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On YouTube’s recommendation system

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Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#331

Post by Too »

dariusj18 wrote: post #12
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.

Yeah, I binged the lockpicking lawyer one day, now that's all it suggests.

That channel is cursed. I've reset my history with new incognito profile several times and regardless of what else i watch it always comes back. Seems like everybody else has seen them also. He must be lock-picking the algorithm by creating such big amount of videos and all within that 2-3min sweet spot of attention-grab.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#332

Post by andrepd »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #283
andrepd wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a more serious side, I searched for a 20s video of a funny gaffe by the President of my country, and immediately my feed was flooded by videos from the local right-populist party's fake news propaganda channel. It's that easy for an unwary person just out to watch a funny video to become exposed to a torrent of bullshit. Anecdotally (n=1, I know), I watch/listen to a lot of leftist lectures and speeches and my fee…

I know for a fact that a sizable portion (if not a majority) of far-right content gets heavily downranked (and in many cases filtered completely from) in the algorithm as "low quality content". The problem is that the right is much better at producing flashy, low-attention/low-commitment content - the kinds of things that excel in the metrics the algorithm would naively optimize for. Case in point, the lectures you w…

Hmm, that makes sense. I actually watch plenty of non-leftist lectures and speeches too (keeping my mind open, you know), and neither those start flooding my feed x) I guess the problem lies in the metrics the algorithm is optimising for.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#333

Post by beckman466 »

jackson1442 wrote: post #266
beckman466 wrote: post #126

This is all horseshit. YouTube should be a utility, democratically owned and governed. When are we going to stop pretending this profit-seeking ad platform isn’t dangerous, and start hosting videos according to other metrics than ‘monetizability’ instead.

I think you're about ten steps ahead of where we are now - remember that _the Internet_ is not considered a utility, at least not in the US. How could we consider a capitalistically created internet property a utility when not even our publicly-funded Internet infrastructure is considered a utility?

> I think you're about ten steps ahead of where we are now

Nah I am a socialist and believe these things should have been democratically owned and controlled from the start. Where you think or hope the steps you mentioned might lead to sounds to me a lot like technological determinism: i.e. 'trickle down innovation' [1], and that's not where I would want us to go. In other words: we're behind, not ahead.

[1] https://venturecommune.substack.com/p/go-where-workers-are-a... (section 'Against technological determinism')

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#334

Post by CincinnatiMan »

jackson1442 wrote: post #264
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…

This is where DuckDuckGo shines. I never go to the YouTube homepage since I just search `thing i'm looking for!yt` and it takes me straight to the search results for "thing i'm looking for." Granted, I've never watched much YouTube, but that curbs it even more.

Similarly, most browser will let you set up a custom search such that you wouldn't even need to go to DuckDuckGo. For example I have "yt" as the alias that searches YouTube. Basically it takes the phrase you enter and puts it into the search query parameter of YouTube.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#335

Post by deanCommie »

zo1 wrote: post #312
deanCommie wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider "independent news"? The majority of "independent news" have a highly partisan or highly unreliable tilt (both to the Left and to the Right): https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/ Interestingly enough, most people complain about the opposite: that if you watch some piece of slightly tilted piece of content on YouTube, the recommendation goes wholehog and pushes you towards the same radicalization…

"Moderate" you with some mainstream content? Honestly that sounds like a euphemism for programming or brain washing.

Is de-radicalization itself a form of radicalization?

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#336

Post by isk517 »

strombofulous wrote: post #237
isk517 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose things aren't as expensive if you are a casual but I'm still surprised you can get 1k out of a pair of shoes. My mother also runs and is significantly lighter than myself and she gets shin splints if she doesn't change runners out at 500 miles. My current system is to run a pair of shoes for about 350 - 450 miles then downgrade them to a pair of walking shoes in till they fall apart. I started running fairl…

How do you like the conductive headphones for that purpose? I have been considering doing the same for when I go on walks at night.

I like them but for me the biggest advantage is they don't funnel sweat into my ears, at night when I walk I still prefer my regular earbud headphones. The sound quality with bone conductive noticeably worse, and sadly they stopped making the cheaper wired version that I started with so then getting a pair to try out is expensive now.

Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system

#337

Post by jeffwask »

stevofolife wrote: post #147
jeffwask wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad because I remember being able to find new and interesting creators passively. Now the main page is all corporate BS and the algorithm locks you in. We played a bit of WOW Classic last year and all of a sudden I was just flooded with Asmongold videos and videos of people clipping and replaying Asmongold. It took a day of "never show this again" to make it stop.

You started playing WoW Classic and it was able to recommend WoW-related videos. It did its job. What else do you expect from a recommendation system? Predict what you're interested next or what you're going to do tomorrow? That's not recommendation, that's mass surveillance and psychological manipulation. But on a useful note, maybe YouTube needs to provide a function to see a list of random videos that are unexplor…

It's a matter of degrees...

Imagine if I went to church for the first time in a decade and the next day three monks show up at my door with a cassock and vows.

...that's the YouTube algorithm in my experience. I show a passing interest in one thing so it floods me with every drop of content they have on the subject to the exclusion of things that I have watched every week for years.

There are creators I watch every week or every drop. Somehow the algorithm chooses to not surface their videos regularly and surface 46,123 videos on Terraform because I watched a quick tutorial.

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