Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Discovery on youtube is pretty poor, imo.

I suppose it's a lot better than FB (we decide what you see), and the navigation model (search & browse a database) is what I want. But overall, it's worse than most porn sites.

These things have feedback loops and 3rd order effects. If discovery worked differently, it's not just what people see that gets affected. Pretty soon, what gets created is affected as the market reacts.

This problem is kind of reminiscent of Google SEO/spam problems, but youtube seems a lot worse than search ever was. SEO-spam, clickbait & stuff that hovers just over the spam threshold.. these are pretty dominant.

"Monetization" was another example of market poorly handled. It just did not reward the kind of thing youtube should want to reward.

View on HN

Discovery was ruined on purpose. I will always rant about this. Youtube wants to control what you see, that has always been the case since Google took over. Right now it's nearly impossible to research something specific on youtube. You searches are automatically "corrected": I search terms in one language and get results in another, google tries to semanticaly interpret what I search (and typically wrongly, ie "temperature differential" --> car differntial videos because they're more popular and profitable). Results aren't complete (they probably create a short search table/cache every few hours based on a finite, semantically-defined number of categories), you can't properly filter by dates, views or any other criterion. Also the "related" videos are often non-related extremely effective clickbait, based on what they know you'll to binge on, even if you don't want to.

I hate youtube wholeheartedly and Google by extension. I don't know if I'm lucky or unlucky to be aware of the vast amounts of data they hide from public view.

Every day hundreds of people create new channels making interesting, thought-provoking and informative videos, and youtube decides to hide them in favour of clickbait garbage and shitty ads, and take away all means you have to discover them.

Indeed. As a person who routinely browse the web in 2+ languages it is infuriating how Google "corrects" you,it is worst in new devices I concede because with time you can adjust some search settings, but still. As much as I like machine learning (despite the hype) , I really fear for the future of the web where big company algorithms "curate" all content for you.

> Discovery was ruined on purpose.

Bingo. And it has gotten worse in recent months as they had to censor and cater to the mainstream media.

> Results aren't complete (they probably create a short search table/cache every few hours based on a finite, semantically-defined number of categories)

Also, heavily weighted towards paying customers and their own pet projects. Some days, youtube is just filled with SNL, late night show, movie trailers, logan paul, youtube drama, etc.

> Every day hundreds of people create new channels making interesting, thought-provoking and informative videos, and youtube decides to hide them in favour of clickbait garbage and shitty ads, and take away all means you have to discover them.

I remember just a few years ago, one of the fun things to do was go down youtube's rabbit hole. Now, youtube is just another managed and curated platform to funnel you to certain corporate interests.

Even when stephen hawking pass away, the only thing on youtube was CNN's video of it. What a marked difference from a few years ago when steve jobs passed away.

Sadly, youtube is just becoming a "tv platform" now. Which is a shame.

I got so frustrated with youtube discovery that I built my own search, although only for talks - https://www.findlectures.com/

Cheers. I love these replies on hn. Me: bitch, bitch, complain. You: here I fixed that. :)

There should be some kind of Cunningham's Law-variant for that phenomenon

This is brilliant, how did you do it, scraping or via an API? I'd love to do something similar for different subject areas.

A mix of scraping and APIs - e.g. http://confreaks.tv/ has a great API where you can get the whole dataset in a json file

Just to make sure I'm understanding you, you're using the API's here:

http://confreaks.tv/api/v1

....but as an example though, I can't find any speakers named Lomax in: http://confreaks.tv/api/v1/presenters.json

Or the Category designation, it doesn't exist in the API above but for a few videos I looked at I didn't see any comparable metadata on YouTube either....is some of it manually added in your curation, or are you doing something magical with "Portions of text Analysis by AlchemyAPI"?

I imagine you know about this already (haven't tried it but potentially useful): https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6084053?hl=en

That particular speaker came from the Library of Congress, which I wrote a scraper for.

The first level of categories come from either Youtube or the AlchemyAPI, depending on the talk. Levels 2+ are from AlchemyAPI or the scrape. The taxonomy they use is for advertising, and Youtube's categories match up with level 1 of that taxonomy. The taxonomy lacks detail for programming topics so I wrote a script to tag things that mention programming languages.

Great thank you.

If the code isn't confidential I'd love to take a look, but understand if it isn't.

Indeed. I've been waiting for discovery on youtube to get better, and waiting, and waiting.

I'm subscribed to a lot of channels (mostly sciency and maker stuff) and whenever I got to the "home" tab it's basically just everything from the channels I've already subscribed to, which isn't very helpful. There is some sort of deep laziness going on at youtube which extends across the entire platform. It's very frustrating to watch so many creators put up good content and then have the platform basically fumble handling those creators year after year.

Try the home tab in incognito. Talk show clips, movie promos & tabloid-esqu stuff.

I get that these things get a lot of view, but... have a little taste. It's like youtube doesn't have an opinion about what's good about youtube. Very Google-ey, but this hit a very obvious plateau.

IMO, Youtube just needs some opinions. Don't be so afraid to call something "good."

If you're looking to discover more videos / creators, I run https://channelsuurf.com. We curate under-viewed / under-subscribed channels from YouTube. If you have any favorites you want more people to see, definitely send them my way!

I agree, YouTube search is very poor, I don’t understand why Google video search is so much better. This is OK on iPad since it’s easy to open videos from a browser into the app, but this shortcoming is a real pain on Apple TV, which i use the most for watching video, relaxing in the evening bug screen and glass of red wine (or two).

Is it possible to even find small creators in a large category? For example I was looking up pubg videos the other day but it's just pages and pages of videos with 1m+ views. I was a bit curious to see what the lower-end creators were like but I wasn't able to figure out how.

Something like millionshort.com would be interesting

Reply on news.ycombinator.com