Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 72 posts

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#41

Post by judge2020 »

patresh wrote: post #35

Relevant paper put up last week on Arxiv to be published at EMNLP 2019 : Auditing Radicalization Pathways on Youtube ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08313 ). Researchers of the University of Minas Gerais and EPFL audited Youtube's recommendation algorithm in the context of alt-right content and found that users consistently migrated from milder to more extreme content throughout recommendations.

Similar post from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17938181

YT's recommendation algorithm drives watch time and engagement, but based on the behavior of other users; so when the YT algorithm sees that driving to extremism pushes high engagement, while driving users to more mild content reduces engagement, the algorithm knows the best course of action for future users.

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#42

Post by ses1984 »

danShumway wrote: post #36

We don't need human-curated Youtube, we need to give more control to users. The annoying thing about Youtube is that many of the problems I have with their algorithm could very, very easily be solved if the designers gave up their relentless mantra of "never ask the user anything directly." I watch playlists and LetsPlays, and occasionally my homepage will just turn into a massive wall of recommendations from the sam…

Playlists can be semantically different things. They can be "top 50 songs of 2018" or they can be "history of WW2 parts 1-50". It might make sense to recommend more than one video fron the first kind of playlist, but not the second.

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#43

Post by sails »

I use the cosmetic filtering feature of Ublock Origin [1] to block everything except the video and related controls. I then only access youtube via the "subscriptions" page [2]. This effectively blocks the recommendations, autoplays, linked videos etc that make YouTube feel like such a cesspit.

[1] https://www.maketecheasier.com/ultimate-ublock-origin-superu... [2] https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#44

Post by wolco »

puranjay wrote: post #39

Am I the only one who always felt that the garbage videos is what really made YouTube so much more authentic and fun than TV? If I wanted sanitized, censored, controlled entertainment, I'd just watch TV

I agree the uniqueness is a big draw. Never sure what might show up.

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#45

Post by apricot13 »

I make a point to avoid watching recommended videos the exception being I tend to use youtube for researching products and recommended videos are actually helpful there.

My youtube process is to go straight to the subs page daily, add all the videos to a 'watch later' playlist* so whenever I go to youtube I always have a curated list of just for me content and I don't get sucked down the rabbit hole.

*not the watch later option because you cant change the order of those ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'd kill for a marker on the subs page that said 'last visited'!

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#46

Post by chapium »

thosakwe wrote: post #15

I don’t even buy the reasoning that the recommendations are somehow “personalized,” because they don’t seem to be... At all. I have never watched a political video on YouTube, or really anything unrelated to music or computer science, yet my “recommended videos” are always full of Ben Shapiro and his ilk. It’s easier to find relevant videos by doing a regular Google search, which is a little ironic.

You can generally avoid political talk shows by clicking the not interested button. They still bubble up, especially if you watch general interest videos that have primarily male audiences.

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#47

Post by danso »

dajon wrote: post #37
danso wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a tendency to rewatch videos over and over, or rather, replay them because they make for good not-too-distracting background noise (I do the same with “The Big Lebowski”). Nearly my entire recommendations feed is videos I’ve seen a dozen times or more, and because I often visit YouTube to just quickly find something for background noise, I’ll just click whatever’s near the top. And next time I visit YouTube...…

I suspect this is fundamentally the same as Amazon recommending things you've already bought. Even if the likelihood of rewatching/repurchasing is small, that probability must compare favourably to the chance that their algorithm will select a 'correct' unseen item to display. Recommendations are hard.

One of my cynical hypotheses is that, for videos that I'm rewatching for the nth time, the amount of energy/desire to interact is diminished (i.e. "vegging out"). Which is inversely proportional to the frequency that I'll click the "Skip Ad" buttons.

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#48

Post by fortran77 »

wastedhours wrote: post #24

Am I the only person who gets actually relevant recommended videos when logged in? I'd say 80% of the recommended videos are directly related to the interests I've shown with my viewing habits. I went through a period of watching at least an hour a day so perhaps that's it and they have some serious data behind me (and I never watch conspiracy, politics or prank videos for them to appear anywhere near them). Whenever…

I just checked. The "up next" column seems pretty relevant. I probably wouldn't watch the Area 51 video or the "what did we find when we searched pennies" but they weren't awful ideas

https://imgur.com/kG0uUDt

(And that Navier-Stokes video was very good!)

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#49

Post by crtasm »

ses1984 wrote: post #42
danShumway wrote: post #36

We don't need human-curated Youtube, we need to give more control to users. The annoying thing about Youtube is that many of the problems I have with their algorithm could very, very easily be solved if the designers gave up their relentless mantra of "never ask the user anything directly." I watch playlists and LetsPlays, and occasionally my homepage will just turn into a massive wall of recommendations from the sam…

Playlists can be semantically different things. They can be "top 50 songs of 2018" or they can be "history of WW2 parts 1-50". It might make sense to recommend more than one video fron the first kind of playlist, but not the second.

Perhaps allow the creator to tag playlists as a collection or a series, or get consensus from user votes.

Re: YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users

#50

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

ses1984 wrote: post #42
danShumway wrote: post #36

We don't need human-curated Youtube, we need to give more control to users. The annoying thing about Youtube is that many of the problems I have with their algorithm could very, very easily be solved if the designers gave up their relentless mantra of "never ask the user anything directly." I watch playlists and LetsPlays, and occasionally my homepage will just turn into a massive wall of recommendations from the sam…

Playlists can be semantically different things. They can be "top 50 songs of 2018" or they can be "history of WW2 parts 1-50". It might make sense to recommend more than one video fron the first kind of playlist, but not the second.

How does that invalidate the argument for giving control over this functionality to the user?
Post reply on HN