On YouTube’s recommendation system
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On YouTube’s recommendation system
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Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system
#2> 3. Do recommendations drive viewers to increasingly extreme content?
> As I’ve explained, we actively demote low-quality information in recommendations. But we also take the additional step of showing viewers authoritative videos about topics that may interest them. Say I watch a video about the COVID-19 vaccine. In my Up Next panel, I’ll see videos from reputable sources like Vox and Bloomberg Quicktake and won’t see videos that contain misleading information about vaccines (to the extent that our system can detect them).
What is Google/YouTube's full list of "reputable sources". Is it even reasonable to maintain such a list given how often sources treated as authoritative can be wrong? Doesn't this amount to artificially converging users' information exposure towards either the reigning authority or towards whatever Google/YouTube favor?
Generalizing my concerns further, I am not comfortable with having a narrow set of monopolistic tech giants serve as king maker in our information landscape. Perhaps what we need first and foremost is a renewed set of anti-trust laws to break up companies with giant market caps and to address the reduced competition faced by widely used platforms built on network effects.
Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system
#3Oh cool. Their algorithm is why I’m now a big fan of Beluga.
Thanks Algorithm™
Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system
#4>Recommendations drive a significant amount of the overall viewership on YouTube, even more than channel subscriptions or search.
Chicken/egg. Above is true is because they flood the sidebar with algorithmic recos instead of your subscriptions, and have tuned their notifications to not give you as many, even if you are subscribed and even if you click the notification bell.
Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system
#5For me, it seems like youtube's recommendation system mostly gets stuck in the local optimum. Once you watch a video from a particular channel, it'll keep on recommending the videos from the same channel for months. Soon, the recommendation just consists of stuff from the channels that have you already viewed. You rarely see new types of recommendations.
Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system
#6Can we get a button to stop recommending videos that have already been watched? On the front page out of 12 videos listed, I've already seen 7 of them and have no need to watch them again.
Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system
#7This article started out talking about what good signals are to drive a recommendation algo, but it ended up concluding with all the different ways YouTube goes against those signals to censor videos or otherwise manually tune your feed instead.
The meaning of "recommendation" seems to have shifted from "what we think you want" to "what we want for you."
It's not a wrong use of the word, just different from what you might expect.
Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system
#8For me, it seems like youtube's recommendation system mostly gets stuck in the local optimum. Once you watch a video from a particular channel, it'll keep on recommending the videos from the same channel for months. Soon, the recommendation just consists of stuff from the channels that have you already viewed. You rarely see new types of recommendations.
That mirrors my experience, too.
In fact, I rarely find YouTube's recommendations to be useful. Occasionally, yes, but typically I just get that "more of the same" problem.
However, that may be explained by how I use YouTube. The article is pretty vague and hand-wavy about how the recommendations really work, but it's possible that the fact that I don't drive my YouTube viewing from the recommended videos list makes the video recommendations worse for me.
Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system
#9For me, it seems like youtube's recommendation system mostly gets stuck in the local optimum. Once you watch a video from a particular channel, it'll keep on recommending the videos from the same channel for months. Soon, the recommendation just consists of stuff from the channels that have you already viewed. You rarely see new types of recommendations.
I made a mistake of trying some jazz 5 years ago, now my feed cursed. 99% of suggested videos are not clicked yet youtube insist of showing same stuff for years.
Re: On YouTube’s recommendation system
#10For me, it seems like youtube's recommendation system mostly gets stuck in the local optimum. Once you watch a video from a particular channel, it'll keep on recommending the videos from the same channel for months. Soon, the recommendation just consists of stuff from the channels that have you already viewed. You rarely see new types of recommendations.
I've noticed this too. Occasionally I'll look up a how-to/DIY thing, watch one video for it, and then all my recommendations (even the ones on the front page) revolve around that topic. But it's not like I have a consistent interest in it, it was a one-off.