Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#91

Post by im3w1l » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:05 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #85

zobzu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This works pretty well (I use it) because it removes recommendations and search results (which are really recommendations) that are artificially inserted/ranked at the top every single time. 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).

> they're looking for banning content they disagree with (i.e. censorship). That's an extremely unfair read of the situation. The extension doesn't even ban anything. It is a research project attempting to understand why the YouTube algorithm recommends the videos it does. Whether or not you think Plandemic (a nonsense conspiracy theory video) should be banned or not you can still see research into the YouTube algori…

Literally the first sentence of the article is about dangerous recommendations. And the second is about harmful content.

This is not just an open-ended inquiry of what youtube is recommending. It's about finding the bad and getting rid of it.

EDIT: I also want to remind people about how Mozilla used its push notifications to call for a Facebook boycott over objectionable content.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#92

Post by nojito » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

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…

The recommendations are designed to be videos you will most likely click on...not necessarily match your current interests.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#93

Post by londons_explore » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #72

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…

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. 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…

The fact Google makes the browser and the OS for most users certainly puts them at an advantage.

Video is much much more complex than a .mp4 file on a server - the effort required to get the first frame from the server to the users screen as quickly as possible, and then not drop any frames after that, is pretty high to begin with, but it's even higher if you don't have control of the exact way the browser allocates CPU/GPU time for example...

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#94

Post by Bjartr » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #72

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…

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. 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…

> I would be happy with a chronological order of all videos from all my subscriptions.

Is this not the subscription view? I've never noticed a video from any channel I subscribe to that didn't show up there.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#95

Post by thrusong » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

YouTube recommendations suck so hard.

I'm subscribed to all this stuff but it never seems to give me similar content, it recommends all the videos I've already watched.

If I happen to watch something new, like a People's Court segment, then all I see is People's Court stuff.

There never seems to be balance.

Then there's the problem where a new video (like Gourmet Makes from BA) gets posted on a channel I like. I'll watch it with my partner on his machine, but then YouTube just chokes up, wondering why I never click on it, and then shoves it in my face ad nauseum.

Like, their search engine doesn't even seem to scratch the surface of content they're holding. It seems to be really stupid machine learning or AI.

Why can't it show me balanced recommendations from everything I watch or subscribe to, toss in some new things which are similar/popular, and maybe differentiate between content likely to be consumed multiple times (music videos) vs stuff people don't often watch a rerun of?

They seem to have so much data they could work with. They have amazing engineers and Google's expertise in algorithms.

Facebook even had problems with news feed being overrun with low quality content early on but seems to have figured it our fairly well- at least in my experience on the site (I know there are big echo chamber problems over there as well, don't get me wrong).

Even a lot of my non-techie friends seem to complain often about how terrible YouTube's recommendations are.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#96

Post by bleepblorp » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:18 PM UTC

klmadfejno wrote: post #22

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…

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?

The function of an adtech recommendation system is not to find content that you want to see but rather to show you content that's the most profitable for the adtech firm that's serving it.

The videos that YT recommends over and over again are probably videos that have a high ratio of advertising revenue (meaning good demographics) to playback cost (meaning low overall byte size) and a high likelihood of going viral by being shared off-platform (meaning broad appeal, non-controversial, short, safe for religious conservatives, safe for work, and easy to summarize within 280 characters).

The videos you want to watch don't meet these criteria, so Youtube won't find them for you.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#97

Post by robotnikman » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

thrusong wrote: post #95

YouTube recommendations suck so hard. I'm subscribed to all this stuff but it never seems to give me similar content, it recommends all the videos I've already watched. If I happen to watch something new, like a People's Court segment, then all I see is People's Court stuff. There never seems to be balance. Then there's the problem where a new video (like Gourmet Makes from BA) gets posted on a channel I like. I'll w…

I feels like YouTube's recommendations were better around 2010 to 2015. I think back then they recommended videos based on the tags a video had, seemed to work much better

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#98

Post by ColanR » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

darkhorse13 wrote: post #69

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.

Except for the memory leaks.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#99

Post by sprafa » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

remram wrote: post #89

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…

That's my experience as well. It will only recommend videos that I assume are popular globally, and old videos from channel I've watched in the past (including videos I've already watched), until I watch enough of something new and it suddenly switches to only recommending that. There's gotta be some middle ground... I don't understand how the recommendation algorithm seems so brittle, given that advertising is their…

The YT algo used to be crazy and recommend insane stuff and you could learn from it and do a deep dive, a lot like Wikipedia. Not anymore.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#100

Post by sigstoat » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

klmadfejno wrote: post #68

anjc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

> They could probably infer that if I'm watching comedy ... I don't want to watch some guy's channel about bassists that they've tried to get me to watch 100 times prior.

davie504 is basically a musically-themed comedy act, so this doesn't seem that unreasonable.