Comment by JDiculous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JDiculous | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with Youtube autoplay is that at some point it just keeps recommending the same 3-5 songs you've already listened to over and over again. I was listening to music on Youtube just now and they just auto-played the previous playing song. Because of this you can't rely on Youtube to play music at say a party unless you make a playlist in advance (which Youtube doesn't allow you to do while you're listening to music on desktop, which is just negligently awful UX).

Why can't they fix this? It'd be extremely simple to implement basic logic to prevent recommending you the same songs you've already listened to over and over again - or even perhaps give you the option to prevent recommending you songs you've already listened to altogether. But as it is right now, there is no way to customize your recommendations other than selecting "not interested" on individual videos/channels.

How is Youtube's recommendation engine this awful? How come you still can't search for and queue up your next video while you're playing a video? It's not exactly rocket science to fix these. Isn't Google supposed to have the "best" engineers?

I’ve removed my YouTube history just to avoid getting the same video suggestions over and over again. So it has to take guesses from other people’s history instead of mine.

For now, it seems better.

And don't recommend shit I've already watched or rejected (Netflix, Amazon).

It's maddening.

I was briefly on the recommendations team of a fashion retailer.

Embarrassingly, it took me way too long to figure out the whole exercise is a sham. There's just so much wishful thinking and hectares of crap data to sift thru. And after chewing thru layer after layer of data and algos, it's somewhat hard to accept there's nothing there. Fool's gold.

The org kinda had a sense that something wasn't working, without really knowing how or why. So the pointed haired bosses were doing the kabuki dance from "relevant" to "personalized" results.

Meanwhile, I remain desperate to have a recommender tell me which shirt to buy. I hate shopping. (Yes, I've both studied and tried StitchFix and others.)

The algorithm is just astonishing. A while back I (and many others) got recommended https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLmuF-0P4tk (climatic scene of Falling Down) with the category "Music". It seems everyone expected some mashup of the movie with Billie Eilish, but we got trolled by the algorithm instead.

> How come you still can't search for and queue up your next video while you're playing a video?

I have actually gotten this feature about a week ago. I suppose it's slowly and quietly rolling out.

But without that, you can add to the end of a playlist that's currently playing, as long as there's a buffer after the current video. The tab that's playing the playlist reloads the queue when proceeding to the next video.

As in you’re working on a YouTube team? Sounds like great forward progress! Can you give any comment on the repeated autoplays? Seems like that would indeed be a relatively simple feature that would add a lot of value.

google's apps literally compete with themselves.

They now have Youtube 'premium' and youtube 'music' subscriptions which i assume are what eat up the good features like the music algorithm.

> Why can't they fix this?

I suspect this is intentional way to promote YouTube Music, just like all these "Are you still here? Thanks for confirming!" popups that pause the playback.

And the fact that the android app stops playing when the screen turns off (but the paid one won't, it helpfully says).

I use the mobile site + Firefox + this add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...

And have one google application less to install on my phone.

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