YouTube Regrets
foundation.mozilla.org
foundation.mozilla.org
I personally went through a 3-month journey starting from travel videos to getting sucked into the "look how awesome mirrorless cameras are and all the beautiful content I can create with them" and ended up spending about 15k on camera gear (body, lenses, gimbals, lights, etc). I eventually managed to reign myself in but I didn't think I can now turn around and blame Google or some algorithm for spending far more than I should have. Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions and lack of impulse control instead of expecting a corporation with an ad-revenue business-model to do it for me?
Now, imagine the sensory overload you get when stuck on YouTube, showing those reviews, unboxing videos, whatever to you - or more precisely, to your experiencing self. At some point your narrating self will make up the story and then you end up paying 15k for camera equipment... of course, it’s your choice, right?
EDIT: https://medium.theuxblog.com/the-peak-end-rule-ff7246115248
Once younlook at the ad-driven economy from this point of view, it becomes harder to be condescending.
Aren't you implying free will by saying a person "can continue to postulate otherwise"?
Then you won't be mad at me for down-voting your comment? It wasn't my choice!
This contradicts your argument. If there is no free will, you can't make yourself become anything.
Much better to act as if free will is not illusory, and do what we can to improve things.
For my young children, I hand select videos for them. Videos I've watched or know about. Just like parents have done for kids for the past 30 years or more.
Sounds like there is a selling opportunity there.
Today kids are raised by YouTube.
The crucial difference is that when I was a kid there was common consensus that hey maybe we shouldn't play the goriest and sexiest things on TV between 2pm and 7pm when kids are watching.
YouTube doesn't have that. Yet. I'm sure eventually it will have to.
[1] I learned more than I care to admit about human interaction, personal relationships, and how the world works from American TV shows. But I also learned so much English that people often confuse me for a native speaker.
For once kids I had been spoken with (~12y) where aware that there are thinks they don't want to see.
But then we have that problem that it's no longer obvious what is "bad" and what isn't. For once youtube removes/age locks videos which are obvious not teen safe (gore, porn). But this mainly gives a illusion of safety.
The problems are normally not the obvious "bad" videos but such which seem to be fine. Except that they aren't because they either change their stile/content midway or are bad in a more subtile way.
EDIT: Just to be clear old TV also had manipulative content, but this was normally only about advertisements and politics due to curation. YT has manipulative content of cults of all kind, often with noticeable risks to mental and/or physical health. And the politically motivated manipulative content seems to have become much more wild/dangerous as it's practically way less restricted.
---
My 10-year-old sweet daughter innocently searched for “tap dance videos” and now is in this spiral of horrible extreme “dance” and contortionist videos that give her horrible unsafe body-harming and body-image-damaging advice. I’ve tried to go in and manually delete all recommended videos, put in parental controls, everything (including blocking the app) — but she’s finding ways to log on using browsers and school computers. These terrible videos just keep being recommended to her. She is now restricting her eating and drinking. I heard her downstairs saying “work to eat! work to drink!” I don’t know how I can undo the damage that’s been done to her impressionable mind.
Parents traditionally haven't though. They relied on rating systems for television content and movies to efficiently screen out content that might be unsuitable for children. These voluntary rating systems were formed in different countries, at different times, for different media (e.g. video games, movies, television, and comics each have their own). It's important to note that these generally accepted rating systems were created as a voluntary measure to avoid widespread regulation of content.
Parents for the last 30 years didn't hand select movies to watch, they read the synopsis, looked for the rating, or asked a friend or employee at the video store for the rating of the content. They used a recommendation system, but that system was a fair bit more interactive. It's anecdotal, but in my high school and university days I worked in video stores, over about an 8 year period - translates into literally hundreds of user education sessions talking about how rating systems work what they cover and don't cover, and regional differences since Canada uses different ratings than the US and often had both a Canadian rating and a US rating.
Your "healthy response" statement also clearly comes from a position of reasonable economic privilege - I can also indulge my childrens interests, and do regularly through sports and other activities, but for the majority of middle class families, that kind of indulgence is out of reach due to the cost.
It's just not economically viable for most families to enroll their kids in something to help them "learn about it safely", any more than most families have time to create curated lists of content (which requires a degree of technical proficiency that is also somewhat challenging for many people).
It really comes down to how you view things like addiction and impulsive behavior, and how those things impact free will. The fact that we don't really know with any kind of certainty that people who struggle with these things are protected when using the internet raises a lot of questions. Should people with these struggles just not use the internet?
