Fair Trending: Objectively-Ranked Trending YouTube Videos
fairtrending.com
fairtrending.com
I'm sold on algorithmic timelines now. That Youtube is awful. People are awful. Fortnite Battle Royale is awful. I don't want to see any of those.
Self-modifying programs are still an enigma we haven't untied.
Twitter trends are being dominated by sports I couldn't care less about, Reddit's front page is constantly bombarded with FortniteBR posts, and YouTube is being taken over by clickbait, tabloid press and garbage. Evidently, that's what people want.
My comment is obviously something of a joke. It doesn't really hurt anyone except staunch FortniteBR fans, and we all know they don't have souls so that fine.
> That Youtube is awful. People are awful. Fortnite Battle Royale is awful.
I definitely used the word right, and I recognized you being facetious, but I still agree with you for the most part because there is a nugget of truth in what you said.
For example. I like all those electronics, physics and music theory videos, but after weeks of same old same old, I sometimes crave for something completely different. I would like to be able to see an orthogonal view to what I usually get just to be able to break out of that self reinforcing recommendation loop.
I could search for stuff I am not interested in and watch videos I don't like just to reset the assumption youtube has about the videos I want to watch but that is tedious and probably does not what I want.
> In 2013, the City of Takoma Park, Maryland became the first place in the United States to lower its voting age to 16, for local (but not general) elections and referendums. As of 2018, three additional cities have lowered the voting age to 16: Hyattsville and Greenbelt in Maryland, and Berkeley in California (for school board elections only). In 2018, a bill in the Council of the District of Columbia was proposed to lower the voting age to 16, which would make the federal district the first jurisdiction to lower the voting age for federal level elections.
But yeah, I'm also sold on personalised recommendations.
It’s still better than the pure vomit on this fair site, but it could be soooooop much better if it didn’t try to maximize engagement as the primary goal.
It may also be a warning that folks looking to push social change that teens and young people want so badly should get the hell on youtube and provide worldviews that are not, "The press is bad because it lies and also I hate the 19th amendment."
The trending page isn't algorithmically created. It's curated by google employees.
> That Youtube is awful. People are awful. Fortnite Battle Royale is awful. I don't want to see any of those.
Then don't. I'm sure most people probably think what you are watching is awful. Isn't that the point of youtube. You watch what you are interested in? Do you think we should all be forced to watch what you want?
> The trending page isn't algorithmically created. It's curated by google employees.
It's a hybrid.
> Isn't that the point of youtube. You watch what you are interested in? Do you think we should all be forced to watch what you want?
No, wasn't this the entire premise of my joke explained back to me? If so... I mean... thanks for the review, "liftbigweights."
People who make silly videos are frightening? If you say so.
> It's a hybrid.
No it's not algorithmically determined like you claimed? It's superficially hybrid. Ultimately, the final decision is made by employees.
> No, wasn't this the entire premise of my joke explained back to me?
No. It was a rhetorical question outlining the absurdity of your insistence that content be curated to your personal liking. Okay "kirindave", he who wants everything his own way.
You misread my post and have drawn an incorrect conclusion as to what I meant or intend to say. I do apologise for my part today's round of your confusion, Mr. Lift BigWeights.
But please, sir, I am not a "he" and I'll thank you kindly to take that mis-gendering somewhere where it's welcome. Perhaps a collapsed neutron star? That would be the biggest weight you could lift, indeed.
This is really kind of saddening, but your best bet really is just personalizing on as many user metrics as you can collect to best serve the people who like clickbait as well as the people who are looking for higher quality articles.
Not really relevant, but funny enough, if you prioritize article quality, popular named entities, how relevant those entities are to the article, engagement, and article age, you end up with earnings reports.
"A simple way to understand this formula is that a video loses a point every 12 hours and gains a point every time it grows by 10x. In other words, a video's score will not change if its view count grows by 10x in 12 hours. These constants were tuned to keep popular videos around for about a day."
It seems like pretty flawed idea, they base their ranking on video views and age, but the video views are a result of the non-"Objectively-Ranked" videos on YouTube itself.
I think the page itself shows those results pretty clearly, it's chock full of videos with thumbnails designed to draw peoples eyes as well as text and titles designed to raise questions and imply drama in order to entice people to click.
That might be the wanted result, but I don't see how that is much different from the official Youtube trending page, except this one isn't localised/customised for your specific country.
