I really think we're entering a crisis here where sites and apps that are engineered to maximize corporate metrics are leading people down horrible paths of addiction, and psychic stress as they spend their mental energy resisting temptations constantly thrown at them.
However, they do charge money per month for YouTube Red which removes ads, and a better recommendation system for Red subscribers might encourage people to buy it.
I've made plenty of "remove ads" in-app purchases on my phone. This isn't too different. And it might actually result in a truly useful experience.
I would be very very willing to pay for Facebook to simply not be tracked, especially at such a reasonable price. I know that won't happen, but I'd really love such a thing.
On Netflix, for example, I get recommended stuff that's similar to other things I didn't like.
Amazon is often the best of them for books because their engine seems to only really value the last few things I looked at / bought and so just recommends really similar stuff. Of course, that fails hard whenever I look at something I'm not interested in for whatever reason.
On Steam I wish they had some elaborate filtering system, there are so many games, I need something like NOT(Adventure+Puzzle) BOOST(RPG), I need to combine tags, not just filter them out by themselves.
I miss the days of "tap tap scroll four clicks" on the iPod to help me rate new music, specifically.
Excerpt from https://www.appcues.com/blog/rating-system-ux-star-thumbs/
"In addition to the new rating system, Netflix has new match percentages (up to 100%) to more accurately predict how much users will like something.
...
The new rating system received 200% more ratings in A/B tests, according to Netflix VP of Product Todd Yellin.
When it comes to rating movies and shows, stars reflect the preferences that people want to have, rather than how people actually behave. Todd gave the example of users giving 5 stars to a documentary but just 3 stars to an Adam Sandler movie that they watched over and over again. “What you do versus what you say you like are different things,” said Todd."
There's a reasonable objection to this behavioral definition of "like", which is that it doesn't actually make people's lives better, it just fills them with more compulsive behavior. It's not necessarily "irrational" to wish you were more patient, or to want to ask Netflix to show you useful things rather than useless fluff. That you occasionally betray your stated goals does not mean you should be denied the right of self-definition.
In other words, what people say they like is more important, to me at least. See eg "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahneman.
Their users are surely not confused about that. So why does Netflix want to present a prediction as a rating? Is it to flatter their users by telling them that the thing that feels instantly gratifying right now is actually an amazing movie? "Hey, great choice. Billy Madison is a five-star movie. What? Why would you feel bad about not watching Raging Bull instead? It's a two-and-a-half star movie at best."
In other words, Netflix, like Facebook, like Doritos, is engineering itself for maximum addictiveness without regard for honesty. It will shelter you from even what you know and reassure you that whatever triggers a pleasure response in your brain is the best. Relax and enjoy it.
The truth is that we consume easy things a lot more often than we challenging things. It would be exhausting otherwise. But the best things are often the most challenging. We know that, we know that easy movies are just a way to kill time, but Netflix wants to do us the service of helping us forget it, because then we might be 1% more at ease when we watch Netflix and 1% less likely to switch to another service.
Whether the buttons do anything, I have no idea
Their % match numbers are fairly accurate, but I have had to go into the watch history and delete the occasional movie watched and finished that we actually hated. No number of 1-stars (or thumbs downs) would eradicate its effects on the recommendations.
5 - Absolutely loved it, will buy a disc
4 - Good, but won't buy a disc
3 - Movie was okay
2 - Not a good movie
1 - Stopped watching 20 minutes into it
Asking people "which of these 3 things you like best" vs. "rate these 3 things 1-5" will usually give you much more useful data, plus be easier for respondents.
A person is smart. People in general are dumb.
"Oh, you bought a wallet? Here are twenty wallets of the exact same type but with slightly different colors that you might want to buy, too"
One per floor per house, of course. You don't want to have to carry them up and down stairs.
All houses should have one floor. Why use stairs or elevators when you can just buy more land?
There was however one moment where Amazon got it right: they recommended to me a book that only a week earlier I had purchased on a whim from an independent bookstore with cash. Creepy good.
That is creepy. Any way it might've been more than just a coincidence?
Though that was Google.
That's probably not exact and I don't remember where in my social feeds it came from, but I loved this.
Your indifference is subsumed in the sheer size of others' consumption.
I mean I'm not accessorizing with the latest seasonal fashions, but there are utility reasons to change the kind of wallet you're carrying for different purposes.
A while ago I took an Ayurveda class (Indian medicine) and part of it was doing an oil enema. There are devices for this that are also used by a certain population for sexual pleasures. Bought one on Amazon and for months I couldn't show my Amazon page to other people because it was filled with sex toys....
The problem with those recommendation engines is that they're not optimized to serve your needs. They're optimized to serve the goals of their respective companies. And the problem comes when your needs are a little incompatible with the needs of the company.
Consider Netflix for example. Their recommendations don't seem to care much about what you actually enjoy the most. They pay different amounts of money to let you watch different content. So your goal of watching the thing you would enjoy the most is different from whatever the hell their goals are-- probably to get you to watch just enough Netflix to make you not want to cancel your subscription, but not run up their bills on bandwidth and licensing fees.
I'm absolutely confident Netflix could make amazing recommendations-- and probably already has them internally. But it's not in their best interest to give recommendations that are in your best interest.
To the extent that I'm right about this it could be a market opportunity to make an honest and useful recommendation service.
Ultimate they are compatible though. And yes I mean in the econ 101 way. This tension should be at least partially resolved via pricing scheme innovation.
