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Comment by baking | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who regularly browses their Youtube recommendations knows that the algorithm changed dramatically a few months ago.

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They pretty much nerfed it entirely. At least to my eyes, it seems to only "recommend" more videos of exactly the same topic from the same channels more often than not. It used to show videos that were along the same lines as the ones I watched but not necessarily exactly the same topic. It seemed to be better about following somewhat tenuous links between videos that ofter turned up new and interesting channels and related information.

It seems they're trying to play it safe by strictly showing the same thing you just watched. The bias seems to be heavily towards your recent watch history. You can actually see this in action if you go through your subscribed channels and watch a few videos from channels that you haven't visited recently. The change to your feed is immediately apparent.

I've also noticed that they seem to have blacklisted or at least severely downranked some channels even when you are subscribed so they rarely show up in recommendations. These aren't even controversial channels but they don't squarely fit into a category either. Overall it feels like they've shackled a previously good recommendation engine in order to appease their loud critics. I'm really hoping someone can create a viable competitor soon, I'll abandon YouTube in a heartbeat once there's another option.

I honestly think it's designed for infants and toddlers who watch the same videos hundreds of times.

Almost every child I've seen in the past 5 years has had YouTube in their hands.

I would expect all their data points to the idea they should suggest the same video over and over again.

I've also noticed the infants of my friends don't know how and have no interest in skipping the ads.

So long as Google can continue to plausibly claim it's women in their 30s-40s watching the nursery rhyme video (because that's who's logged in), they can continue to rake in the more expensive advertising associated with that demographic.

> So long as Google can continue to plausibly claim it's women in their 30s-40s watching the nursery rhyme video (because that's who's logged in), they can continue to rake in the more expensive advertising associated with that demographic.

That stops working when the advertisers realize they aren’t making any sales from those ads.

True, but ads dont just sell products, they also sell ways of thinking by frame.

You also have to think about the people who use Youtube to listen to musics. I assume music tastes don't differ that much.

But honestly, the moment they decide to make arbitrary decisions about what videos should be played next they are going to make some miscalculations. Some times they just made worst calculations than average.

> I assume music tastes don't differ that much.

I wouldn't make that assumption. Personally, I have a wide range of musical genres that I listen to and those tastes change over time, even month to month depending on how I'm feeling. I've met enough people that say similar things to think this isn't uncommon.

It's not like they announced this. I suppose they're always tuning it against spammers.

I haven't realized :/.

Do you have some examples ?

Now that I think about it, I distinctly remember is that at some point Youtube started throwing lots of "it's always sunny in philadelphia" scenes at my face.

I am not even angry, I discovered my favorite show this way.

I used to see a heavy dose of my subscribed channels in my recommendations, now only a fraction of them are represented. We're talking channels where I watch nearly every video they post but they won't show up in my recommendations. There's clearly stuff Youtube "likes" and even a naive recommendation engine would perform better.

Same here. That's why I changed a couple of subscribed channels to send me notifications, it puts updates of these channels in the notifications area and sends me an email for every update. The June 2019 change of algorithm was that big and hostile that I had to turn on notifications.

interesting, there must be some variation in the algorithm.

I have just loaded Youtube and in the 8 recommendations above the fold :

- 4 of them are from my subscriptions

- 1 is the last published in a series of videos I have been watching, published 2 hours ago

- 1 is from a channel I have never watched AFAIK, but contains a sketch from a comic duo I watched often on Youtube

- leaving 2 lectures that don't come directly from what I watched recently.

If anything, I would prefer if Youtube was pushing way more original topics.

One thing I have remarked is that their algorithm is very "grippy". Once it identifies a topic you might be interested in, it makes sure to find other videos on the same topic.

As an example I stumbled on a beautiful video about what life is like for an man with autism. The next day Youtube recommended me a video where women with autism talk about their lives (actually I remember having already watched that video several years ago, so a meh recommendation). Today Youtube wants me to watch a video about autistic children in China.

Also, with the magic of A/B groups, we might be running on 2 very different algorithms for all we know.

> even a naive recommendation engine would perform better.

I think you are underestimating the complexity of the problem :)

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