It is. I get results in German. (And yes, they're all clickbait I'd never watch.)
Looks like AI recommendations did have a point all along lol
There’s nothing is even consider watching on the “Fair trending” one; I can see myself watching one or two things off the YouTube one if I was very bored.
As you know, the subscriptions feed is now optimized on YouTube and not all new content from your subscribed channels find their way into your feed anymore.
This platform that I was thinking would basically bring that back, however under a different domain with a better UI.
Anyone interested? Let's build it together. Or just bring that feature into this site. I just want a feed that's chronological and non-optimized.
Source? Wasn't that just an experiment?
I think they need to go and work on their sums a bit more.
What does this mean? Are you saying Youtube needs to improve, Fair Trending needs to improve, or the viewers need to improve?
log(upVotes - downVotes) - (hoursOld / 12.5),
according to https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algo....
Fair Trending basically differs just in the log() part, substituting (fractionUpVotes * views) for (upVotes - downVotes). This could change the ranking if a lot of people view without voting either way.
Go on, ask me how I know.
I have to say the whole notion of "trending" I find ridiculous, and even a bit offensive. That somehow because a zillion people find something interesting, that I should, too, makes clear that the best we've done in filtering is assume people are sheep and need to be "fed" as such. Even with the targeted suggestions they do when they look at my viewing history (and other history I'm sure), it's so incredibly ham-fisted I just want to shout, "hey maybe you should spend less time getting your AI to beat Go champions and more time getting it actually make useful and relevant recommendations that just maybe you can dispose of that 'trending' shit you're always foisting on everyone." (Of course, if Google actually got newer versions of the Youtube app to just work correctly with their Chromecast, I'd take that as progress).
Yeah, yeah, I know that they aren't trying to get the best matched content to me in the first place... just that which I might swallow and they can get the biggest bang for their investment... but the value proposition gets too diminished and I'm gone.... emphasis on stupidity such as "trending" pushes me to look at alternatives with some frequency. I've already left Twitter and Facebook due to this pushing trends stuff, Google is on the edge.
Of course, maybe I'm the outlier and I should just invest in Google, Twitter, Facebook, oh yeah and their traditional equivalents of "Us", "People", and the "National Enquirer" since that's where the masses apparently are.
The only trending I'd be interested in at all would be "trending" amongst a group of people whom I could actively curate in a list based on my tastes and interests and... importantly... theirs. It's clear to me that I can't outsource that curation just yet.
Finally... the front page of Hacker News is obviously just a big "trending" list. I have a higher affinity with the audience here, but still find about 60% - 70% of the front page content to be of zero interest and the comments hit much less; The 30% - 40% I come back for clearly has a high value to me, nonetheless. Between a tagging filter and having the ability to select a list of certain HN users to allow undue influence the results that I see when I come to the site would make it much, much better experience. (And I probably wouldn't be baited to post crap like this). In truth, I don't actually use the Hacker News homepage directly and instead start my journey at http://hn.elijames.org/
The magic of social media is that corperate executives and media conglomerates don't get to pick what goes to the top. The users do. That's why Facebook 'curating' the trending news feed was so messed up. The whole point of trending is to see what actual real people are interested in, not just what a dozen editors in a backroom want you to see.
At the end of the day nobody should second hand their interests and be so passive as to care at all what "trends". In fact, a pure random pick out of all the possible options would likely be more interesting and engaging than this "Fair Trending" can do or corporate engagement efforts... while a random pick certainly wouldn't be perfect, it at least it surface interesting and original ideas/content that don't necessarily click the "group-think" and "lowest-common-denominator" boxes.
No, it's just basic human pshychology. People imitate other people. People like what other people like. This is wired into us on a very basic level.
Yes, these basic patterns are often stupid, from a purely rational persperctive. And yes, those of us who are trying to act more rationally (the HN, LessWrong crowd and others) see this behaviour as stupid. But it's irrational and naive to assume that it's easy or even possible to completely get rid of this basic behavioural patterns: they're wired in your brain on a very basic level, and you can only steer them and restrict them, but not remove it completely.