Regardless of how good the recommendation engine might be, it's still always subject to human perception. That can be unpredictable and fickle, on a good day :)
It's a classic race-to-the-bottom. If YouTube lets Facebook keep you addicted, you won't get to the long-term.
http://timewellspent.io/ is good for perspective
Personally, I find YouTube terrible at keeping me engaged. Even when I want to keep watching videos, their sidebar fails to show me anything I want to click on at least 1/3 of the times.
This is too fine a point. A user will "select" a default choice by doing nothing, and it's in YT's interests to provide default choices that reward the company. This has been researched for decades and is supported by, among other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias
But why? If I've watched hundreds of Zeni Geva videos over the years, but it's my fifth Tool video, why would I be more likely to click on a ad on a Korn video?
Of course it's possible they have, and realised they still make more money by focusing on the more recent videos.
In other words it doesn't consider you as someone with a long history. You can change your profile from a conservative to a liberal in a few hours watching videos. Whether it's possible to have a balanced amount of crazy ( not the same as a centrist) is something I'm currently working on, it requires effort!
This only works because YouTube stays focused on what you're doing without trying to build a bigger picture of who you are. It would be nice if it could somehow do both, but I don't have a clear picture of how that UI would function.
Noticed the same thing happening for the past year or two.
I used to be able to go on YouTube and find a variety of interesting videos I'd never seen before. It seemed like there was a good balance of categories in the recommendations.
Now, I watch one boating video and suddenly my recommendations are 100% boat related with some random clickbait/viral garbage sprinkled in for good measure.
https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
Once a video is removed from your history, you'll no longer get recommendations based on it.
If you aren't logged in, you can't view or edit your viewing history, but you can at least clear it. (Which will return you to YouTube's terrible default viewer profile... sigh)
For example, let's say they have a user who watches 100 videos a week, for ease of math. 50 of those videos are in "core" areas of interest - these do not change over time. An additional 35 are in areas of secondary interest: topics which have piqued the viewer's curiosity, but not deeply interested them. We can expect these topics to change every [1,4] weeks. The remaining 15 are referrals or clickbait from other websites.
How can YouTube differentiate between these three classes of videos? The first class will be heavily represented in their subscriptions. Presumably, the viewer will prefer their recommendations to ignore the third class (clickbait). The second class is the hardest, as the user may want these videos surfaced, but then want them to decay over time as their interests change.
I think this is the problem that they are attempting to solve, with varying degrees of success.
For example, I get emails from Pocket "You saved a popular article..." And I think "Who cares?" Don't tell me what I know, tell me what I missed. YT is similar. It recommends things I've watched. I'm looking for new and interesting and I'm getting yesterday's news? That doesn't excite me.
But because the playlists are dynamic, YouTube keeps on shoving songs from other playlists (and genres) into each other, trying to generate a "perfect playlist" and in the process making all the playlists sound very similar with no more genre distinctions except for the first couple of songs.
This seems like a good algorithm to me, as when i'm watching skateboard videos with my friends, I don't want "how to caulk tile joints" to show up
But for me it is just silly.
As an example: I watched a few episodes of Penn and Teller: Fool Us yesterday. I hadn't really watched it before, and while I like Penn and Teller in general, I don't remember watching them all that much on YouTube prior to yesterday (I'm sure at some point I had watched a video or two, but not more so than anything else I stumbled on.)
Today, 12 of the top 30 videos on my YouTube home page are specifically Penn and Teller: Fool Us. Not magic in general, not Penn and Teller in general, but specifically that show. That seems like the very recent past is way overrepresented.
So e.g. if I go and view Russian dashcam videos they're going to automatically play more of them, even though I've shown no prior interest in that topic.
Having two systems for recommendations would introduce a lot of UI complexity, so I can see why they didn't go for that, and why the recommendations are consequently tuned for people who are actively watching videos on some topic right now.
For example, Russian dash cams to Russia at night to the Russian sleep experiment creepypasta, to horror games to video games in general, if that is what the user tends to watch.
I know this has graph theory written all over it and the shortest-distance problem has wreaked havoc for centuries, but I think with enough resources Google/YouTube could find a good compromise in this situation.
Do you mean, in terms of implementation or for the user? Because as the later, I think the two are already conceptually different (homepage vs next video), so I don't see how just feeding it different videos would make it more complex.
So let's say I'm interested in exactly two things. Russian dash cam videos and videos of trains without narration.
I go to the homepage and click on one type of video, what should the next video be? A random video from the two categories? One or the other? Should it show me a banner at the top indicating what recommendation mode I'm in (historical preference or "similar to current video").
Now I go and do the same on my Android YouTube app which has no real UI equivalent of a homepage, what happens then?
This is a lot of UX complexity for a feature few probably care about.
By the way, the Android app does absolutely have an UI equivalent of a homepage, it's even called "Home".
Making your app behave differently because you navigated to the current state via different menus is very bad UX design. That's all I'm saying. Your suggestion would entail either UX complexity or such implicitly different behavior for YouTube.
Yes Android has a "Home" button. But what I meant by no real UX equivalent is that when you open youtube on the web you'll open a new tab and go to youtube.com.
When you do so an Android you've likely just dismissed the app in the past, and opening it again will bring you back to the last video you were viewing. You don't go through the homepage by default.
Thus it's more of just another menu item on Android, not something that's equivalent to / on a website.