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

Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

foundation.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 179 posts

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#11

Post by FiReaNG3L »

dexen wrote: post #10
FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…

Systemic fixes are needed. In the meantime you can improve your own experience (and hopefully others a bit too). When you hover over a recommendation, there's a menu icon to the right side (three vertical dots, gray). Clicking it opens menu with option to indicate "Not interested" and "Report". The former is supposed to train your own instance of recommendation algo, the later does the usual reporting. According to t…

Oh I've been doing that... but it's a lot of tedious manual work (5!!! clicks per recommendation)

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#12

Post by bondarchuk »

FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…

I'm afraid this, too, is because it works. I don't have a specific example at hand but multiple times I've seen people say something like "youtube kept recommending me this so I finally watched it".

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#13

Post by dexen »

Semi related: there's a browser plugin[1] available to "de-mainstream" Youtube. It removes from recommendations the well known channels of the big name media brands[2]. You can add more to the list.

--

[1] https://demainstream.com/

[2] https://github.com/miscavage/De-Mainstream-YouTube-Extension...

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#15

Post by 52-6F-62 »

FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…

I've had the same experience. I use YT to listen to music pretty regularly and if I don't go and actively select a different song it will play the same 5-10 over and over. Even when I do select a song it will make its way back to those same 5-10 songs. There's a lot to discover on there so I still use it, but it's also pushing me back to my other services or libraries.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#16

Post by jimktrains2 »

FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…

Not just the same categories, but videos I've seen before and videos it's been "recommending" for months that I don't watch.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#20

Post by 3131s »

dexen wrote: post #10
FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…

Systemic fixes are needed. In the meantime you can improve your own experience (and hopefully others a bit too). When you hover over a recommendation, there's a menu icon to the right side (three vertical dots, gray). Clicking it opens menu with option to indicate "Not interested" and "Report". The former is supposed to train your own instance of recommendation algo, the later does the usual reporting. According to t…

Those don't do shit. I tried getting it to stop recommending me fucking Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro videos for years, but I guess I just can't escape the angry 30-something category.

I think Youtube's recommendation algorithm is an abomination that has caused real harm to society.

Post reply on HN