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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

This is a nice idea, but the one thing I haven't been able to divorce myself from is YouTube. I really hate how Google has allowed such a wealth of constant information that completely dwarfs alternative video hosting sites. As censorious as Google can be(now "up next" is always some video from CNN or Fox), blocking YouTube from my network would mean cutting myself off from a large portion of the world.

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It’s fascinating how differently the YouTube algorithm treats people. I've not once seen a Fox or CNN video recommended, I didn't even know they had a presence on YouTube

Personalization makes it incredibly hard to "watch the watchers," because everyone is getting a slightly different view of what Google is doing. I would like to see a program where users submitted data about their recommendations to researchers so that we could uncover Google's opinions. It would have a lot of financial value to YouTubers and would make it harder for Google to abuse their role as censor.

I could imagine shadow-burning YouTubers without banning them by shrinking their recommendation audience.

Further, it would be good for Google. Every little shift in the weather is going to get blamed on them whether they deserve it or not, now that it's common knowledge that they weild this power in more than zero cases. Google is about to discover why judges write opinions. Administering justice from secret meetings leads to popular dissent more than it leads to justice.

I clear my YouTube search and watch history about once a week. Partly because of privacy, but also because a single binge of, say, metal casting videos does not mean I want them recommend ever again in the future.

They use browser fingerprinting and/or IP addresses as well. Even on a brand new browser session, doing something even slightly related to the previous session brings back its entire recommendation history.

Yeah, the fact that I can clear cookies, open a private browsing window with tracking protection turned on, go to YouTube, and be asked which of my two gmail accounts I want to log in with, is pretty creepy.

> doing something even slightly related to the previous session brings back its entire recommendation history.

Are you sure that it does, and that it's not just a case of "hey we've never seen this person before, but they watched X, let's immediately start with recommendations Y and Z because other people who watched X were engaged with it?"

I used to think that and gave them the benefit of the doubt, but then I realised that some of the videos being recommended had nothing to do with the one currently watched other than the fact I watched similar ones previously.

How does that work at, say, the library, or some other public internet kiosk? Or maybe they're just assuming these are edge cases today, amidst the billions of private browser instances on handhelds?

It probably doesn’t work, considering the library users would be watching totally different & unrelated videos, where as in my case they have years of data of very specific viewing habits centred around a few topics.

Yes you are right they are using browser fingerprinting, but with the right tool they can easily change it. They can use Kameleo software or Multilogin etc. https://kameleo.io/

One thing this opens you up to is the average recommendation, which is biased towards inflammatory or click-bait content.

I do it every week as well and the recommendations start off being seeded from my subscriptions, not from the trending tab.

The problem with this is that it then just suggests the content that hits the front page instead - so for the most part a load of crap. All I'm doing is swapping recommended videos on, say, metal casting, for YouTube's "on-brand" content creators which pump out generic content on a bi-daily basis at 10 minutes in length.

It thinks I’m addicted to opiates because of the suboxone ads it presents, only because sometimes I listen to 90’s techno, rave music.

Not Google, but Twitter thinks I’m a 45 old married male with 3 kids

I’m 39, divorced, and have 2 kids

It’s almost as if the big data sales pitch is an epic joke like nuclear powered everything being pitched in the 50s

Twitter is a mess in general. No wonder they struggle to monetize.

What? That is an incredibly accurate profile derived from random tweets / follows, and certainly accurate enough to serve you ads.

Fair point. Except I don’t post, follow feeds only, put nothing about my personal life in my profile, and they asked for my birthday.

So my point was aimed more at advertisers buying on Twitter: they filled in the blanks and got them all wrong. And the one they had the data for they got wrong.

That and I’m not a internet consumer really. Twitter can see I’ve blocked over 1,000 accounts that promoted tweets. Is that statistic being shared with advertisers?

Likely not. Advertisers believe so who cares.

It’s so ephemeral as to be useless.

My understanding is the the only part of YouTube that is not personalized (except by region) is the "trending" tab.

It means it is the most representative of what would be a common YouTube experience.

