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Veritasium recently made a video [1] talking about how the site today seems to favor quantity over quality. Many of the people in the comments there think YouTube's recommendations are to blame saying they're often not relevant. What have been your experiences?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03dTJ4nXkXw

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Yeah, the recommendations on YouTube are horrible. Google is a very hard company to understand sometimes. They're attempting to make self-driving cars with AI, yet they can't recommend relevant videos.

The recommendations make a lot more sense if you assume that they don't especially care about content-driven relevance and instead just care about maximizing the expected value of how many people watch another video (all hail "engagement").

A self driving car seems easier in some ways. Just make it not crash.

Recommendations for millions of people and millions of videos on the other hand. Liking a video is subjective, for some channels I don't like half their content yet I am a regular viewer of some of their series.

Personally I am quite happy with their recommendations, even if I don't watch half of it.

Maybe easier in some senses, but cars are life and death. If 1 out of 10 of your recommendations are bad, no big deal. If the car misclassifies obstacles in the road at even 1/100th that rate, not acceptable.

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