71–80 of 179 posts
I use a ublock filter to block YouTube recommendations. I think they're unhealthy.
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…
I think part of it is them removing certain content from the recommendations. I would be happy with a chronological order of all videos from all my subscriptions. Perhaps with groups of subscriptions, so I can make a group of comedians, a group of nerds, a group of girls dancing, etc.
The real problem is that youtube is still so much better than everyone else at just playing videos. How has it been 10 years and there is still no real competition in the realm of usability. Even most paid services are not as good. I think a bunch of the streaming services should pool their resources and come up with a good open source player with libraries for all the major frontends and backends. Instead of all of them poorly reinventing the wheel over and over.
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> "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.
I'd take your point if they only recommended bass videos, but presumably it's just one recommendation in a list of many, with the point being to explore your preferences while also satisfying your demands
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…
There isn't any more "depth" to recommendations anymore. Right now it's the same recommendations over and over again. Lots of celebrity, corporate media, etc.
When youtube wanted to grow, their recommendation was so good. You could go down that rabbit hole forever really and actually discover content/creators. Now that they have a monopoly position, it's about limiting options and guiding you to established content.
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…
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?
Say you go on reddit/r/iloveredcars - all you will see upvoted (ie ... RECOMMENDED by users) will be red cars. You'll never see blue cars. You'll never know they even exist. All you've ever seen are red cars. Not only this but you'll notice that over time it's always the same red car pictures being reposted over and over again.
By inserting "wrong" results a small percentage of the time this ensures that users will be exposed a tiny bit to different content, that may be they end up liking, opening an entiere new tree of recommendation opportunities.
Now I'm sure some people don't want this and they do want to see the same red car pictures over and over, but personally, I appreciate that they do this.
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The fact that feature exists shows that even YouTube know their algorithm needs help.
Everyone lauds TikTok’s algorithm for some reason, but they have the same thing and it seems just as worthless there.
With enough time Tiktok will look as bad. I.e. I don't think it's algorithm related "for the most part"
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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.
If they were only recommending comedy from the same artist you may then have the same issue as another comment, which is that recommendations aren't novel enough. I'd take your point if they only recommended bass videos, but presumably it's just one recommendation in a list of many, with the point being to explore your preferences while also satisfying your demands
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Just because every now and then it shows something interesting or different doesn't mean that they aren't stale for the most part.
This misses my point entirely. I'm not commenting on whether youtube recommendations are stale or not. I'm pointing out that it's contradictory to complain both that the recommendations are too stale and that people discover offensive things.
Semi related: there's a browser plugin[1] available to "de-mainstream" Youtube. It removes from recommendations the well known channels of the big name media brands[2]. You can add more to the list. -- [1] https://demainstream.com/ [2] https://github.com/miscavage/De-Mainstream-YouTube-Extension...
That said I don't think it's what Mozilla and many commenters here are looking for, they're looking for banning content they disagree with (i.e. censorship).