It is definitely a double edge sword but being obsessed about something and pursing it to no end could lead to extraordinary results. Lots if not most of great accomplishments have been done by people that would just not let something go.
Not every brain works the same way. In fact, every brain is certain to work differently. Plenty of people may not have the same impulse control you have, and it's not their fault.
We believe we have agency, but this depends on the underlying inputs to our knowledge base. When the inputs are manipulated and result in new assumptions, the decisions we make are invariably influenced and often in ways we don't expect. This is also the root of concepts like unconscious bias.
Tldr: probably not, because you cant control your inputs anymore.
Impulse control is a skill, not everyone is the same or has equal level of abilities in anything, but we are ultimately choosing our reaction to an input and we have power to extend our influence on ourselves and world around us.
That doesn't mean it can't be improved, but it does mean we should be respectful of people who may have a much harder time with it. Not everyone can meet a societal baseline that's challenging enough for people deemed to be normative; a person with one arm is plenty likely to be good at basketball, but imposing qualification rules based on their capability to do free throws might be a bit out of bounds... so to speak.
That's what algorithm (self-)regulations (and gripes along what Mozilla published here) would aim to address.
If someone with bad impulse control kills another person, is it not their fault?
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. I'm just pointing out that this is the moral principle being debated here.
I certainly don't know the answer, but we should think about this one a little bit before saying that no one is ever at "fault" for anything.
Impulse control is just another facet of human personality, just like being aggressive, or being a bigot.
You still want to throw malfunctioning unit into a cell, or repair it some way. (Some soul-having scenarios are downright dystopian -- can't fix a defective soul unaffected by natural events, might have to dump it into a volcano).
Um, sorry, what?
If you choose to do a thing, whatever it is, that thing very much is your responsibility, and (if it ends badly) your fault[1].
I've done some bloody stupid things over the years that haven't ended well and, guess what? That's all my fault.
Taking things from the prosaic to the hyperbolic, here are some notable examples of the kinds of people who typically have poor impulse control but who very definitely should be held to account for their actions:
- Paedophiles
- Rapists
- Shoplifters
- Serial murderers
[1] I will grant you this doesn't apply to children, which is why we have concepts such as the age of legal majority, but it certainly applies to adults of sound mind (i.e., the overwhelming majority of adults).
Addiction is a disease, not a crime. It's therefore a great example of something which fails your test.
I won't address the strawmen you laid out because information addiction is the challenge we're facing in this thread, and addiction of any sort is recognized as a disease and disorder.
---
> Um, sorry, what?
Please null the tone. I'd like to engage you on level and respectful terms.
However, I personally find it scary when an organization with as much cachet as Mozilla encourages people to absolve themselves of responsibility.
Seems like a bit of a strawman?
> Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions
Certainly, and those using algorithms to direct human behavior have accountability as well, wouldn't you say? Are they not accountable for their behavior?
Wouldn't it be rather opposed to the way we think about most products and services if those implementing algorithms were held exempt from all consequences or responsibilities of putting their product into the world?
Surely you acknowledge that algorithms wield incredible power? Or else we wouldn't be having this discussion nor would the world's most powerful corporations be investing vast resources into using algorithms to further their goals?
Yes, you should be held accountable if you watch 2 hours of youtube a day, but I think that there's a difference between a legal obligation and the right thing to do. Yeah, google doesn't HAVE to do anything. But they really should. It's the right thing to do.
I think we as a society are going to have to get a lot more savvy about how easy it is to influence other people when they're not paying close attention.
P.S. I spend <2h/day on youtube mostly on the shows or tutorials I wanted in advance. I spend <20min/day on fb (90% messenger, 10% groups that I "have to" follow). Very close to 0 social media activity for more than 2 years now. So it's definitely possible.
If YouTube doesn't want to be responsible for it, it should provide means for other companies to pick up the slack.
Also: clear cookies, don't login into any accounts when you don't need it, type your specific search terms in, don't click on those totally obvious clickbait ads/videos/whatever. Here, I solved your “recommendation problem”.
You seem to have a personal experience that you are vulnerable to YouTube.
However, you seem to be concluding that you are NOT vulnerable to YouTube. Not based on data, but because that is an unacceptable conclusion. Like a lot of people, you believe accountability is important for society to function. And it seems like you force blame on yourself, in order to rescue the notion of accountability.
I think you see the problem, right? But what if this whole way of thinking isn't right? There are some people alive today who still believe that getting a disease is a sign of not praying enough. Like, living in the USA right now. We know they are wrong. What if being vulnerable to cognitive exploitation is similar? What if it's foolish to put this in the realm of "the victim needs moral strength" and it should be more in the realm of "the perpetrator needs to stop harming / the risk factors need to be reduced by collective actions".
