On YouTube’s recommendation system

I have experienced the same. I think the AI is basically told to feed more of the same content. No distinction is made between viewed, new, or related content.

That, and music videos.

Though it feels like both scenarios should be pretty easy to handle algorithmically.

YouTube is weird, it seems to be so incredibly different, depending on the user.

I get what you're saying about the reward system, but I normally run out of content I want to watch and recommendation engine isn't really suggesting anything interesting. That's after watching a few videos every other evening.

There's a few channels I subscribe to, and I do regular clean up, like twice a year, and remove the subscriptions I'm no longer interested in. YouTube mostly shows me the new videos from those channels an a few similar videos and then kinda gives up.

Two thing I would not recommend is using YouTube without a subscription and be sure to log in. The default videos on the front page are all terribly, and the ads are amazingly bad. In regards to the ads, I think that people in smaller markets are a problem for YouTube. They simply don't have enough ads so they can't actually target them in any meaningful sense.

"Think about how hard it would be to navigate all of the books in a massive library without the help of librarians."

According to the blog post, YouTube is just like a public library. Nevermind the absolute absurdity of comparing reading books belonging a large library to watching YouTube videos. Its strange because I never remember walking into a large library and being tracked every where I went and accosted by librarians trying to "recommend" books to me. I remember searching the catalog without any interference. I rememeber going to the stacks to retrieve books and then discovering other books nearby because the stacks were organised according to a public standard, not according to a secret algorithm. I remember checking out books so I could read them outside the library, wherever I want to read them, in private. (I download YouTube videos as opposed to using Google's Javascript "video player".)

This blog author wants readers to believe going to a library and finding books is "hard". I dont remember it that way. Not every patron who visits a library asks a librarian for assistance. YouTube doesnt give anyone a choice to be left alone. Theres a "librarian" looking over your shoulder the entire time. The amount of telemetry and tracking while using the website is totally unnecessary.

I have the same problem. We watched the videos about those 13 Thai kids that were stuck in a cave. Since then, YouTube has assumed that I'm into cave diving and mountclimbing, so my feed has filled up with videos of related topics. I've never cave dived, never will, and mountain climbing makes my palms sweaty.

But all of that pales in comparison to their Tik-Tok clone attempt of short videos. Talk about "chum"! They're clearly highly optimised to pull people in and get them hooked.

Luckily, I know digital drugs when I see them. I was one of those freaky people that could recognise the "hooks" in games like World of Warcraft and simply stop playing before the "endgame" mechanics sucked your life down the drain just so that Blizzard can get their recurring revenue.

Seems like this data driven optimisation for addicting people to low-quality content is the mental opiod epidemic of the current era...