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

111–120 of 179 posts

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#111

Post by boogies »

phreenet wrote: post #102
srean wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it has been the opposite as in it has so little hysteresis. Just one day I watch something I do not usually watch, say cat videos, and for weeks I will get only cat videos as recommendations. I think their algorithm needs to be cognizant of and adapt to temporal shifts in a viewers interest. Some users may like change in focus at slightest of deviations, others may prefer more hysteresis.

Because of this, when I'm sent video links to watch I will open them up in a Private Window / Incognito so I do not pollute my account.

I never use non-private windows, so I use Invidious or mpv for this. I put

  control + alt + m
    notify-send "mpv loading $(xclip -o)"; mpv --player-operation-mode=pseudo-gui "$(xclip -o)" || notify-send 'mpv error'
in my ~/.config/sxhd/sxhkdrc to conveniently play any youtube-dl supported url I’ve copied or highlighted.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#112

Post by friendlybus »

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…

Not interested doesn't work. One or two weeks later it 'forgets' your preferences and someone else uploads the same content as a clip so it gets suggested too.

Googling around shows there used to be a 'Don't recommend this channel' button which would be awesome to have back.

I find it very annoying listening to a two hour debate, understanding difficult topics and then disagreeing with the speaker and being unable to block content from said speaker.

There's a bunch of one-topic people pushing their opinions out to the youtube user base and it would be great not to have to see their face in 30 different suggestions after you find yourself deeply disagreeing with their opinions or you're just done with their conversations after hearing all of their views.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#113

Post by lordgrenville »

zobzu wrote: post #76
klmadfejno wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use YouTube infrequently. Usually for binging random content like comedy sketches or speedrunning. No matter what I'm on, there's always a few videos in my recommendations that make no sense and look like trash. Not generically, but specific videos that ALWAYS appear. One of them is "I PAID FIVE BASSISTS ON FIVR TO PLAY AN IMPOSSIBLE BASSLINE" ... Why is this so bad? What are your hundreds of data scientists doing?

I don't think it's bad actually. I mean the recommendations could be far better, but this specific case isn't bad. Say you go on reddit/r/iloveredcars - all you will see upvoted (ie ... RECOMMENDED by users) will be red cars. You'll never see blue cars. You'll never know they even exist. All you've ever seen are red cars. Not only this but you'll notice that over time it's always the same red car pictures being repos…

aka Multi-Armed Bandit

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#114

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

Try clicking novel suggestions from the home page. It will start altering your profile in a few days. Also don't do this from a browser session tied to a Google account. There will still be a profile attached to the cookie but it isn't permanently linked to you.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#116

Post by dankerr »

boogies wrote: post #111
phreenet wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of this, when I'm sent video links to watch I will open them up in a Private Window / Incognito so I do not pollute my account.

I never use non-private windows, so I use Invidious or mpv for this. I put control + alt + m notify-send "mpv loading $(xclip -o)"; mpv --player-operation-mode=pseudo-gui "$(xclip -o)" || notify-send 'mpv error' in my ~/.config/sxhd/sxhkdrc to conveniently play any youtube-dl supported url I’ve copied or highlighted.

Thank you for this tip, just added it to my sxhkdrc.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#118

Post by thesuitonym »

anjc wrote: post #63

I'm always mind-blown reading comment threads like this regarding recommendation, with people annoyed that explicit feedback helps recommenders, or exasperated that they're recommended one item that they haven't approved while also wanting novel recommendations. 1000s of hours of videos are uploaded every minute. 5+ billion videos are watched daily. Are you not rather quite pleased that YouTube can deliver highly rel…

Consider that a lot of the complains are that YouTube constantly recommends already watched videos, instead of new and relevant ones. Then, if a user watches a single video on a topic outside of their usual interest scope, YouTube replaces any semi-relevant recommendations with with that new category, regardless of if the user is actually interested in the topic.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#119

Post by heavyset_go »

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…

Accidentally clicking on an ad from the President's re-election campaign made YouTube think that I'd be interested in watching videos of different people getting destroyed by facts and logic, or watching sweaty people get really angry at pop culture for some reason.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#120

Post by dghughes »

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…

What freaks me out is how invasive YouTube/Google is. I have browser ad blockers, script blockers, privacy addons. Sure I am logged in though which pretty much defeats the purpose of all those.

My often used example is the time I went car shopping with my sister. She was buying a new car I went with her (age old women vs salesman bias). The dealership was over an hour from my town, my sister lives in a different town. I didn't do anything other than stand there, no info of mine given, no forms filled out.

Back home two hours later YouTube has showing on recommendations for me videos for new car shopping.

Post reply on HN