Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
foundation.mozilla.org
Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
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Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#2They 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.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#3They 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.
Mozilla is quite clear about that. They consider Firefox as a political (yeah privacy is a political stance) product like another. A costly one.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#4Mozilla: Born 1998. Died 2022.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#5What'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 will be fed on your recommendation page for months.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#6They 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.
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.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#7What'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…
Yeah, it especially annoys me that it recommends videos I've already watched. Even if I say "don't recommend this" and give "I've already watched the video" as the reason, YT will still keep recommending videos I've watched.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#8Earlier 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.
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 recommendation bubbles and their shape & size can help quite a bit. It's a valid research.
It grates me that Mozilla seems to take very one-sided view on the politics of it, but hey, it's a start. Hopefully others will follow to counter-balance the Mozilla's slant.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#9Earlier 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.
Maybe because rationality could be exercised only if a person is given diverse high-quality information. Being tracked means being figured out, put in a Turing box, and utilized in accordance with someone else's agenda. This research seems to attempt observing how digital bubbles form and how they could be circumvented.
Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
#10What'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…
Systemic fixes are needed. In the meantime you can improve your own experience (and hopefully others a bit too). When you hover over a recommendation, there's a menu icon to the right side (three vertical dots, gray). Clicking it opens menu with option to indicate "Not interested" and "Report". The former is supposed to train your own instance of recommendation algo, the later does the usual reporting.
According to the current scuttlebutt lore, Youtube makes a concerted effort to steer users towards authoritative sources (typically the big media brands), especially on spicier subjects. This is in response to the recent slew of articles accusing Youtube of user radicalization.