If your concern is privacy, I've developed this project which routes everything through Tor except for the video file: https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local

There is also this project which is similar but much better, more polished, and with more features than what I have currently, but I haven't tried it to see if it supports a similar kind of selective proxying: https://github.com/omarroth/invidious

Then there's Freetube, which supports proxying but I'm not sure of the details either. It doesn't scrape Youtube itself as far as I know; instead it consults with the main Invidous instance at invidio.us which provides an api: https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube

My experience is if you watch videos on a given topic, they try to show you more of the same topic. So they probably decided you like American cable news.

It can get frustrating when it only recommends a single topic. I might go through a phase where I want to see videos about something specific. The recommendation algorithm will re-enforce that and prevent me from moving on to something else. I found that if I make some effort to watch a lot of videos about other topics, they appear. You can also manually edit your viewing history.

The trouble is that they often take viewing a video as a sign that you’re obsessed with that topic. You click one Flat Earth video to see what the crazy sounds like, and for the next three months half of your recommendations are “Scientists don’t want you to know this!”

I would rather that it would just play the next video by the current channel in reverse chron. Maybe if a channel made multiple videos in the last 24 hours, play that and then play other stuff. Instead, it immediately moves me to cable news if I am watching anything political, even though I never watch cable news voluntarily.

Try invidio.us - it hooks directly to the video feed of youtube, which means no ads, no tracking, reddit comments, your own subscriptions with rss which don't require "hitting the bell" and I just tested it works even when youtube hostname is redirected to localhost in /etc/hosts

YouTube and Maps are one of the few Google services left which are still available over Tor. You can proxy youtube-dl and retain some of your privacy this way.

I've been thinking of setting up a super-tiny (about $15/year) VPS as a youtube-dl proxy for a while now. It's the only Google service that still remains valuable to me; I enjoy channels like Bad Obsession Motorsports and various indie musician channels, and Vimeo just doesn't have enough of that type of content, sadly. I know proxying through a VPS that I pay for doesn't 100% divorce me from Google's watchful eye, but it's enough abstraction that hopefully they don't get enough info to build a profile of the real me.

Several video creators who got their start on Youtube have branched out to making their own platform, Nebula, if you are interested: https://watchnebula.com/

Unfortunately, they won't succeed. The way their homepage is designed suggest that they believe that their reputation and brands are enough to make people subscribe. Why is it not possible to click on a channel image and have a sneak preview? Their landing page is only good for people who already made the decision to join, not to attract new viewers. In other words, they rely on youtube to expand their audience.

They aren't doomed offhandedly, plenty of original content streaming platforms make money. However they won't help with people getting crushed by YouTube; I can't just create an account and start uploading to their HBO/Netflix analog.

I've got Little Snitch configured to block Youtube (and most Google services) when my browsers request them, but if there's a YouTube video that's interesting enough to warrant the extra effort, I just switch to my terminal and use youtube-dl to grab it and play it back locally.

What I do, and all the sites I visit (techie) are surprisingly not broken (aside from recaptcha spam):

1) use Firefox with multi-account containers, and disable 3rd party cookies.

2) put youtube in it's own "youtube" container. do not login to that container

3) put all other google stuff in it's own "google" container

If you do that, and don't login to google except in the "google" container it makes it more difficult for google to know who you are on youtube or other non-google sites.

But to make it so they REALLY don't know who you are, you need to do the above plus use a VPN. In my own usage I've discovered that youtube will recommend you videos based on your IP address's recent views if your not logged in.

You can always use YouTube through an alternate resource. Try invidio.us

Up next for me is great, always suggests videos of people I usually watch but haven't yet seen - or similar videos it thinks it might like.

Very rarely have any news outlet.

Video-hosting website alternatives as YouTube are indeed, pretty difficult to use in hope to replace entirely that service. I’ll say that peertube is going into a great way, but if it actually continues to gain success, it will surely take too many longs. You can however, if its mainly for telemetry purposes, use something else like invidio.us which i’ve been using alongside it, since i’ve deleted my Google account.

I set up a daily script to download new videos from channels I like using youtube-dl. It works really well, I rarely visit the actual YouTube site anymore.

pleroma (and i think maybe mastodon) provide media proxy that i think work for youtube. so when one person shares a video, one instance serves it to all the other users

Wouldn't that just be sharing a link to YouTube? I.e. not re-hosting the video (which would probably violate copyright).

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