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Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
21–30 of 179 posts
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#22What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…
I use YouTube infrequently. Usually for binging random content like comedy sketches or speedrunning. No matter what I'm on, there's always a few videos in my recommendations that make no sense and look like trash. Not generically, but specific videos that ALWAYS appear. One of them is "I PAID FIVE BASSISTS ON FIVR TO PLAY AN IMPOSSIBLE BASSLINE"
...
Why is this so bad? What are your hundreds of data scientists doing?
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#23What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…
I've had the same experience. I use YT to listen to music pretty regularly and if I don't go and actively select a different song it will play the same 5-10 over and over. Even when I do select a song it will make its way back to those same 5-10 songs. There's a lot to discover on there so I still use it, but it's also pushing me back to my other services or libraries.
Not just that, but I get super annoyed that I exclusively listen to YouTube music on my desktop, and exclusively watch shows etc on my Apple TV. And for some reason YouTube cannot figure out that no, I don’t want to watch these music videos on my Apple TV, and no I don’t want to watch this documentary on my desktop.
And yeah even within music videos, the recommendations seem really basic. Compared to Spotify, Google is looking like real amateurs when it comes to recommendations.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#24They just can't help their political activism. They're in deep shit with massive cuts to their technical operations. But they still do politics guns blazing.
Mozilla is quite clear about that. They consider Firefox as a political (yeah privacy is a political stance) product like another. A costly one.
There is politics as in FSF / GNU and there is politics as in Mozilla. Lot of mozilla activism is not relevant to privacy / open web. Not to mention it also limits many people from donating to them.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#25Seems silly Why not just build a better (user-configurable) recommendations engine?
Over a database of videos they don't own? That changes rapidly in ways they can't control?
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#26What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…
For me it has been the opposite as in it has so little hysteresis. Just one day I watch something I do not usually watch, say cat videos, and for weeks I will get only cat videos as recommendations. I think their algorithm needs to be cognizant of and adapt to temporal shifts in a viewers interest. Some users may like change in focus at slightest of deviations, others may prefer more hysteresis.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#27[dead]
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#28This claims that YouTube recommendations are opaque, but often YouTube cites that viewers of a specific video like another. YouTube also tags content which might be extended to note related or contrasting content or to map how videos that share a tag relate.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#29A few months ago YouTube was flighting a feature I liked a lot. The homepage would group my interest into named categories "Cute dog videos", "Strangeloop", "Debussy", "PyData", "Algebraic Topology" and so on. I really liked that because I could choose which deep end to sink into. Not just that it would also serve as a reminder on what I had been interested in, but have become too distracted to remember.
They seem to have stopped this and now the recommendations featured on my homepage are all over the place.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#30A few months ago YouTube was flighting a feature I liked a lot. The homepage would group my interest into named categories "Cute dog videos", "Strangeloop", "Debussy", "PyData", "Algebraic Topology" and so on. I really liked that because I could choose which deep end to sink into. Not just that it would also serve as a reminder on what I had been interested in, but have become too distracted to remember. They seem to…
Same. It was refreshing to see options for computer science, electrical engineering, etc... instead of the usual stuff. Found a few new channels the day or so that feature was up.