I was by no means trying to exonerate YouTube or any service that aims to manipulate its users. I was only trying to convey that a large campaign against exploitation should not be the other extreme where victims are automatically absolved while the perpetrator is entirely demonized. Surely there must be a middle-ground?
Look, when I got up in the morning I had no intention of looking at videos from the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack, but I followed an urge and lost 15 minutes as it led me to viral videos about deleted scenes from Star Wars and then surprisingly well-made fan videos, and... you get the gist.
On the other hand, many people at YouTube did wake up this morning with the intention of maximizing my viewing time. They are armed with supercomputers and artificial intelligences piloted by Ph.Ds. If in some future world, "conspiracy to steal time" was a crime, this would be an easy prosecution.
That said, that doesn't mean that I shouldn't take any steps to defend myself. I should use something to block certain sites. But just because I have that responsibility doesn't diminish someone else's culpability for inflicting harms.
Either one or the other party receives all the blame, or you are in the middle ground of spreading the blame around. One group is entirely responsible IFF the other entirely _not_ responsible. Anecdotally, it does not seem like either party bears zero responsibility, so neither party bears all responsibility, which seems to me to be a nearly-inherent reason why the middle ground is correct.
> I should use something to block certain sites. But just because I have that responsibility doesn't diminish someone else's culpability for inflicting harms.
Very well put!
That is a dramatic generalization,and who is "we"? Your initial argument seems sound to me but the analogies and the method you arrived at the conclusion sounds like you are not aware of your own confirmation bias.
If you mean that introspection is a bad way to recognize when you're being manipulated I agree. That concept is not exclusive against taking responsibility. One can say "I am responsible for my actions but youtube is also responsible for manipulating my thought process,on purpose and with bad faith"
P.S.: None of the major world religions teach "not praying makes you sick", perhaps you meant "prayer cures illness"? Plenty of medical doctors and surgeons believe prayer helps (even if they think it is strictly the hoping and positivity aspect that allows the mind to work with the body to fight illness),which is why I asked "who is 'we'"?
That is before considering marginalized people. While they may be able to walk away from videos that marginalizes them, they are not always free to walk away from people who marginalize them. (These are people who may, or may not, be reinforcing their prejudices from those videos.) They may be enticed to view a video that appears to align with people like them, only to discover that it is attacking people like them. Then there are the sheer numbers. A message repeated often enough, even if it is only through thumbnails and titles, will have an impact upon a person's well being.
It is also important to realize that this environment is the product of decisions made decades ago, when we decided that anyone can post anything with few consequences. Whether you view that as good or bad depends upon several factors, such as where you fall on the spectrum of free speech. Yet there was one clear consequence: anyone did post anything and making content discoverable became a problem. Given the bulk of data, it became effectively impossible for humans to categorize or recommend content, so algorithms entered the picture. Since the algorithms cannot do it properly, we should not be surprised by people blaming the algorithms or the creators of those algorithms.
Is there a way to fix the problem? Short of scrapping YouTube, I doubt that there is a human solution. There is too much content and you cannot rely upon creators to do so accurately (too many motives, lack of understanding, or laziness to deal with). So the only real solution is to tackle the algorithms or face the consequences of the existing ones.
EDIT: clarification on "creators".
Also, in your individual example, I think the 'blame' exists partially with you and partially with youtube. Your weakness for camera gear combined with the strength of the camera gear algorithm guided you to buy 15k worth of stuff.
So free will is when we have not zoomed out enough to see patterns? That actually explains a lot.
The intellect is stronger than the will. Remember the story of Odysseus handcuffing himself to a pole to avoid the lure of the Sirens.
> 02: “I Don’t Know How To Undo the Damage That Has Been Done”
> My 10-year-old sweet daughter innocently searched for “tap dance videos” and now is in this spiral of horrible extreme “dance” and contortionist videos that give her horrible unsafe body-harming and body-image-damaging advice. I’ve tried to go in and manually delete all recommended videos, put in parental controls, everything (including blocking the app) — but she’s finding ways to log on using browsers and school computers. These terrible videos just keep being recommended to her. She is now restricting her eating and drinking. I heard her downstairs saying “work to eat! work to drink!” I don’t know how I can undo the damage that’s been done to her impressionable mind.
So your sweet 10-year-old daughter is learning dirty dancing now? And your first reaction is to blame a website for this? Young women have had these problems long before YouTube. TALK TO YOUR DAUGHTER. How long did you spend writing this? Have you tried just sitting her down and helping her with her self esteem issues? There's no app for it, it's just called being a supportive and encouraging parent.
