On YouTube’s recommendation system • Hacker News Board

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#171

Post by commandlinefan » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

exolymph wrote: post #50

LarryDarrell wrote: post #17

> 3. Do recommendations drive viewers to increasingly extreme content? > As I’ve explained, we actively demote low-quality information in recommendations. But we also take the additional step of showing viewers authoritative videos about topics that may interest them. Say I watch a video about the COVID-19 vaccine. In my Up Next panel, I’ll see videos from reputable sources like Vox and Bloomberg Quicktake and won’t…

I'm sorry that you're in this painful situation. Personally I don't think the root problem is YouTube — rather, it's your parents' confirmation bias. They want to believe these things. I've watched Alex Jones videos myself. I did not leave wanting more and no recommendation algo could change that. (Lest I leave the wrong impression, the same is true of AOC going live on IG.)

> They want to believe these things.

This isn't exactly new. When I was growing up, there were tabloid newspapers in the supermarkets with wacky headlines like "woman gives birth to two-headed bat", "aliens abduct CEO of GM and replace him with robot clone" or "Elvis is alive and acting as president of the United Nations". They've moved online, but they were always there. Somebody was buying them, even back then - enough to justify the costs of printing them and paying to have them placed in supermarket checkout counters.

What's also not new is the influence of unelected, unaccountable busybodies interjecting themselves wherever and whenever they can to suppress whatever they personally don't happen to like on your behalf (always, always, "for the children" as we see here). Back then it was Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Tipper Gore with their "moral majority" - they didn't care much who believed that they needed to wear tinfoil hats to protect their brains from being reprogrammed by government radio waves, but they sure did care about anything that undermined the position of the christian church in daily life, and they were really successful with it. Now all the people who opposed them back then are… doing the same things themselves.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#172

Post by paganel » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #154

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.

That's what I personally do, I treat the side-bar as basically an ad-bar and my peripheral view just ignores it.

It wasn't always like this, about 7-8 years ago I used to discover lots of interesting music after watching some indie music video, but not anymore, at some point their algorithm just broke (it looks like it's searching for a local maximum and once it finds it it gets stuck in there, as someone else mentioned above).

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#173

Post by FalconSensei » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

jeffwask wrote: post #136

grumbel wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I started using multiple accounts, makes it a lot easier to keep the algorithm on topic and not get side tracked just because you searched for a song or game once. In the end the core problem with the recommendation system is simply that there is only one list of recommendations, which makes it damn near impossible to switch to a different topic unless you start account hopping. The new topic-bar helps a l…

I did this till I started paying for premium then it sucked.

If you use different channels, premium should work for all, right?

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#174

Post by emilitt » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:12 PM UTC

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…

I found the PocketTube YouTube extension very useful for organizing my subscriptions into categories for easy searching. I had the same issue though I'm not sure I'm past a thousand subs yet - probably only about a hundred in total.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#175

Post by seneca » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

dabfiend19 wrote: post #170

rubicon33 wrote: post #155

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, findi…

lol bruh have you ever used tiktok

> lol bruh have you ever used tiktok

Please don't make low effort posts like this here.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#176

Post by jedimastert » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

Super interesting somewhat buried link on the guidelines for evaluators. I just assumed they were private so I never bothered to look them up; I wonder how easy they were to find before today

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#177

Post by jedimastert » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

rubicon33 wrote: post #155

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, findi…

> 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

I've found myself doing this more recently, but I also like exploring. I think my goal is to not start from recommendations, but a specific curiosity, and roll from there.

Then again, there are plenty of creators that will bring me things I never even thought to consider. 3blue1brown was mentioned in the article, and I have notifications turned on for them because I know for a fact I will watch the entire video.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#178

Post by jedimastert » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

mrkramer wrote: post #162

Recommendation on YouTube is somewhat good but search sucks. When you search for something it throws at you random garbage on top of the thing you are actually looking for, think AltaVista vs Google yes Google you own the YouTube. There is no ability to search for videos in playlists and there is no ability to search videos' comments. Also they say >borderline content—that is content that comes close to, but doesn’t…

> TOS can not treat anything as "borderline"

They addressed this, I think, later in the article

> With all that, why don’t we simply remove borderline content? Misinformation tends to shift and evolve rapidly, and unlike areas like terrorism or child safety, often lacks a clear consensus. Also, misinformation can vary depending on personal perspective and background. We recognize that sometimes, this means leaving up controversial or even offensive content. So we continue to heavily focus on building responsible recommendations and take meaningful steps to prevent our system from widely recommending this content.

So much, in terms of moderation, what is acceptable, etc. is a constantly moving target. Even if there is an exactly right answer today, it might become an important conversation to have tomorrow

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#179

Post by robbomacrae » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:21 PM UTC

swalsh wrote: post #11

The reccomendation system is absolutely dangerous. Just this summer, I watched one video on peppers out of curiousity. By the end of summer I've got multiple different varieties growing, and all the accessories to support them. I'm really enjoying my garden, but it's very unlikely I would have started one without the youtube algorithm. Similarly my doctor reccomended I exercise more, so I started running. Then I goog…

YouTube's recommendation system (and googles search engine if you see the comments in the other post today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764) somehow escapes the flak that other systems, such as Facebook news & posts, get but I find it's equally damaging to society.

There seems to exist a downward spiral where content that is prioritized to be attention grabbing over all else gets the most clicks and then drives more content to focus on this. The quality of the content itself seems to be increasingly inconsequential and has fallen off a cliff in the face of click spam.

Anecdotal evidence 1: I used to watch youtube videos for investment ideas and now all of these streamers pump out the same low quality, not very researched content with their face plastered on top with a shocked look on their mug.

Anecdotal evidence 2: My son was shown youtube by one of our nannies (despite my rules on no youtube) and has since become semi-addicted to the most brain dead content of toys being made into knock offs of the reasonable shows he used to watch or some adult man child being a weird clown in public.

Idiocracy will be due to memes as much as genes.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#180

Post by lotsofpulp » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:22 PM UTC

isk517 wrote: post #121

swalsh wrote: post #11

The reccomendation system is absolutely dangerous. Just this summer, I watched one video on peppers out of curiousity. By the end of summer I've got multiple different varieties growing, and all the accessories to support them. I'm really enjoying my garden, but it's very unlikely I would have started one without the youtube algorithm. Similarly my doctor reccomended I exercise more, so I started running. Then I goog…

Running is a hobby that feels like it should be cheap but gets surprisingly expensive. Two quick pieces of advice to save you from a bit of hurt. 1. Track your miles, shoes need to be replaced every 300-500 and 2. Go get a foot orthotic and gait assessment done. Wearing the right type of shoes and finding out if you require orthotics is a easy way to prevent injuries that won't pop up for another year or two down the…

I know quite a few casual runners (5K to 10K) and been running for over 15 years myself. Other than a $120 pair of running shoes every year or two, what is the expense? Maybe the water backpack things if you are into extreme running?

It is not even a separate expense for me, as I just use my running shoes as my regular shoes. Also, maybe it is my gait or my lack of weight, but I estimate my shoes last 1k miles.