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

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

#181

Post by Someone »

trh0awayman wrote: post #112
jeroenhd wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can't tell the difference between a great film and a terrible film - they walk away thinking "I enjoyed that". If I walk away and think "I enjoyed that" then by all measures that was a great film. A great film will please most of not all of its target audience. When a film is shown in Cannes the target audience is cinema enthusiasts who seek deeper meaning and interesting new ways to use the medium. When a new…

> They may have a different taste, but that taste is no better or worse than anyone else's. This is often repeated like it's some universal truth. Enjoying a film (or anything) doesn't mean it's great - this is a very hard to explain idea though, as it's something that is experienced in the core of your being. It's like trying to explain why small talk is important to someone from a low-context culture - there's prob…

> Enjoying a film (or anything) doesn't mean it's great

If lots of people enjoy seeing not great films they apparently prefer enjoying themselves over seeing great films.

If so, one could argue there’s nothing wrong with suggesting people what they want.

On the other hand, if you replace ‘film’ by ‘nicotine’ or ‘opium’, many in society think it’s wrong to give people what they want, and that, instead, society should discourage their use, and aim to have its citizens use less of those.

Similarly, some people (e.g. some variants of socialist movements) will argue that society should strive to make its citizens enjoy those better films, food, music, etc.

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

#182

Post by hackernewds »

bambax wrote: post #72
ThePhysicist wrote: post #12

It's only a matter of time before we'll see auto-generated content that uses AI-generated imagery, text and voice synthesis to produce content that appears vaguely intelligble enough to fool people to watch it. And as the downvote count is private information now it will be very hard to distinguish these videos from legitimate ones. Personally I think creative-commons licensed content is a double-edged sword. It seem…

> And surprisingly, Google seems unable or unwilling to filter this stuff out. A little OT, but I find this very surprising too. In general I'm (still) a big fan of Google Search, which I think is amazing and miles above the competition. But it's true that SO clones are everywhere, often in the first five results. How can this be? How hard is it to detect that if the exact same content appeared first on SO, and then…

Google does actually. they explicitly recently announced they will not promote AI generated content, which was met with a lot of criticism

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

#183

Post by tomc1985 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #79
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 can't tell the difference between a great film and a terrible film - they walk away thinking "I enjoyed that". If I walk away and think "I enjoyed that" then by all measures that was a great film. A great film will please most of not all of its target audience. When a film is shown in Cannes the target audience is cinema enthusiasts who seek deeper meaning and interesting new ways to use the medium. When a new…

It takes a lot more than lots of people saying "I enjoyed that" to make a great film.

Giving people what they want as a primary objective is the fast-track to mediocrity. "Good is the enemy of great," as they say.

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

#184

Post by tqi »

trh0awayman wrote: post #112
jeroenhd wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can't tell the difference between a great film and a terrible film - they walk away thinking "I enjoyed that". If I walk away and think "I enjoyed that" then by all measures that was a great film. A great film will please most of not all of its target audience. When a film is shown in Cannes the target audience is cinema enthusiasts who seek deeper meaning and interesting new ways to use the medium. When a new…

> They may have a different taste, but that taste is no better or worse than anyone else's. This is often repeated like it's some universal truth. Enjoying a film (or anything) doesn't mean it's great - this is a very hard to explain idea though, as it's something that is experienced in the core of your being. It's like trying to explain why small talk is important to someone from a low-context culture - there's prob…

> It's like trying to explain why small talk is important to someone from a low-context culture - there's probably a fundamental disconnect where it will never make sense.

Doesn't your analogy actually run counter to the point you are making? ie the importance of small talk (like taste) is not universal?

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

#185

Post by MattGrommes »

toolz wrote: post #96
stackbutterflow wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to be intellectually stimulated. Feeling good is not enough. The same way drugs trigger pleasure in our brain but we can't accept a society where the majority is constantly high and a minority runs the show. The moment we give up on pushing people to challenge themselves is the moment our society declines. Moreover democracies require an educated populace in order to survive.

It is important be intellectually stimulated and fiction is one of the worst ways to achieve that. Read a technical book or listen to philosophers debate or brush up on complex historically significant events. At the end of the day art is for entertainment. Whether or not you need the intellectually stimulating element in your art is subjective and unimportant.

Disagree completely on fiction not being intellectually stimulating. It's much easier to get many different views on a subject from a fictional discussion between characters or to see something from a wildly different point of view via a fictional character. In addition, fiction gives you a hook in the form of a story, to bring you along. Many speakers are not as interesting as their ideas and a story gives you an extra incentive to keep going.

Art is certainly for entertainment but it's the intellectual stimulation that makes certain fiction great.

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

#186

Post by draw_down »

book_mike wrote: post #137

I don't care. YouTube sucks. It really, REALLY, sucks. The interface sucks. The algo sucks. The controls sucks. The content is psychologically damaging to kids. The content is barely good for adults. The platform needs to be refactored completely and if the ad guys show up, kill them (figuratively and in jest).

No post body was provided.

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

#187

Post by the_only_human »

elbigbad wrote: post #71
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…

I am not someone who spends much time on YouTube at all, perhaps a few hours a year. But after looking at that channel it just seems to be some line drawn images with a poem read in the background. If it’s not autogenerated content, I bet it absolutely could be by someone on HN. Comparatively, a suggested video came up below when I was checking out the red frost channel, and I ended up watching most of it. Some guy r…

> I am not someone who spends much time on YouTube at all, perhaps a few hours a year

In other words, "the bad man can't hurt me if the bad man is outside my field of vision."

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

#189

Post by dredmorbius »

dredmorbius wrote: post #164
comboy wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at the video in question[1]- I search for some answer, I watch it and I DID NOT enjoy that. If not for the dislike button, I have no way to signal that to youtube. Algorithm just sees that I watched the video - great. Since I haven't found answer to my question I may watch even more videos on the topic (alg - great video, got him hooked on that topic). Most recommendation system mismatches are much more s…

Back in the G+ days (I was both an active user and critic), I hammered the importance of the Exit, Voice, Loyalty model. Google from its inception had inspired exceptionally strong loyalty through solving technical problems (web search) well. I'd adopted and was proselytizing as of 1999. Over the years that situation ... changed. With Google no longer serving technical needs well (across multiple dimensions), and dis…

Clarifying: as I methodically deleted Gmail contacts, an increasingly desperate set of pleas and feedback/survey requests appeared.

I opted not to participate. The actions speak for themselves.

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

#190

Post by kristopolous »

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".

This is an inversion of how human behavior works.

The reality is that a context is created, either intentionally or not, and then people behave in the context.

I commented on this phenomena 4 months ago in a different thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30184653) and 7 months ago somewhere else (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28972157)

Quoting one of them

> So you treat users like idiots and then they start acting like idiots. It really does work that way.

> Let me give an intuitive analogy for those unconvinced. We're going to use a gym, library, and bar. The same person would be exercising, studying, and drinking at those institutions, in specifically that order.

> We shape the buildings (create the context); thereafter they shape us.

> It's the difference between say assuming your customers are alcoholics and then building a bar and saying "it is of public benefit, profitable to our company, whatever, if our users studied so let us make a library and they will rise to the occasion".

so "Recommendation systems just mirror what the users watch" is not a complete statement. It's "Recommendation systems just mirror what the users watch in the "

The same users on youtube, kahn academy, twitch, and xtube will follow dramatically different paths because the products are just slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. They are castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination as Fred Brooks said, true. But they do amount to a concrete form and context and it does meaningfully influence behavior.

The system encourages the bad behavior. The context is what makes it "natural" - it doesn't have to be that way.

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