201–210 of 337 posts
Can we get a button to stop recommending videos that have already been watched? On the front page out of 12 videos listed, I've already seen 7 of them and have no need to watch them again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28569079 > 2. If you have set your history to expire after some amount of time, it will start re-recommending videos you've already seen once it has forgotten you have watched them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you blindly follow some pratfalls or kittens video, you'll get served up junk. If you happen to be researching some specific topic (how-tos, explainers, academics, technical topics being among my favourites), you'll tend to find you're getting recommendations that follow from that initial topic.
I still treat recommendations quite warily, but at least the ones that come up in such sessions are somewhat better than standard fare.
(I never use YT whilst authenticated / logged in.)
> 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. This is a weird way to say "ideas that we suppress for being misinformation are sometimes actually true."
'sometimes true depending on who's watching, what their cultural background is, and whether or not the idea presented is proved with future research'.
If you say "people shower every day on average" then that might be true in hot sweaty climates more than in temperate ones where people might shower every other day instead, but that's not really what's meant with misinformation. So I'm not understanding how the things that one means when talking about misinformation -- e.g. that lemon juice cures cancer or that homeopathic medicine works better than placebo pills, those kinds of things is what we're talking about right? Isn't that universally false (or true, if something is not actually misinformation but only labeled as such because people don't like the facts)?
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.
Best decision I ever made was installing an extension to get rid of the recommendations (they're such crap - I wish they would actually try to recommend me things with a high likelihood of me enjoying rather than whatever propaganda youtube wants me to see).
Using uBlock Origin, right-click the part of the page you want removed, select the "remove element" option, confirm it's got the right bits selected, and nuke.
Using Stylus, you'll be opening up the element inspector and finding the relevant selectors. Fastest option is to apply a "display: none important!;" directive to that.
Stylus is by far the more powerful and flexible of the two, and you can do far more with it if you care to. uBlock should be sufficient though.
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.
So the system is relatively good starting from a clean slate for a short period of time when focused on a relatively narrow set of content. Other than that, I haven't found it to be very useful. Before doing this, I would rely on search and ignore most if not all of the recommendations that came my way.
"videos from reputable sources like Vox" - yeah, right... I wonder who that article is addressed to? At first it may seem they want to reassure viewers that they will get shown the best content. But the longer the article goes on, the more it sounds like a reassurance that they will absolutely block out unwanted political views. Why do they feel the need to put out such an article? To stave of government regulation?…
exactly, they are proud to tell you they block videos that are "problematic" from being recommended. But problematic to whom or what is not described. As this would surely reveal their bias in their algorithms. And also who our overlords are.
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 made a mistake of trying some jazz 5 years ago, now my feed cursed. 99% of suggested videos are not clicked yet youtube insist of showing same stuff for years.