YouTube is littered with mass-produced videos made by automated bots
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
All that shows up when I try to “explore” is what could be called tabloid amateur videos, top 5-10 lists and a bunch of other shit that will quite literally waste your life as it makes you dumber.
Maybe it’s my own fault for having watched the Churchill vs Roosevelt epic rap battle too many times, but nothing YouTube suggests is anywhere close to something that I won’t shut off after 5 seconds.
I mean, it’s so bad I actually spent time to turn off auto play on every device I access YouTube on.
There's also a ton of bot-generated podcast spam on YouTube where bots will pull podcasts from feeds and then dress them up with cheesy video content.
I find YT's recommendations a bit myopic (too focused on what I've watched in the past few days), but I literally don't have any clickbait or other crap videos, it's actually pretty OK.
I've used it hundreds of times, but since "clickbait bullshit" isn't an option, there are 3 and they're pretty dumb it probably won't learn any time soon. It sometimes comes pretty close to driving me away from the service.
I do get slightly annoyed at the repetition of adds I don't really need to see the same Barclays bank add 5 times when watching critical role.
A cute funny gorilla is funny the first time after the 100th time not so much - now if you had an actual good ISA rate I might engage as my current cash isa form Santander is a bit crap.
If I watch an abnormal video linked from a friend or something, that does tend to drastically alter what it recommends.
"Oh you watched a weird cartoon edit dubbed with an old song? Here, we have thousands of those to recommend!"
Honestly, I'm just glad it has mostly stopped only recommending videos I've recently watched. That's worse than a bad recommendation.
For example I only read HN and tech related sites. I have no idea what's going on in the world outside the world of tech :).
Lately I've been trying to read the printed version of the economist in PDF form, it surprised me that it didn't feel like reading a news site. Everything was structured, well written etc. I can recommend following periodical publications for news, rather than only looking at feeds and visiting sites.
For instance, on Instagram I followed one middle eastern celebrity and my Explore tab became filled with pregnant ladies’ bellies and babies.
But the bubble is not what I want.
> The messages that are pushed to us probably does not paint the whole picture -hence we like it-.
This is why I don't. I hate it. I talked to a Microsoft guy who wanted to sell me on the great future of AI recommendations a few years back. His argument was that when the AI know I like to discover things it'll recommend me new stuff. That hasn't happened to far. I only start getting recommendations for things I have searched for, usually. Sometimes, rarely, I get some new stuff that I'm incredibly happy about.
But what they can do apparently is recommend me favorite topics of somebody I spend physical time with (the creepy "oh we just talked about this yesterday" moments).
YouTube is just a service that is out to make money out of bored and media-addicted people. It isn’t a public service that is being exploited.
I don't know. When ideas like this cross my mind, I immediately think about how they will be shut down by Google anyway, so I don't really bother. I guess in this case the bot-creator was lucky.
Another point is of course that I can use my coding skills for better things.
You're not a parent, are you?
EDIT: neither am I, for the record. But I think a lot of the replies here are a bit too quick to lay the blame on the less tech-savvy parents, who may just be using YouTube in the good faith that an app designed for children will not auto-queue disturbing content (also, the linked article makes a larger point about the "infrastructural violence" of the internet that we should not dismiss to quickly).
https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
If you don't think your kids should use YouTube then don't let them...easy as that! It's like with cookies...if you really want to I'll bet you find a way to stop you kids from eating them.
Sort of. If I let my kid watch Peppa Pig on the TV, I can be reasonably assured that it won't suddenly take a turn (while I'm in the next room washing dishes) into Peppa Pig having sex with Barney just before they're both ground up into sausage.
The same isn't true on YouTube.
You can have millions of parents address the issues themselves or you could have one company with massive resources fix the program for millions of parents.
Aside from morality, I think it's a clear product / business issue for them.
I can totally empathise how easy it is. I can give my one year old the wiggles and he's calm and quiet for hours if I want. Holy crap it's quiet. I can clean. I can rest. I can do my taxes. But it's just not a panacea. And as he gets older he will naturally try to control the content flow himself. That's fine. But I need to parent this to protect him from what he can't yet regulate himself.
I am trying to raise an interested and independent child with her own interests who goes through this world awake, not a member of the phone-zombies you see everywhere who have a never ending hunger for flashy videos and other entertainment. That there are parents who put their babies/toddlers in a stroller with a phone in their hands is just mind boggling to me.
My daughter is almost a year old and the only time she has ever looked at a screen (including TV) for longer than 10 seconds is when we video call her grandma who lives in another country.
Impressive bit of cognitive dissonance there. Although I suppose it can be explained with
> I couldn’t care less.
Which is fine, but then there is no logical reason for anyone else to care about your point of view either.
The accountability for YouTube would come in the form of less users or less advertisers. Until this happens though, these ‘crappy’ videos are appertently just what the users want to see and the automated advertising bots don’t care.
Accountability for the video-makers? I don’t see why. The copyright system is broken and counter productive in many cases to our ability as humans to create more knowledge. One could always argue that it is an art project anyway.
But I do think removing the role of an editor and cinematagrapher and being able to programmatically convert a script/screenplay instantly into a useful video content seems like a great idea; the right approach. In addition, something like this could also create internationalized video content very quickly.