> 05: How I Lost My Father
> My stepfather is an 80-year-old retired scientist from Ecuador. He was always curious about all sources of wisdom, theories and knowledge, is very literate and educated, enjoys discussing current events and scientific discoveries. But for a few years, he has become quite lonely and spends a large amount of time on the internet — and on YouTube in particular. His curious mind quickly brought him toward "alternative theories" on multiple topics: conspiracies, Illuminati and other alien-based stories, Bible-inspired as well as radically anti-religious obscure worldviews, "pyramidologists", etc.
> Despite the fact that we tried to erase his YouTube history and "clean" his browser, his recommendations are completely filled by these kinds of esoteric videos, with those recognizable synthetic (TTS) voice-over commentaries, endlessly proposing a similar video after another. He sometimes falls asleep while watching. His days are filled by such content, which has quite strongly affected his worldview toward a much grimmer and more pessimistic turn. It seems impossible for us, his family, to fight against the recommendation algorithms that steers his digital consumer life. It is quite sad and frustrating to see a loved one bury oneself more and more into this kind of obscure, negative and extremely confidence-depriving influence.
> My father, before his passing, thought aliens were already living among us in disguise, that he could eliminate his heating bill with a new "free energy" device, and that UFOs were all over the place. He showed me YouTube videos that "proved it." I spent hours trying to explain to him that YouTube is full of "free energy" scams, that the best UFO is maybe a shitty little DARPA toy, and that aliens among us in plain clothes was simply delusion caused by YouTube videos. He could not come to grips with why people could be dishonest, or why the FCC wasn't doing their job, and trusted what he saw on his TV way too much. He was consuming YouTube on his TV and maybe thought the same FCC kind of government regulation he was used to was still present there. How much better could our time together have been if not for YouTube-induced delusions?
So all you tried doing was taking away his computer? You can't stop him from taking the bus to the library! It sounds like he was extremely lonely. The best thing you can do is spend more time with him, and maybe get to the root of what is causing him to be unhappy.
With both the father and the daughter, I believe that the feelings are coming first, and the media they are seeking out is a reaction to it. The 10 year old girl has very normal self esteem and body issues, and needs a mother there to support her. The elderly father feels alone, depressed, and maybe abandoned, and is seeking out videos that are congruent with his state of mind.
I have a lot of experience with this. I had a very similar situation with a family member who became embroiled in Trutherism about a decade ago. But it wasn't the fault of the Internet. It was because he was depressed and miserable for other reasons. The conspiracies that he saw, when distilled down, were based his much more pragmatic anxieties. When he got emotional support and a job, he was much better. This guy should have tried spending more time with his father and helped him feel safe and close, then he wouldn't have spent so much time watching this.
1. Do we want to figure out who to blame, or do we want to fix the problem? You're blaming the people who watch the videos, but that doesn't lead to any solution to what is a pervasive problem in our society.
2. If we must play the blame game, then at least let's be nuanced about it. Sure, it's my personal responsibility if I make the poor choice to start smoking, but cigarette companies are responsible for producing a product that kills people. These are two separate actions: one done by me, and one done by a corporation. We're each responsible for our own action, and neither one is good.
That goes way beyond personal responsibility. It was a wide spread fraud.
YouTube isn’t really doing that. They simply recommend things that you may like and succeed or fail at it. When people are uncomfortable with the recommendations it’s a failure, not a conspiracy against the public.
That's the misconception here. Youtube is recommending things that make you watch more Youtube. Their customer base is advertisers, not viewers.
Ehhhhh. You make decisions and take actions inside contexts that other people create.
So, if you want to be absolute about it, you have to only consider the choices you as they differ from your alternatives. If you did not have (or, within epsilon, did not experience having) any other choices, are you accountable at all?
And, since all of this is super fuzzy anyway (YouTube presents you with a weighted choice, at which "exit" is near the bottom), you have do something like take the cross-product of each option with the modifications made to your capacity to choose that option and _then_ the difference between each of those and _then_ you can begin to say what someone is accountable for given their choices, but then that's not accounting for past traumas, and then you start getting into free will and "can you even make a choice anyway".
> instead of expecting a corporation with an ad-revenue business-model to do it for me?
....yes. Definitely. Because that corporation sure as shit won't, and it's not so much a question as that we each are responsible for ourselves as an observation, because mostly, other people aren't gonna do it.
You might be responsible for the outcome of your decisions, but it's not exactly reasonable for the rest of us to hold you completely accountable, because you're not wholly responsible for the options you decided between.
