000,000 FTEs to achieve this.

That last category is in an adversarial relationship with the first two categories and they have way more resources. Even if Youtube's incentive was aligned with yours - which it isn't - the content creators are in a battle to the death to optimize how much share of the money they get which means they're incentivized to do almost the exact opposite of what you want.

Re: A man who uploaded 2M videos to YouTube [video]

#63

Post by NonNefarious »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #44
nixcraft wrote: post #34

Meanwhile, Google has removed RedFrost Motivation[1] (over 1.5 million subs and =>120 million views) from the YouTube Partner program stating reason "uses someone else's content without adding significant value for viewers". I kid you not. This is one of my favourite motivational channels with an orignal artistic take. According to post[1], they claim to use talented voice artists and musicians to produce our exclusi…

The ban seems legitimate since they use copyrighted poems. Every answer on StackOverflow is under Creative Commons SA-BY, and this guy follows exactly the terms of the license. I won't say that this Youtube channel isn't a parasite, but it's doing something 100% legally and the one you talk about is not.

The posted explanation doesn't mention copyright, though. It complains that the channel was delivering the content without "adding significant value," but meanwhile Google allows this asshole to perpetrate the same offense MILLIONS of times.

Re: A man who uploaded 2M videos to YouTube [video]

#64

Post by trh0awayman »

jopsen wrote: post #55
trh0awayman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recommendation systems just mirror what the users watch - including their age - and the reality is that 99% of people have horrible taste in just about everything. They can't tell the difference between a great film and a terrible film - they walk away thinking "I enjoyed that".

> they walk away thinking "I enjoyed that". I really enjoyed reading your comment :)

My point wasn't to denigrate people for having poor taste or whatever. I don't care what people watch. And I'm not one to talk - I sometimes think of buying one of those McMansions from McMansion Hell.

But my point was that the systems are working as intended, and that there is no real failure here - people are seeing a reflection of their peers. It was hard for me to understand it until I saw how my Zoomer cousin watched Youtube like it was a TV station. Youtubers aren't "gaming" any sort of system, just like SEO isn't really "gaming" Google (for the most part) - they're both gaming people. SEO tricks work because it gets clicks. Clickbait titles have worked for 10+ years now because it STILL gets clicks.

Re: A man who uploaded 2M videos to YouTube [video]

#65

Post by NonNefarious »

jiggawatts wrote: post #20
acover wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reputation?

Tragedy of the commons explains everything. Individuals at Google are incentivised to abuse the collective reputation for personal gain. It always seems that the towering reputation of Google is an unassailable monolith that will never be shaken by any individual. So every individual harms it in their own tiny selfish way, gaining promotions, KPIs, or pay bumps as a reward for their behaviour. Decades of promoting th…

Confirmed. A good friend and colleague worked at Google. Their employees are forced to use a graphical tool to rank coworkers in comparison to each other by lining pictures of them up horizontally... and you're not allowed to put people on an equal level. The tool enforces disparity.

This after Google admitted that they've been douchebags during the interview process and claimed they were going to do better. Yeah, OK.

Re: A man who uploaded 2M videos to YouTube [video]

#66

Post by jwilk »

lorey wrote: post #21

Am I the only one that thinks this blog post is not too different? A blog post about a youtube video, no additional value.

It's much easier and faster to read ~10 lines of text than to watch a 16 minutes video.

[Looks like someone silently updated the submission URL to point to the video. The original URL was: https://thenewleafjournal.com/leaf/man-uploads-2000000-youtu...]

Re: A man who uploaded 2M videos to YouTube [video]

#67

Post by themitigating »

kristopolous wrote: post #7

The problem of web content is the search and recommendation systems have no opinion on skill, effort, scholarship or accuracy. It's become disconnected so much that metrics of quality are seen as arbitrary, unrelated attributes. There is literally zero reward for hard work. It's actually more likely to hurt than help you because original scholarship or novel insights is definitionally more dissimilar to existing thin…

Isn't the sort of data or at least similar already used for recommendations? I agree a large portion of the internet is garbage but there's always Wikipedia.

Re: A man who uploaded 2M videos to YouTube [video]

#69

Post by shp0ngle »

mongol wrote: post #3

Why this guy has not been blocked from Youtube is beyond me. He spams so many search results.

What he is doing is technically legal. He attributes the sources, as the CC license requires. And the Q&A is technically correct.

The correct action is to not ban him, but not show him very high up in results. The same with Expert Sex Change of yesteryear.

Re: A man who uploaded 2M videos to YouTube [video]

#70

Post by killingtime74 »

mike_hock wrote: post #42
formerly_proven wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On average production quality seems to correlate inversely with accuracy and actual knowledge on Youtube. It kinda makes sense, most Youtube channels seem to be one-man-shows, if the production quality is good, the dude doing it is basically an A/V person at that point and you're looking at P(A/V person AND knowledgeable in X) vs. P(knowledgeable in X).

Not only YT, this applies to almost everything. If a website is basic black-on-white HTML with little or no styling, it usually has high-quality content.

So you’re saying us Backend guys are geniuses huh :D
Post reply on HN