Why not go further? Once we can determine an affordable way to programmatically stimulate every necessary region of our brain to bring about emotions and the effects of nostalgic or sentimental introspection traditionally stimulated by beautiful artwork, then we can just plug in and go for the ride and get on with our daily work.
But seriously, that is not what art is. Art is not created automatically by a machine. We can program a 3d printer to spit out an exact copy of the veiled virgin, but will we find it as beautiful? Certainly not.
Part of the charm of the artistic process is that a human being's perspective becomes illuminated, in part, in the medium. The natural imperfections of that perception are made beautiful and become less like imperfections and more like variations. A machine, as of yet, cannot do this. A computer program cannot have this multiplicity of perspective which is at once flawed and beautiful. It cannot understand the human emotive experience beyond what is input-output-- and the human emotive experience, as we can all attest, is not composed of input-output events.
If we let the machines make our art for us, or to artificially induce the emotions in us, we have lost all understanding of what art is. Art is not utilitarian. We cannot have machines perform art.
I think there is nothing magical about being a human. We are complex machines with lot of processes, but nothing that can't be replicated.
That's just to start.
I think you are young. I hope you grow out of that state of mind.
this is repackaging and theft of real creators' content.
Are the videos the net negative, or is the net negative that we have a laxly-moderated automated platform that gives a super-large platform to crap?
Yeah, except for the whole "negative contribution to society" part.
> it is a company that has a business model that is based on getting people to waste as much of their time as possible on YouTube
Society = people. There is good stuff on youtube, and there is bad stuff on youtube. Why do you want to be part of the problem? Seems pretty selfish to me.
300 hours of video are uploaded to youtube every minute in 2018
A couple of years ago I've seen a Google talk with a youtube admin/engineer. He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not order servers fast enough for the demand. Money seems to never have played a role in those decisions (I can't find the link to the talk anymore).
If a video gets uploaded it will be stored in multiple resolutions and formats. So a video is probably stored as ~20 files which makes the space requirements even more mind boggling.
We had the exact same problems in the beginning of Camarades.com, before the wankers found out about it. It's amazing how for nearly 6 months it was just 'nice people' and after that it went downhill rapidly.
We found out that hard way that 3 weeks lead time on a batch of servers only looks good if you don't double in size every two weeks or so :)
One Dell server we ordered didn't even make it to production, it was way too small by the time it arrived so they took it back and shipped us a much larger one. That's also roughly around the time that we figured out that it is much cheaper to have one large server to do all the writes and a bunch of slaves that do all the reads from local copies.
Of course a modern day server would laugh at serving up dynamic pages to a few hundred thousand people per day but in the late 90's that was quite a challenge.
I spoke recently with an engineer at Youtube. He said that encoding and storage costs for algorithmically generated videos are a serious concern internally.
One is an automated, content stealing scheme for making easy money. The other involves techniques by which you can promote your brand through your own content.
Just because you can predicate something with the same term, doesn't mean they are not very different.
I wasn't equating anything.
Who is earning that kind of money? The pros I know bank $1/1k (excluding sponsorships, referrals, Patreon, random demonetisations, and so on).
2. read text using text to speech, produce audio file
3. use a library like https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy to combine them
4. auto upload to youtube
5. profit!
1. hope and dream of success
2. set up scrapers to get the filler content- text and video/audio
3. read text using text to speech, produce audio file
4. use a library like https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy to combine them
5. auto upload to youtube
6. get depressed when you realise nobody wants to listen to a computer speak.
7. go back to day job
:)
You can do a lot with ffmpeg.
"Weird Kids' Videos and Gaming the Algorithm"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8
It talks about possibly using machine learning to create many videos targeted at toddlers and using techniques to ensure the next autoplay item doesn't change to another channel.
What makes them fun is trying to figure out if (or where) the voice is a robot - usually child's play because robots frequently places the em-PHAS-is on the wrong syl-LAB-le.
But the British butler voice isn't too shabby.
surely the solution here is in how youtube pays people? Does it not have to have a bank account? Isn't it a bit weird to find thousands of channels with robo videos on it with the one bank account?
i may of course be simplifying fraud detection
I was amazed to discover the Nigerian scam was a means to get money out the Western banking system - find a fool who will transfer 900,000 of a million bucks to a number somewhere and you get your stolen credit card money out the country.
(see also gangs who walk down high street taking out 1000 in cash at each ATM)
But this one - YouTube is paying these people. what about fraud prevention are we missing here?
1. Publish higher-quality content on the verified channel, and lower-quality closely related content on unverified channels. Suggestions on the unverified channels are more likely to include content from the verified channels than content from elsewhere, as that content is more closely related.
2. Get multiple channels verified! If it can be done once, it can be done multiple times.
The phenomenon is referred to as "Elsagate"[0]; be forewarned, it's pure nightmare-fuel.
You can use excerpts to comment on a work (e.g. review), but that's about it.
Can you explain how littering Youtube with low-quality copyright-infringing videos contributes anything to society?
It's easier to realize you make money because its making other people money ( nothing to do with benefit though ).