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YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views

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Re: YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views

#151

Post by Applejinx »

setr wrote: post #82
gryffin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially with all that data, YouTube still hold a bad recommendation engine.

I'm currently unaware of any recommendation engine that's worth acknowledging. Netflix, Amazon, Youtube, PornHub, etc... they're all accomplishing little more than "similar to the one, and only one item you last saw", with dramatic shifts in "profiling" from one or two videos. Actually, Netflix acknowledges this and splits the recommendation into "because you watched X..", so at least it covers a greater range (eg la…

That's the bottom line right there: thinking that recommendations are useful to YOU is naive and missing fundamental things about the experience.

That said, you can indeed tell them what you like but by use of negative space. When you get bombarded with obviously horrible recommendations, do the two-step process of clicking 'Not Interested' (if possible without even watching the video, or you can check it in incognito mode, assuming they're not watching that even more closely) and then 'tell us why', and respond 'I'm not interested in this channel: "undesirable video maker".

That assumes you can be sure you want to nuke the channels and subjects in question, but when it's clickbait channels and/or alt-right propaganda it's generally easy to identify and not get wrong. I'm sure the same would be true for leftwing propaganda, but the stuff I don't want pushed on me has a whole language and lexicon that's easily recognizable by video title, channel title and attempted clickbait image. If stuff trips my sensors on those grounds, I'm generally comfortable nuking it unseen.

Re: YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views

#153

Post by eteos »

I like the concept and it looks good. Some criticism: After pausing a video, it still goes to the next video after a couple of seconds. I'm also seeing way too many XHR requests on a paused video. It's like the next video is already playing but invisible? The network tab just looks way too messy.

Re: YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views

#154

Post by Applejinx »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #51
gryffin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially with all that data, YouTube still hold a bad recommendation engine.

Or potentially the recommendations are tuned more towards ad revenue than your personal interests?

Or otherwise paid for (which I think still counts as 'ads'), or tuned towards engagement.

I think quite a lot has to do with machine learning working out that if you panic the human animal they pay attention to threats, and therefore to maximize engagement 'if it bleeds, it leads' (old newspaper maxim). Newspaper editors can (and might not) automatically apply a social-benefit heuristic or sense of social shame (not wanting to be a 'muckraker' or troublemaker), and machine learning may not even start with such a concept.

If engagement was maximized by turning viewers into cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers (CHUDs), machine learning would simply make note of that and run as hard as it could in that direction, since it doesn't have a larger context in mind unless programmed to do so.

(Such a larger context is actually sort of controversial: lot of people demonize the very concept of social justice, and without it you get these hacks to maximize engagement by tapping into really unmanageable human/animal behaviors)

Re: YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views

#155

Post by pbhjpbhj »

brod wrote: post #131
hnarn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are aware that you are scraping videos that are later re-labeled as "unlisted", but you don't mention what you do to mitigate this problem. Even if it may not be illegal, at the very least it would seem un-ethical to link to private videos like this, and it would seem trivial for you to "re-scrape" your database every now and then to check whether any existing videos have changed from listed -> unl…

This logic would require them to re-scrape every video forever, which is unreasonable. I think a better approach for everyone involved would be to only store references to videos which were posted more than x minutes ago. I'm not sure if they have that information when scraping though.

GP said:

>It seems that a lot of users will upload video which is by default published [and then they change it to private] //

So to avoid that sort of unexpected public-ing (ie publishing) only one extra scrape would be needed. Or, if they knew the period over which the setting was normally changed then they could just delay the scrape until most would have already been changed.

I imagine though, in part, the 'fun' is catching inadvertent publication and morality is no t considered.

Re: YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views

#156

Post by pbhjpbhj »

mncharity wrote: post #13

A somewhat similar "sampling" experience is searching for a high-frequency term like "a", and filtering for an upload date of last hour or day[1]. Non-English terms and time of day bias on geography. [1] "a"/"last hour": https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=a&sp=EgIIAQ%253...

No stop words, that's curious?

Re: YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views

#159

Post by [deleted] »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #155
brod wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This logic would require them to re-scrape every video forever, which is unreasonable. I think a better approach for everyone involved would be to only store references to videos which were posted more than x minutes ago. I'm not sure if they have that information when scraping though.

GP said: >It seems that a lot of users will upload video which is by default published [and then they change it to private] // So to avoid that sort of unexpected public-ing (ie publishing) only one extra scrape would be needed. Or, if they knew the period over which the setting was normally changed then they could just delay the scrape until most would have already been changed. I imagine though, in part, the 'fun'…

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