I honestly find this whole thing disgusting, it's one thing to be upset that you got deceived but to assume someone else has been and to demand the freedom (to be deceived, to choose what you believe) be removed from another is insane. Youtube is full of plenty of shit, if someone wants to believe it or if someone accidentally "falls for it" that's their problem and theirs alone.
The entire feed is conspiracy theory videos which have led them to believe some really awful things. Virtually any tragedy in the news has some conspiratorial take; the victims are actors, it was a false flag operation, the school doesn't exist. Over time the viewer builds up the impression that every news story is meant to deceive them, and then completely loses their ability to judge truthfulness or apply skepticism.
I've even heard them talk about leaving their idyllic home because of misplaced fears. For the rest of their lives they will believe the awful lies that YouTube has served them.
> the victims are actors, it was a false flag operation
You don't know what led them to believe what. And false flag operations are common, so is staging photos, videos for war propaganda. Those are not conspiracy theories, but our terrifying reality. Truth doesn't exist in wars.
One big problem with your story though, just like with every story on this Mozilla page, is that it's impossible to verify. And when it's impossible to verify things are often made up. Furthermore, emotional propaganda of such stories is pushing people to take some rumors, change them and claim them as their own, creating this "me too" movement of fake stories.
Another problem, is that the stories are so poor, that there is no perspective, baseline or any room to make any conclusions of supposed negative effects on people. Just fallacies. Do some strange things get recommended to some people? Of course they do. Do they even have enough reach to even theoretically be able to affect people? Certainly not nearly as much as a family friendly content of a girl living in a van with a snake.
Also, how can one blame YT or any media for providing/proposing content that changes one's views? Arbitrarily blocking content that present a different view on events discussed in mainstream media would seriously threaten democracy.
The author of this appears to have allowed their child to freely browse the collection of videos, regrets it, and is now passing blame. In the case of his father, the author is blaming YouTube for not curating proper content. Why didn't the author curate content for his father or spend more time with them to see what they were watching? It sounds like the premise of these points is that the author didn't appreciate the bubbles their family members fell into, and instead wanted them to be in different bubbles.
> YouTube is merely a mirror of our societies.
YouTube, and all for-profit social media construct experiences that take advantage of our human fallibility in order to drive eyeballs and clicks. You're writing something very explicitly crafted to drive potentially self-destructive behavior off as merely "a mirror of our societies."
The closest parallel is the gambling industry. There's a reason it's highly regulated.
The main problem are that recommendation systems are a black box. They should have interfaces for interaction. They should allow user chosen curators (e.g. parental filter companies) to tweak their parameters, add filters or over-ride recommendation choices.
As I mentioned somewhere downstream, we can't have black boxes shoving things we don't want into our screens anymore. We need something better.
In real life I don’t typically get people taking to me about products without telling me they were paid to recommend these products and the billboards on the street don’t show ads based on my profile (yet).
Yes it's called marketing/propaganda. It wasn't invented by YouTube.
Now that whole "YouTube Regrets" stunt by Mozilla here is obviously about the following question: "who should YouTube allow to have an audience", nothing more.
Why would youtube be a mere reflection of society? If culture gets reproduced through action, wouldn't youtube's actions amplify certain cultural messages? Do mere reflections amplify things?
> Let’s send a message to YouTube that they need to recommend responsibly...
I don't think there's such a thing as responsible recommendation at the scale YouTube operates at. At least not in the way people think by responsible anyway.
Oh I know, "censorship!" etc... but at Googles scale, as you point out, what else shall we do?
I do rather throw that ball back into your court. At that scale, they are regulatable :D
The key to your statement is the word "related". How do you determine whether two pieces of content are related? Because Youtube has found a way which works for them and seems to work in the majority of cases.
Do we know that to be true? failing for what percentage of the user base? it's obviously imperfect.
Eventually, you serve the tools instead of building them...
It's not irresponsible because people see videos they would rather not. It would be irresponsible if someone logged in to a child's account and see's something inappropriate, and it would be irresponsible to continuously allow illegal videos to stay up (both of these cases happen and need addressing). But saying your preferences don't align with how they determine content to be similar to each other doesn't make it irresponsible.
Catering to preferences like that is not a responsibility. It might make the product better or worse for you if they don't, but it's not an obligation.
If you realize that you are getting weird recs due to a particular video you watched, you can delete that singular video from your history. I’m not particularly concerned about this aspect of Google/YouTube’s behavior.
