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I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

towardsdatascience.com

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Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#111

Post by rawoke083600 »

pantelisk wrote: post #25

The youtube algorithm is working extremely well, to the point where I find hard to believe it does not have any human in the loop or active moderation. I have discovered so many interesting types of music and documentaries and subculture/subgenres on it. It manages to hit my interests so well, that I rarely go to netflix nor spotify anymore for discovery. I 'll either directly go watch something that I 've chosen on…

Ja I'm with you.. I'm super amazed at the channels, doccies, channels and cool videos I did discover ! Now a "real F1 score" is not really possible with the size and nature of YouTube ( Recall VS Precision) but still I find 6/7 days I get recommended cool stuff 3/5 times :) My gf(ok she is now my ex since 2 weeks ago) use to also complain at how bad YouTube algo was for her, but she did enjoy my videos and channels I got recommended. The only difference is I think, was that I spend a lot more time on YouTube then her ?

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#112

Post by bigfoot675 »

You might find AWS SAM CLI to be useful for packaging your code artifacts. I'm not sure if you've found this yet, but even so, it can be finnicky sometimes.

Particularly, the "sam build --use-container" command might be useful for simulating the Lambda environment

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/serverless-application-model/lat...

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#113

Post by piva00 »

frankosaurus wrote: post #48
stingraycharles wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you for real? YouTube seems to do terrible at the recommendations. It cannot even recognize that when I’m behind the computer, I’m not interested in watching documentaries and when I’m behind my Apple TV, I’m not interested in listening to music videos. It’s such basic stuff, let alone the actual recommendations; it just keeps rehashing the same channels. “Oh you watched a video about the US elections, let’s bomb…

I actually agree with OP. YouTube recommendations on my primary account are quite good. I attribute this to careful curation of my logged-in viewing habits. > you watched a video about the US elections That's the problem. As a rule, I never view political, celebrity, or clickbait videos when logged in. There is such a vast amount of dreck in these categories, you're sure to be disappointed sooner or later. If I see a…

I think this is the problem: it's really hard to understand how to get better recommendations out of YouTube.

I did try to curate my watching history, at one point I erased it and started to keep track of what stayed there or not, it doesn't matter, if I watch 2-3 news/political commentary I start to get crap recommendations. If I watch 2-3 videos of any subject I start to see a flood of those recommendations.

It is absolutely useless to me, even more that I have some very non-overlapping hobbies that I jump around.

I tried curating my subscription list, at some point that worked but since YouTube dropped those from their recommendation algorithm my subs are just to check videos from channels I like, some weeks I will see the same videos on my recommendations that I have already watched.

It's a mess, I can't understand it as a SWE to be able to tailor it to my usage. By now, after trying for about a year or so, I completely gave up on "training" YT's recommendation algorithm...

On the other hand, Spotify has always been really good for me, the trends of what is recommended doesn't change so often if I don't change my listening habits, when I do change it picks it up as a quiet signal and doesn't overwhelm me with recommendations for a genre I listened to one day out of the year. Also the Spotify's Radio feature for a song/track/album/artist works really well for the genres I listen to, when I'm tired of my playlists, or when I just want to discover new music, a starting a radio from a track, album or artist I like usually gives me very relevant content.

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#114

Post by speedgoose »

_boffin_ wrote: post #77

This is a great start, but there's a huge portion of data you're just flat out missing from this--comments. There's so much useful information inside user comments. I have a theory that I'm truthfully too lazy to test out, but I'm presuming that lower quality videos are going to have an average comment text complixicity number lower than the higher quality videos, especially as your topic gets more specific/technical…

Unfortunately comments are known to be important for ranking. I see more and more Youtubers asking their audience to write comments.

The carwow channel for example is definitely asking to answer stupid debates in the comments to improve its ranking. The vilebrequin channel does the same but as a joke and explain that it's to improve the ranking. The community then write a lot of long and stupid comments to improve the ranking.

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#115

Post by rasz »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #49
smoe wrote: post #34

Really cool project, going to play around with it, since I wanted to experiment with alternative algorithms for these kind of platforms for a while, but didn't found time to get started. My biggest gripe with YouTube recommendations, or any service of that kind (Spotify, Amazon, etc.), is that they don't understand what aspects of the content I value. So it is a huge hit and miss. Sometimes it works, because I guess…

I wish I could explicitly tell YouTube “don’t ever recommend videos I’ve seen.”

inject those two styles into YT website:

    a #video-title { color: red !important;}
    a:visited #video-title { color: black !important;}

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#116

Post by rasz »

dastx wrote: post #33
stingraycharles wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you for real? YouTube seems to do terrible at the recommendations. It cannot even recognize that when I’m behind the computer, I’m not interested in watching documentaries and when I’m behind my Apple TV, I’m not interested in listening to music videos. It’s such basic stuff, let alone the actual recommendations; it just keeps rehashing the same channels. “Oh you watched a video about the US elections, let’s bomb…

My biggest annoyance is that it suggests videos I've already watched. Old and new. I totally understand if a recently uploaded video gets suggested several times a day or over a few days, but it suggests videos I've watched years ago, and also months ago. Over and over again. Their "don't suggest this video" or channel doesn't work for shit either.

inject those two styles into YT website:

    a #video-title { color: red !important;}
    a:visited #video-title { color: black !important;}

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#117

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

sktrdie wrote: post #51

I want something like AdBlocker extensions but for replacing algorithms of these social media platforms. It can be community driven so I can select “give me scientifically proven posts” algorithm or “non political stuff” algorithm.

What other features would you want in that?

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#118

Post by AntiImperialist »

pantelisk wrote: post #25

The youtube algorithm is working extremely well, to the point where I find hard to believe it does not have any human in the loop or active moderation. I have discovered so many interesting types of music and documentaries and subculture/subgenres on it. It manages to hit my interests so well, that I rarely go to netflix nor spotify anymore for discovery. I 'll either directly go watch something that I 've chosen on…

I have found that Facebook videos always has had much better video recommendations.

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#119

Post by bryanrasmussen »

JSavageOne wrote: post #89
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could explicitly tell YouTube “don’t ever recommend videos I’ve seen.”

This option would single-handedly fix their completely broken music recommendation algorithm that only seems to auto-play the same 5 or so songs that I recently listened to and thumbs-upped.

I get the same behavior, only I've never thumbs-upped anything.

Re: I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time

#120

Post by simonmales »

altrunox wrote: post #44
gylterud wrote: post #28

I found YouTube suggestions to be generally useless, so I have just disabled the suggestion sidebar completely[0]. Leaves more screen space for the video. The reason I found them useless is that the suggestions were too specialised. I usually do not want to watch a dozen videos on the same topic. I usually want to watch one high quality video about it, then move on. Same with channels. I do not want to follow ten cha…

I had no idea uBlock could do that! I just removed my Twitter treding topics, awesome.

Bingo, me too. Did the same for the FB feed.
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