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Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

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Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#281

Post by jlebar »

maxxxxx wrote: post #162
mindcrime wrote: post #145

My biggest problem with YT recommendations is that they dramatically overweight recent videos when generating the recommendations. I mean, I can spend a week doing nothing but watching (well, listening) to videos of classical music performances, and my recommendations will be full of classical music, exactly as you'd expect. Then I watch one random one-off thing, like "15 funny pitbull fails" and suddenly ALL of my r…

All the AI stuff is really still incredibly dumb. Same for Amazon: Buy a mixer and suddenly you will be haunted everywhere by ads offering more mixers.

All the AI stuff is really still incredibly dumb. Same for Amazon: Buy a mixer and suddenly you will be haunted everywhere by ads offering more mixers

Do we know it's actually dumb?

Like, given that you just bought a mixer, perhaps in an absolute sense, you're unlikely to buy a second mixer. But relative to everything else that you might buy, perhaps you are very likely to buy a second mixer!

There are huge financial incentives to get these ads right. I'm more inclined to guess that Amazon is doing something right than that they're leaving money on the table.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#282

Post by jstanley »

scrollaway wrote: post #249
propogandist wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube has made significant efforts to not show ads on content that is deemed unsafe, so those videos generally aren't making any money. You seem to be against people putting out content that don't align with your views, which is something completely different.

> You seem to be against people putting out content that don't align with your views Not GP, but I see this a lot as a retort to people who make the claims they did and I tend to call BS on it. I strongly suspect there is an extremely broad library of "content that doesn't align with their views", including an extremely broad spectrum of political views, they would have zero issues with on YouTube. Somehow, climate d…

> why the hell is it that, whenever I see someone defending such content, it's almost always someone who belongs in the category of people who believe in said content

Since nobody here has given any indication that they believe in these ideas, it's probably because you simply assume that anyone defending it believes in it.

Possibly also because the concept of not wanting to take down objectionable videos is a "weird" idea, and people who are willing to take weird ideas seriously probably have lots of other weird ideas.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#283

Post by simula67 »

> To that end, we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.

Instead, why not just include videos that thoroughly debunks these ideas in the recommendation section of these videos ?

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#284

Post by curiousgal »

simula67 wrote: post #283

> To that end, we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11. Instead, why not just include videos that thoroughly debunks these ideas in the recommendation section of these videos ?

I am only 24 years old and hearing 9/11 being referred to as a historic event makes me feel old.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#285

Post by natch »

My YouTube suggestions list is filled with videos I just watched in the last few weeks or months. Along with the some new videos, but remarkably many already watched ones. They are not labeled as such.

I suspect I blocked some cookie or changed some setting they didn't want me to change, and this behavior is deliberately calculated to be punitive. It's not very user friendly.

Or, the YouTube developers are just not very smart. Either way, it doesn't look good for them. This would be so easy to fix. If they don't know how, they are welcome to reach out to me and I can give them some ideas.

Yes it did occur to me that some users might like this. But they way they have it set up is very confusing and suboptimal for my needs as a user. I will admit though it may be serving some business need that they have, like saving their bandwidth by re-serving me old videos from my cache.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#286

Post by TeMPOraL »

rasz wrote: post #213
TeMPOraL wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the US; unfortunately, I don't think Poland has a dedicated government channel for kids. Still, I want to make it video-on-demand, but with content fully curated by us - to avoid age-inappropriate content, ads and recommendations. There's no way I'm going to let my kid touch raw YouTube in the next decade.

We do, tv-trwam.pl

Hahaha, no.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#287

Post by 0az »

LeftTurnSignal wrote: post #200
TeMPOraL wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangent: I'm expecting a kid, and time will come in couple years, when I'll want to show them kid videos. I fully intend to set this up as streaming from a library curated by my wife & me, populated with youtube-dl and through other means. I know some people on HN have such setups; could you share recommendations for hardware and software stack? I suspect a Raspberry Pi may not be enough (having network and USB shari…

I don't have much to add, other than I have had some good results with using the application "4k video downloader" to grab playlists on youtube. I'm not a fan of the generic name, but it does what it sets out to do and is fairly cheap. I'm sure everything can be done with youtube-dl, but I don't have a ton of experience with that. I am able to get most of the videos downloaded and converted using that application. So…

Using ytdl is easy: `youtube-dl $url` grabs the video at the highest quality. Playlists can be downloaded this way too.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#288

Post by ddebernardy »

jlebar wrote: post #281
maxxxxx wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the AI stuff is really still incredibly dumb. Same for Amazon: Buy a mixer and suddenly you will be haunted everywhere by ads offering more mixers.

All the AI stuff is really still incredibly dumb. Same for Amazon: Buy a mixer and suddenly you will be haunted everywhere by ads offering more mixers Do we know it's actually dumb? Like, given that you just bought a mixer, perhaps in an absolute sense, you're unlikely to buy a second mixer. But relative to everything else that you might buy , perhaps you are very likely to buy a second mixer! There are huge financia…

Just spitballing here, but if you just bought a mixer, your odds of buying another mixer is lower than that of buying a cook book or some other related stuff -- which Amazon could totally figure out mining the other stuff people bought at the same time or shortly after a mixer.

Re: Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

#289

Post by paulddraper »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #273
paulddraper wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that's dumb, but I bet the marketing data behind that says otherwise. You think "I already have a mixer, idiot!" but in reality the chance that you are interested in buying a mixer just went from 1% to 2%. (Because you want another one, because you want to gift one, because you returned yours, etc.)

This has been discussed on HN before. The last time I saw an Amazon employee weigh in, he said the ads are in fact not effective but the ad team isn't measuring it well. In particular, he claimed that he showed them that after adjusting for returns , the order-again rate for a particular expensive item was effectively zero, they asked him to repeat his study for another product, and he wandered off and found work to…

My skepticism level remains high. This is billions of dollars, with easy access to tons of data.

I'm not sure if put more stock in the government successfully hiding a fake moon landing, or analysts in one of history's most successful companies not running the numbers.

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