And one more thing: these patterns are quite often good rough heuristics to solve a lot of problems that we don't want to waste a lot of resources on. For example, if you don't want to be a fashion icon (reasonable assumption for most audience on this site), you can always just buy clothes from the most popular brand out there, and with very high probability, you'll get clothes that fit, are of reasonable quality and have neutral social signalling. Of course, if you invested a lot of time into your own research on the matter, you'd be able to find clothes that perfectly reflect your personality, more thoughtfully use cultural context, are of superior quality and may cost even less - but would you bother? Most of HN readers usually answer "no" to that, because they have other priorities in life.
Well, a lot of people just decide that their information diet on YouTube doesn't deserve such attention, and they're ready to watch whatever funny videos are just popular to fill their lunchbreak.
If you want objective ranking, look at kworb lists. E.g. https://kworb.net/youtube/
Ellen Degeneres and Jimmy Falon are you Youtube trending but nowhere on fairtrending.
"Elitist corperate control over mass media is great because I don't like what normal people do." -people in this hackernews thread
This seems blown out of proportion. "I don't like what normal people do, so I will probably not look at trending to find content" is what most people are saying.
What about those of us who would rather stick a fork in our eye than watch PewDiePie, Degeneres, or Fallon? I’m not seeing the praise for what you’re calling “elitist corporate control,” so much as despair that the supposedly fair option is at least as hideous as the rigged option. Beyond that if we define normal as in Normal Distribution, then who’s fault is it if you expected to find the middle of that distribution on a site called Hacker News? Most people would be bored out of their skin on this site and that’s fine, just as it’s fine for a subset of the population with shared interests to enjoy it.
If you want normal as in average, you’re barking up the wrong tree, and FaceBook, Instagram, and the rest have you covered. If you’re seeing a lot of praise for the YT algorithm, rather than dislike of both algorithm and lack of curation, I must be missing it and you could maybe point it out?
I understand this data is not easily accessible to a third party but it would certainly improve this algorithm.
Edit 1: If I open YouTube and the Fair trending videos were presented to me, I would probably never use YouTube again.
Edit 2: I realize that I never click on the trending tab on youtube. I take back Edit 1, I'll just never click on the trending tab again.
An example of how bad it is, they've started (on purpose or not) removing videos of uploaders that aren't taking part of the YouTube monetarization + have a Patreon link in their description. [0][1]
I'd expect/hope that such practice would be suit in EU courts for unfair competition.
I wonder how "Fair Trending" implemented their technology, if they are using official YouTube APIs and if Alphabet is going to kill this service once it gains traction?
Their about [2] page doesn't answer the "how do we get to the data?".
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005682
Of course, an alternate ranking does nothing to fix the problem of videos that have simply been banned by YouTube. Lots of good stuff is just missing now. Freedom of speech: tearing out a man's tongue doesn't prove him wrong, but it does prove that you fear his message and it strongly suggests that his message might be correct.
I find it strange that one would believe this A) means people are scared, and B) means the message is more likely to be correct.
For example, if we were to watch two random idiots arguing or "debating" over a complex and highly nuanced topic, if neither of these "debaters" has any expertise or really any understanding of the wider issues which may need to be considered, its incredibly unlikely either of these people will come to anything close to the "correct" answers. While one of them may make more convincing arguments, this means very little.
If my car mechanic makes a convincing argument,links me to a bunch of youtube videos, and official looking webpages which all tell me I should use homeopathic medicine and the guy I'm sitting next to me simply says "Nah, doctors are totally way better, dude." Neither of those two people are trained in medicine, but should I listen to the mechanic because his argument was more convincing? No, of course not.
Having an innate ability to use Sophistry absolutely does not indicate whether or not their position should be trusted. And refusing to engage with a Sophist is in no way an indication of being fearful of their message.
It's so weird when people believe "debate me bro, a random idiot, or you're wrong and I'm correct." is in any way a rational conclusion to make.
YouTube actually bans videos. They leave up plenty of incorrect things that are nonthreatening, so correctness is clearly not the determining factor.
This is not a matter of refusing to debate. It is a matter of refusing to let alternative opinions exist at all.
I guess the fact that he's in this list and therefore one of the most popular channels on YouTube would explain why he keeps appearing in my feed despite my unsubscription and continued lack of interest, however.
I didn't mean to imply it does -- at least, not directly. But those factors affect how users interact with the videos, which YouTube measures as engagement. And a typical sermon is likely to look especially bad on certain engagement metrics; in particular, their length means that users are less likely to watch them to completion, and even less likely to watch multiple videos in a single session.