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

On YouTube’s recommendation system

blog.youtube

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 337 posts

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#151

Post by betwixthewires »

> Our recommendation system is built on the simple principle of helping people find the videos they want to watch and that will give them value

Well it doesn't live up to the principle, not even close.

> It’s constantly evolving, learning every day from over 80 billion pieces of information we call signals.

This is probably why. It's a positive feedback loop mechanism for noise.

Another reason why is probably that it's metric for "give them value" is engagement. Its a dishonest metric, because "gives them value" is less important than "give us value", so even if you found that it doesnt give them value, you've got a perverse incentive to continue doing it and pretending it is in their best interest.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#152

Post by stevofolife »

lordentropy wrote: post #5

For me, it seems like youtube's recommendation system mostly gets stuck in the local optimum. Once you watch a video from a particular channel, it'll keep on recommending the videos from the same channel for months. Soon, the recommendation just consists of stuff from the channels that have you already viewed. You rarely see new types of recommendations.

I think old school recommendations behave that way. You will need to introduce reinforcement learning into your reco in order to explore and exploit.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#153

Post by type0 »

derefr wrote: post #75
lordentropy wrote: post #5

For me, it seems like youtube's recommendation system mostly gets stuck in the local optimum. Once you watch a video from a particular channel, it'll keep on recommending the videos from the same channel for months. Soon, the recommendation just consists of stuff from the channels that have you already viewed. You rarely see new types of recommendations.

Bizarrely, I find the opposite. I follow a lot of channels. (More than a thousand, I think.) Among those, some of them I watch every time I see them, while others I hardly ever engage with. But it's always the followed channels I hardly ever engage with that show up in my Recommended feed; while the followed channels that I consistently engage with are nowhere to be seen. (Not just in Recommended; they fail to show u…

Their recommendation system is broken. Sometimes recommendations are completely unrelated, sometimes the same videos get recommended in every page for several days. Videos are usually tagged (there are browser extensions to view tags on videos), so recommendation can't even match the tags to view stuff in a similar ballpark. They demonetize and downplay recommendations for decent channels because they are deemed to geeky or are not posting videos frequently enough, I'm not at all pleased how Youtube gets more and more rotten.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#154

Post by skybrian »

haolez wrote: post #149

Sometimes, I want to watch a random video that was recommended, but I get anxious about clicking on it and start getting recommendations for that video's theme forever and ever. Once, I've clicked on a video about Tetris' World Championship Finals (I was curious!), and I was plagued with Tetris recommendations for some months.

I guess that means you've learned to care a lot about YouTube's recommendations? Another approach is to ignore them.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#155

Post by rubicon33 »

Be careful with YouTube. For years people have talked about social media's effect on mental health, but personally, I've found the biggest hit to be YouTube.

Their recommendation system is really the heart of the beast. It's essentially a dopamine reward system, not too dissimilar from a slot machine at a casino. Pull the lever (refresh the page) and get random results! It sucks you in to a cycle of refreshing, finding videos you're interested in, clicking, rinse, repeat.

Personally I found myself losing hours per day to this behavior and gaining very little from it.

Far more productive, is going to YouTube for something SPECIFIC. Use the search function to find what you're looking for, and watch those videos, but never use the homepage or sidebar recommendations.

There are actually google chrome plugins which will totally remove the recommended section:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#156

Post by throwaway316943 »

city41 wrote: post #104
lordentropy wrote: post #5

For me, it seems like youtube's recommendation system mostly gets stuck in the local optimum. Once you watch a video from a particular channel, it'll keep on recommending the videos from the same channel for months. Soon, the recommendation just consists of stuff from the channels that have you already viewed. You rarely see new types of recommendations.

I am a huge YouTube addict and get sucked into it a lot. I used to discover all kinds of great channels and really enjoyed it. But lately I have noticed I'm not really finding much and the amount of watching I am doing has gone down a lot. Not sure if they changed the algorithm, or if I've just seen everything I like. I have definitely noticed YouTube is recommending me more clickbaity and mainstream stuff lately.

It’s changed, I’m in the same boat. The only new channels I’ve found that I love are after seeing them promoted outside of YouTube. They clearly intersect with other channels I’ve subscribed to and watch regularly but were never recommended. I also notice that the recommendation queue for videos on these channels tries to steer you away to larger more mainstream channels that are only tenuously related.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#157

Post by type0 »

cronix wrote: post #39
lordentropy wrote: post #5

For me, it seems like youtube's recommendation system mostly gets stuck in the local optimum. Once you watch a video from a particular channel, it'll keep on recommending the videos from the same channel for months. Soon, the recommendation just consists of stuff from the channels that have you already viewed. You rarely see new types of recommendations.

Visit in incognito mode and don't sign in. Brand new, fresh youtube, ready to be corrupted again.

Incognito mode doesn't make their recommendation system any better, but at least it doesn't get stuck on some stupid subject because their bs algorithm deemed it important to show the same stuff several days in a row.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#158

Post by jlos »

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I actually enjoy YouTube's recommendation algorithm, though I do make an effort to point it in the right direction. One example is guitar players: I'm an active guitarist, I've been for years, but as I got older the discovery phase of music dropped off. However I found YouTube constantly recommends amazing, phenomenal guitar players who almost immediately move into my list favorites. But some of these guitars only have a few thousand subscribers , there's very little chance I would have ever found them without youtube, and almost certainly no chance they would ever have an audience without this recommendation algorithm

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#159

Post by shaicoleman »

The best recommendation system for me is none at all.

I recommend using an extension called 'Improve YouTube!' [1], which allows to collapse/hide recommendations/comments/ads/related videos/autoplay etc.

There's also YouTube Vanced [2], which allows some of these things on Android.

1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-vi...

2. https://vancedapp.com/

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#160

Post by dgritsko »

stevofolife wrote: post #147
jeffwask wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad because I remember being able to find new and interesting creators passively. Now the main page is all corporate BS and the algorithm locks you in. We played a bit of WOW Classic last year and all of a sudden I was just flooded with Asmongold videos and videos of people clipping and replaying Asmongold. It took a day of "never show this again" to make it stop.

You started playing WoW Classic and it was able to recommend WoW-related videos. It did its job. What else do you expect from a recommendation system? Predict what you're interested next or what you're going to do tomorrow? That's not recommendation, that's mass surveillance and psychological manipulation. But on a useful note, maybe YouTube needs to provide a function to see a list of random videos that are unexplor…

> What else do you expect from a recommendation system? Predict what you're interested next or what you're going to do tomorrow?

Actually, I think they kind of are trying to do this (in a sense), if you read the article:

> Our system then compares your viewing habits with those that are similar to you and uses that information to suggest other content you may want to watch. So if you like tennis videos and our system notices that others who like the same tennis videos as you also enjoy jazz videos, you may be recommended jazz videos, even if you’ve never watched a single one before.

Post reply on HN