Finally, if you’re upset about your dad watching conspiracy videos, consider that maybe he’s always been a nut job and you are just now realizing it. People don’t keep watching videos that they don’t like, they started down the rabbit hole by clicking on videos that looked interesting (maybe the rabbit hole got deeper because they feel asleep, but they did start it on their own).
My mum gets paranoid about burglars. If I introduced her to a constant drip feed of robbery videos her fear would escalate disproportionate to her normal life. That's not a revealed character flaw.
If you are not seeing fully refreshed recommendations it's probably because you are still subscribed to channels or have liked videos or the other pieces of information that goes into recommendations.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725?co=GENIE.Pla...
You can also configure it to automatically clear anything older than 3 or 18 months.
Or follow this link to go straight there: https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols/youtube
It’s not that easy yet but proper browser support for regaining control is coming.
You really have no control over what google knows about you or who they think you are. you can't change browsers, computers, or even your location to get away from them.
In the same way that each one of your (positive) rights is just someone else's obligation, every case of censorship is someone else's lack of freedom. While YouTube is not a state institution (hence they're not morally obligated to cater to anyone's needs, or be a platform for any kind of video), they want to make money, and if their best way to make money is through automatic recommendations, then I'm afraid that YouTube is not for people that don't like automatic recommendations.
On the YouTube topic. As a product designer, I think that YouTube product managers and designers have a lot of responsibility. Video recommendations are designed to be addictive. They don't stop, and while there are options to turn auto-play off they are not the default. It's not a problem of the "uninformed user". It's by design. People in the comments mention creating playlists and curating content. But there are many design gaps there too. For example, YT Kids has some time controls, but the content curation options are minimal.
“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral” - Melvin Kranzberg
Another issue is in how they're now demonetizing any piece of content that mentions anything remotely controversial, making it even less profitable to do any kind of journalism. Want to talk about the Kurds in Syria? Be prepared for having the video be immediately demonetized.
The recommender system comes far third in this list, in my opinion.
[0]. I have no idea what.
EDIT: I signed up to the newsletter.
They know the issue isn't so much the algorithm as those that are gaming it to empty extraction of peoples attention (== money), extreme, or harmful ends. In doing so we might better understand the problem and then provide tools or recommendation to social media and the public on the topic.
Of course Google won't, because it would dramatically reduce watch time and their advertisers wouldn't like that. But a man can dream
Because the people looking for visibility on their conspiracy video would never tag their video with high-visibility keywords like "cute" and "puppies"!
Dumb metadata-based search and content recommendation is not the way forward. Google's original contribution to the web was pulling us out of that tarpit - SEO prior to PageRank was a wreck.
Twitch also has "Not interested" button, but what they never mention anywhere is that it simply pushes stuff into 1000 size limited FILO list. You know, 1000 entries because storage is expensive at Amazon.
Not to say that for some folks a complete abolition of YouTube might be well in order.
I don't think this discounts the larger problem though...
P.S. I'm quite frustrated that I can't "depersonalize" Amazon.
Do one better: Consider NewPipe [0] instead, if you're on Android.
Would also love a free webmail alternative.
This is the issue. I'm starting to believe the only options are free ad-supported generic platforms or direct creator-to-fan relationships. Totally free without ads is impossible.
At least that’s been a viable model since the beginning of TV and radio. Dunno why it can’t be done now.
They just won't be able to target them as well.
Online video requires you to be able to store every piece of video that has ever been uploaded, for the rest of eternity, and requires you to be able to play anything on-demand to ~600 million simultaneous connections, each requesting a different piece of media. You can't fund that with advertising.
Google hasn't ever released figures, but the speculation consensus seems to be that youtube has never made a profit.
Give it 5 years.
Cheaper bandwidth and storage for the host doesn't help because it's getting cheaper for users too, meaning that they are going to create higher-quality content. Ten years ago, everything being uploaded to youtube was 480i resolution. Now most things being uploaded are 1080p60fps, with some channels starting to upload 4k.
Isn't that quite literally what youtube becomes, if you decide to turn off the watched history completely?
##.ytp-pause-overlay ##.ytp-suggestion-set ##.ytp-endscreen-content youtube.com###related
I personally try to hide all recommendations everywhere.
I also fixed the video in place so I could scroll through comments of howto videos to see if any of the commenters had corrections or improvements to the methodologies without losing the video content itself. It does that on mobile by default, but not on a desktop.
Here's an idea: Don't give your children unsupervised access to the internet. Yeah she might still access this stuff at school, but when I was in middle and highschool pre-2007 there's no way I'd ever get away with watching videos on a school computer during class. It's hard to imagine teachers are somehow more relaxed about this in 2019 and I'd be amazed if youtube wasn't blocked on school networks anyway.
