For sure, Youtube's (bad) impact on current generation children will be felt (in a bad way) for many upcoming generations to come. At this point, it's literally technology gone rogue.
‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
161–170 of 366 posts
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#162For me YouTube recommendations are not toxic, they are so amazing I some times wonder how comes the world around is not heaven when everybody has free access to this. That's because I always watch high-quality educational content and some beautiful comforting and inspiring music. So for me YouTube is a fountain of knowledge, visual and musical aesthetics etc. Every day I get inspiration, healthy kind of fun and learn…
The more things change the more they stay the same.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#163For me YouTube recommendations are not toxic, they are so amazing I some times wonder how comes the world around is not heaven when everybody has free access to this. That's because I always watch high-quality educational content and some beautiful comforting and inspiring music. So for me YouTube is a fountain of knowledge, visual and musical aesthetics etc. Every day I get inspiration, healthy kind of fun and learn…
When I watch junk on YouTube I need to open the link using Chrome's incognito mode. When are companies going to give us more control over what inputs we give their recommendation algorithms? There should be a button that says "hey, I'm going to watch this because I'm only human, but please, don't show this junk to me". Or, "hey, I understand this content creator has thousands of videos and uploads content daily, but,…
My guess is that they'll never do this, because they want you to go bad and watch as much of that junk as possible.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#164The recommendations are now almost completely inescapable if you want to continue using their service. They recently did away with email notifications for new content [1] and now the RSS export feature for subscriptions has been removed [2]. I refuse to interface with their algorithm, so I've begun hunting down alternative video hosts and the personal sites of the creators I can find and am preparing to leave their p…
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#165For me YouTube recommendations are not toxic, they are so amazing I some times wonder how comes the world around is not heaven when everybody has free access to this. That's because I always watch high-quality educational content and some beautiful comforting and inspiring music. So for me YouTube is a fountain of knowledge, visual and musical aesthetics etc. Every day I get inspiration, healthy kind of fun and learn…
I don't think you should avoid signing in, when you see something you don't like just mark it as such and the algorithm seems to be pretty good at filtering in the future.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#166For me YouTube recommendations are not toxic, they are so amazing I some times wonder how comes the world around is not heaven when everybody has free access to this. That's because I always watch high-quality educational content and some beautiful comforting and inspiring music. So for me YouTube is a fountain of knowledge, visual and musical aesthetics etc. Every day I get inspiration, healthy kind of fun and learn…
> That's why I recommend to avoid signing-in into YouTube. Better watch anonymously so you can always clean the cookies and get out of the pit. There definitely needs to be a "reset" button on these services, or at least a better way for your to actively monitor your algorithmically-determined interests and give feedback (I swear, you watch one SNL video...). Another poster in the thread said you can do this by editi…
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#167YT algorithm is great for me. I learn a ton about: woodworking, violin technique, folk music, StarCraft, math, coding, home improvement, DIY projects, etc. What is toxic is the viral ideology that infects the mind of many, many humans. We need education and social interaction to counterbalance the anti-truth conspiracy infection that social media is spreading.
The problem is, this will not (ever) work. Most people are mentally and/or physically exhausted after a long day of work, they don't have the mental firewalls to protect themselves against "cheap and easy" proposals (like, for example, to "build a wall").
I see conspiracy crap like cigarettes: even though everyone should know for decades now that smoking kills, the only way to effectively get rid of cigarettes is to ban their marketing and make them expensive. Going after the vendors is what must be done. And if that includes jailing the worst offenders, be it.
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#168For me YouTube recommendations are not toxic, they are so amazing I some times wonder how comes the world around is not heaven when everybody has free access to this. That's because I always watch high-quality educational content and some beautiful comforting and inspiring music. So for me YouTube is a fountain of knowledge, visual and musical aesthetics etc. Every day I get inspiration, healthy kind of fun and learn…
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same experience here. I have to actively curate them by removing some one-off dumb videos from my watch history, but my YouTube recommendations are by far extremely high quality. Youtube is the only service I know of that has actually achieved working content recommendations for me. My Watch Later has hundreds of hours of content from things that I definitely want to watch but I'm either not yet in the mood for or to…
+1 for cleaning up the watch history. It's pretty nice that youtube let's you edit that and doesn't use a "full history" to train the recommendation algorithm. I try to be careful and always use private browsing when opening "suspicious" videos, but every now and then, one slips and taints my recommendation. OTOH, with a clean history, I barely subscribe to channels, since new videos usually end up in the recommendat…
Re: ‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
#170For me YouTube recommendations are not toxic, they are so amazing I some times wonder how comes the world around is not heaven when everybody has free access to this. That's because I always watch high-quality educational content and some beautiful comforting and inspiring music. So for me YouTube is a fountain of knowledge, visual and musical aesthetics etc. Every day I get inspiration, healthy kind of fun and learn…