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Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

foundation.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#61

Post by rapnie »

stingraycharles wrote: post #23
52-6F-62 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the same experience. I use YT to listen to music pretty regularly and if I don't go and actively select a different song it will play the same 5-10 over and over. Even when I do select a song it will make its way back to those same 5-10 songs. There's a lot to discover on there so I still use it, but it's also pushing me back to my other services or libraries.

Not just that, but I get super annoyed that I exclusively listen to YouTube music on my desktop, and exclusively watch shows etc on my Apple TV. And for some reason YouTube cannot figure out that no, I don’t want to watch these music videos on my Apple TV, and no I don’t want to watch this documentary on my desktop. And yeah even within music videos, the recommendations seem really basic. Compared to Spotify, Google…

> Compared to Spotify, Google is looking like real amateurs when it comes to recommendations.

I agree about Google bad recommendations, but for me Spotify it at that same bad place too. It used to be way better, but now 80% of my daily recommended playlists are stuff that I have in my own music library, just shuffle played. It's absolutely terrible.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#62

Post by rayuela »

Couldn't care less about this. Just put out a paid version of Firefox that dedicates this revenue stream exclusively to continued Firefox development and I will happily pay fist fulls of money for it. Seriously, Firefox adds so much value to my life and I'd happily pay for it.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#63

Post by anjc »

I'm always mind-blown reading comment threads like this regarding recommendation, with people annoyed that explicit feedback helps recommenders, or exasperated that they're recommended one item that they haven't approved while also wanting novel recommendations.

1000s of hours of videos are uploaded every minute. 5+ billion videos are watched daily. Are you not rather quite pleased that YouTube can deliver highly relevant top-20 recommendations within milliseconds from such a large and changing corpus, while keeping track of your past preferences, your interactions, your social circle's preferences, popularity and trends, content features, etc?

It's pretty amazing to me. I think people expect recommender systems to read minds.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#64

Post by brudgers »

FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What'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…

[semi-speculation presented as if I actually know]

Youtube recommendations are best effort. That effort has a computational budget and a time limit. The fastest and least computationally intensive recommendation is to pull the last set of recommendations out of the on-device local cache.

The next fastest thing is to recommend whatever is cached near the edge of your internet connection whether it fits your previous viewing or not. It generally does not do this. Instead it recommends edge-cached material with cosign similarity to your preferences. However, there might not be much of that if your preference is for outlying content.

The slowest and most computationally intensive recommendation would be to compute a new tensor of your preferences and run cosign similarity across the entire vector space of Youtube. It doesn't do this for obvious reasons even though that's what we all want.

Of course, this ignores the issue of Google revenue. Advertisers targeted you, target you based on the videos you've watched. So there's that too. Google recommends videos for which it has relevant advertisers.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#66

Post by toomim »

s9w wrote: post #2

They just can't help their political activism. They're in deep shit with massive cuts to their technical operations. But they still do politics guns blazing.

Yep: this project is funded by donations, and donations tend to favor the politics of the donors.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#67

Post by grufkork »

brudgers wrote: post #64
FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What'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…

[semi-speculation presented as if I actually know] Youtube recommendations are best effort. That effort has a computational budget and a time limit. The fastest and least computationally intensive recommendation is to pull the last set of recommendations out of the on-device local cache. The next fastest thing is to recommend whatever is cached near the edge of your internet connection whether it fits your previous v…

With most sufficiently large companies it all boils down to making money (which usually is why they have been able to grow so large to begin with). It is a very fine line between making as much profit as possible from users and not exploiting them so much that they leave.

Google does not have that much interest in serving new, interesting videos over what earns the most clicks and therefore advertising. A lot of users might also be pretty fine with what is already served. Although I have seen more and more alternatives popping up, several with a monthly payment plan instead. While free content is nice, a paid plan incites different business practices than one where revenue is closely coupled with the number of clicks.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#68

Post by klmadfejno »

anjc wrote: post #59
klmadfejno wrote: post #22

Earlier 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?

> "use YouTube infrequently" > "binging random content" gets recommended random popular content > "why are recommendations so bad" They can't read your mind, you know

They could probably infer that if I'm watching comedy,and the last 5 videos were comedy by the same artist, I don't want to watch some guy's channel about bassists that they've tried to get me to watch 100 times prior.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#69

Post by darkhorse13 »

rayuela wrote: post #62

Couldn't care less about this. Just put out a paid version of Firefox that dedicates this revenue stream exclusively to continued Firefox development and I will happily pay fist fulls of money for it. Seriously, Firefox adds so much value to my life and I'd happily pay for it.

Same. Firefox is a great browser.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#70

Post by klmadfejno »

jack_pp wrote: post #38
klmadfejno wrote: post #22

Earlier 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

I do this, and it does work, but it doesn't seem to learn that I don't want to see generic youtube garbage.

I'd love for it to learn that anything with a shocked face thumbnail and CrAzY question for video name is not desired.

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