There's nothing a 10 year old NEEDS internet access for on private computer or phone.
It's probably time to lean on the Goog a bit and get them to stop feeding Alex Jones and his ilk with unsolicited "recommendations" that run counter to previously viewed videos messaging. I get it. They think that people should leave their filter bubbles, but they equate all points of view as equally educational, when common sense would point out that some points of view on some topics should be considered off-limits. If I say "I want to live" and your point of view is "die mofo die!" do we really need to compromise on merely mutilating me? perhaps your point of view can be entirely dismissed in such a case, as situationally wrongful. Morality has social functionality, gasp.
But I reckon that 1) there's likely no state actor with sufficient power to control the goog by now, accumulated dirt being accumulated dirt, pols having browsing histories, money having value, and all...
2) there's likely to be no such reaction here on Hacker News due to this malicious algorithm being considered a form of "free speech" I suppose.
Here I always figured on tech being a liberalizing social force, but between FB and the G, it's going downhill rather swiftly...
> I’ve tried to go in and manually delete all recommended videos, put in parental controls, everything (including blocking the app) — but she’s finding ways to log on using browsers and school computers.
You addressed it by saying she couldn't possibly watch videos at school, which is silly.
There's plenty of educational content on YouTube. A lot of school firewalls only block stuff that's been tagged as age-restricted content. Or students may know how to get around the block. Or she may be watching on her friends' phones. (The parent says "school computers", but how would they know for sure?) All this can happen during lunch, or before or after school, or between classes.
It is impossible to directly monitor 100% of a school-age child's internet access unless you homeschool them, never let them go to the library or talk to other kids, and sit and watch them while they do their homework.
What phenomenally useless advice, and an utterly uninformed perspective.
Who and how do you propose offer this "supervised access" in a meaningful fashion?
How do you adapt for the fact that children, when supervised, specifically avoid play that might subject them to additional scrutiny (for example, not using youtube, etc).
How do you address the lack of supervision in environments that aren't specifically at home, or when one parent finds different content problematic than another parent?
How do you ensure that two parents who are at odds (e.g. divorced couples, etc) coordinate what is permitted or not in an environment where the child has different rules in different environments?
Far from children not having internet access at school, the school my children attends recognizes the need to teach children how to think critically about online content, and both my 8 year old and 10 year old have had assignments to use youtube and other media sites to learn more about specific topics.
Far better advice would be to periodically review content your children view, and then have meaningful discussions about the content they are consuming, what makes it "good" or "bad", and encourage children to make better choices, and to discuss what they are seeing and learning.
As awful as Youtube is, it's not possible to block it out of kids lives, any more than porn magazines and other objectionable content could be kept out of the hands of children 30 years ago.
As you say in your last sentence, it’s impossible to keep porn magazines out of the hands of children, but yet we as a society are determined to at least try.
It’s all that’s suggested here, try to limit access, make it clear that some things aren’t to be watched at a young age.
Can you image what society would be like if people just had given up on restricting porn and said they could sell it to 10 year olds and play it in elementary school libraries?
I am not arguing for wholesale abandoning of parental controls, but there are relatively innocuous parental controls (for example, my kids tablets don't let them do anything between 10:00 pm and 9:00 am; they don't need it after bed time or before school, and if they do, then I can override it). On the other hand, there is invasive surveillance that copies off all traffic so that parents can review it, keystroke loggers, and other "spouseware" that makes sure that parents can intrude into every interaction. There are no doubt a subset of children who merit this kind of surviellance - children with health issues that need supervision so they don't harm others or themselves. For those edge cases, those tools make sense, but for most children, a more effective strategy is to listen to your children, respect their feelings, agree on boundaries, and have consistent and reasonable consequences for breaking those rules.
Anything else says to children that you don't trust them, and that will lead to them developing a habit of keeping secrets and hiding things from parents, and that is a pathway to children not talking to parents when there are unsafe interactions because they are afraid of the consequences of asking for help and admitting that they broke the rules.
We hold cigarette companies responsible for letting us know their products may cause harm. We hold food and beverage companies responsible for what they put on their labels. We label coffee cups with a "Hot!" warning.
I hear you on personal responsibility, however, I think that comes from a place where you have or had time and space to educate yourself on this (apologies: using "you" very generally here and don't mean to imply you specifically). Most readers here have deep experience with YouTube and the consumer web--I've been on the web since Compuserve in the mid 90s and a hundred people who read this thread can one-up me. Think about how many people are coming onto the web for the first time. YouTube is a source of truth to them. They're told that Facebook has a "News" feed--and that's what they think is in their feed: literal and true news.
