Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. This is the Mozilla Foundation not Mozilla Corp.
I don't know why people pretend like the distinction matters.
Because they want to pretend that Mozilla aren’t throwing money down the drain.
Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
41–50 of 179 posts
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. This is the Mozilla Foundation not Mozilla Corp.
I don't know why people pretend like the distinction matters.
In terms of where money goes, it does. Mozilla Corp both makes and spends vast sums of money (browsers are fantastically expensive).
Mozilla Foundation, in contrast, makes and spends relatively little compared to that. Seriously how much do you think this crowd-sourced project is costing the Foundation?
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#43What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…
> (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust).
This applies to YouTube music as well. I find this incredibly annoying.
Know what's even worse? Searching for something, then liking that song. On my end, that generates an incessant stream of titles from the same artist that no amount of downvotes can stop.
YM sees the pattern +--------------------- and yet continues to predict +.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#44Seems silly Why not just build a better (user-configurable) recommendations engine?
Mainly, because most people won't be exposed to it. They will be exposed to the Youtube's one and the effects over the majority are those that matter for the goals of the study.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#45YouTube recommendations, for me, are the greatest music discovery resource. I've found more new artists through YouTube's algorithm than Spotify, Pandora or Amazon Prime Music.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use YouTube infrequently. Usually for binging random content like comedy sketches or speedrunning. No matter what I'm on, there's always a few videos in my recommendations that make no sense and look like trash. Not generically, but specific videos that ALWAYS appear. One of them is "I PAID FIVE BASSISTS ON FIVR TO PLAY AN IMPOSSIBLE BASSLINE" ... Why is this so bad? What are your hundreds of data scientists doing?
They stop appearing if you specifically mark them as not interested
Every so often I do that. I spend five minutes selecting channels I'm not interested in, because I watched a gamedev video once and now I'm being suggested hundreds of gamedev videos, or whatever. Pretty soon, it's like the algorithm just... gives up and starts suggesting me generic videos about celebrities and other vapid things that I'd never click on in a million years.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does privacy have anything to do with conspiracy theories and “disinformation”. Privacy should in fact be about respecting the individual and choices, and believing in people being intelligent enough (as groups) to make good choices. Basically the opposite of this pro censorship Mozilla stance.
Recommendation bubbles are partly privacy matter -- without the ability to track users, there would be no recommendation bubbles. It may sound like a far-fetched possibility -- how to maintain privacy of logged in users? But I figure it is doable from technical standpoint; the key question would be how to transform the financial part of the operation to keep Youtube afloat. At this point, even the awareness of recomm…
You can recommend just based on content. I hardly ever open the youtube homepage. And often open links in incognito mode. Still get to see all these recommendations next to a video.
I don't see how you could not have a "recommendation bubble" as long as you have recommendations. Even if they were to be 100% manual it's still a bubble of some kind.
Not only that, you effectively have these bubbles outside the internet too. A book will recommend further reading, friends will recommend certain things and so forth. There's no escaping it.
When I go to the YouTube homepage these recommendations are absolute junk. Links friends send me are much more relevant and influential.
IMO the most charitable reading of this initiative is that they believe the algorithm is somehow biased towards exposing and warming people to harmful content in an unobvious way.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mozilla is quite clear about that. They consider Firefox as a political (yeah privacy is a political stance) product like another. A costly one.
Why does privacy have anything to do with conspiracy theories and “disinformation”. Privacy should in fact be about respecting the individual and choices, and believing in people being intelligent enough (as groups) to make good choices. Basically the opposite of this pro censorship Mozilla stance.
Censorship? It seems to me that they want to use the data for research.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#49Mozilla: Born 1998. Died 2022.
Oh no it will survive. Yahoo-ificating itself in the process.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#50What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…
Same thing for my 'google news' app on my phone. If I ever (god forbid) google a persons name, I get stories about that person for months. I also get the same results (mixed into new results) for days and sometimes a week at a time. Are they really that bad at recommendation that they can't find another option that ranks higher in my "interest" score?