I'm trying to consider it from that perspective. My first reaction is to say: if you don't like it, just ignore it. If you don't want to get addicted to something, don't try it. It's up to you, as an individual, to own your life. I still feel that to be true, however...
I'm still considering how I feel but I think it's more complex than that my gut reaction indicates. We're not making decisions just for the informed 10% and I do think there is ground to be given up by the platforms.
I think adding tools to help users address the latter is worthwhile, but I don't think the former is actually a problem.
"... and YouTube irresponsibly recommends that content to people who are likely to be negatively affected by it".
The latter is what I meant by "content I don't like exists on YouTube".
From the article:
>I started searching for “fail videos” where people fall or get a little hurt.
>My 10-year-old sweet daughter innocently searched for “tap dance videos”[...]
The same pattern applies to many of the other stories in the article. (There's more than just the ten on the first page. Click "load more stories" at the bottom of the page.)
Also didn't know there were more than the first 10 because I browse with js off by default, which hides the "more" button.
Sure it's still there if you are logged in, but if you aren't you can only clear the browser (cookies) etc. To get ride of annoyances, but this isn't a feature a less technical versed use is aware about, especially because they are "annoyed about youtube not their browser, right?".
Well anyway the main problem doesn't lie with youtube specifically but the idea that this kind of systems are a good idea.
----
This kind of systems ==> in the sense of very complex, opaque interwinded systems of targeted advertisement and recommendation system which are not meant to give you the best experience but keep you as long as possible on the platform. Which also through constant change of rules try their best to prevent people from gaming the system but in the end only end up hurting quality content providers through constant changing rules, and their recommendation system _still_ gets hijack frequently by all kind of people (from stupid annoying hidden advertisements, over *phobic hate propaganda, subtle political propaganda to cults like thinks).
Anyway in the end this is not only a technical problem but also a social one one more than one layer.
Also tbh. I would be more worried about many of the other modern user provided multimedia platforms then youtube.
But well, one problem is that many people have the misconception that youtube (and others) are safe. It isn't especially not for young kids, even if it doesn't contain porn or other "obvious" adult stuff.
I watch videos on youtube either if they come from channels I have chosen to subscribe to, or specific videos I have been linked to from outside (friends, reddit, hn, etc). The idea that I would watch, say, anti-LGBT videos that were auto-recommended after watching a drag queen's channel just seems silly. Why would I just click into those hateful videos? I didn't want them! So I don't watch them!
I'm sympathetic to the idea that borked recommendations algorithms can be frustrating and obnoxious but at the end of the day, every video I watch is a video I _chose_ to watch, and I just choose not to watch garbage. I don't understand why other people seem to find making this choice to be so difficult
Sure people can quit watching those recommended videos anytime they want, but the feed is carefuly curated to make you keep watching and watching and potentially also altering your beliefs. That is I believe YouTube crosses the line. It has to remain responsible.
Similarily our experience of sadness and happiness tends to be a comparative assessment (compared to 5 seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks ... ago).
So if you are a platform that generates income from advertisement, and if advertisements must be felt as positive, you optimize for negative background (content) videos, such that the advertisements are relatively positive as a result. Now is that a reflection of the consuming individual's character flaws? I think not
Everybody knows deep pockets buy fake views to promote their content. Youtube in turn favors them to promote virality, and people are exposed with uninteresting or unwanted content, but still addictive. The more addictive, the more profitable.
They do have a responsibility, unless you think a company can make money selling weapons. Oh wait!
Surely the billions we threw at safe AI must be paying off anytime now right?
A YT user must develop the habit of downloading anything that appears valuable.
Hope that the irony of a story like this getting pushed away from the front page by an algorithm isn't lost on people :)
www.youtube.com##.html5-endscreen
##.ytp-pause-overlay
www.youtube.com###secondaryIt's really nice having one account used purely for music (with all the associated music recommendations), another for consuming news etc.
Bypassing soft paywalls becomes easier as they're different sessions (that aren't incognito, so don't trigger incognito detection). Having a 'no.JS' profile is the fastest way to skip soft paywalls.
I started getting suggested things like "Biggest Hillary Fails" and "Jordan Peterson DESTROYS WHOEVER" over and over and over, and it got quickly got darker with things about how problematic immigration was and weird fan "documentaries" about senior SS leaders.
I'm way too suspicious (to a fault) of everything I take in, but I can imagine other people going down real holes if they were served the same terrible suggestions.