Mozilla project exposes YouTube's recommendation 'bubbles'
engadget.com
engadget.com
Anyone who has used YouTube enough while logged in probably has noticed how music playlists start looping the same songs and how recommendations start repeating.
I've found that the best method to avoid that is actively reverse train the suggestion "neural net" or whatever they use. Asking friends for video recommendations, refreshing page multiple times when recommendations are all too similar, marking suggestions of known topics as boring, clicking on new topics more than old ones and so on.
It's really rather fascinating how easy it is to fall into a bubble and how hard is it to extend it. I do suspect it works great for most users and that's why it is like that.
However, I have refrained from clicking on videos before even if they seemed interesting in the moment, because I don't want to extend my "bubble" in that direction (I've gotten that before). So in my experience, the bubble is actually too easy to extend.
EDIT: on the other hand, a few days back I accidentally used private browsing on a technical video and got a few of those mythical good ads of the sort that inform you about a genuinely interesting and relevant product you didn't know about. So maybe it's not the worst thing ever.
It's not been blocking youtube ads for me for a week or two.
At least that's how it works for my account even though I'm completely uninterested in the guy.
It's gotten to the point where I don't click links simply because I don't want to get spammed.
You are so not interested in him that you a) know his name and b) watch his videos?
If you want to get rid of something you only clicked once, click something you like 2-3 times and it will not be listed in the first results anymore. After some time it will disappear if you really do not watch this kind of content.
This works with and without account.
In general it seems that social media regarding news and politics is almost always toxic and should be avoided.
Twitter in particular is entirely awful because the format prohibits any intelligent discourse.
Yes to the point where looking for content on prehistory can lead to flat earther conspiracy theory rubbish.
Maybe if youtube did not keep you in an etertainment bubble you would find much more music you unexpectedly enjoy from artists or genres you haven't heard of.
For example, when I'm in the mood to watch sailing videos, I don't want to get bombarded with Taylor Swift's latest concert (which I have absolutely no interest in) in the recommendations. My interests don't necessarily align with what's "popular", and anything bubble-less will necessarily have the popularity of something as one of its inputs.
Compare that with news, where some events are important enough that _everyone_ should know about them (COVID-19, for example), local events affect you more, etc. There, the bubble is a hindrance to your situation awareness.
As for music, I mostly use Google Play Music for that, through which I have discovered a lot of new artists.
It shows what the homepage looks like for someone in a variety of different bubbles. You knew it was happening, this exposes how it looks.
We have to take control back!
I see YouTubers claim that YT does this, but personally, I've never encountered a single video on a channel that I'm subscribed to that didn't show up in my subscriptions feed. I've also never seen direct evidence, it's only YouTubers claiming that this is happening to their subscribers, as a way of explaining some downturn in the number of views. I suspect many of them are confused about the "notification" feature, which I don't know I've ever seen anyone actually use. (Also, sometimes a video can get stuck in "processing", in which case it won't show up in the feed until it's finished processing.)
Do you have some examples of this happening? I'm almost certain if you could provide screenshots, e.g. of the channel and of your subscription feed, showing the missing video, that YouTube would consider this a bug. The subscription feed is supposed to show all the new videos from channels you're subscribed to.
This is also my experience, I've even closely paid attention to the videos of YouTubers that claim this type of thing is happening and I still have always seen their videos appear in my feed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT3lnEJVuGA
See comments, this was definitely happening to several subscribers.
What I find good, in a way, is that I get bored quick and get off Youtube, otherwise it could be a serious time blackhole.
I think the only way to escape their recommendation engine is to use an outside source to index youtube videos and control/randomize it better from there.
This is one thing that infuriates me. They do SUCH a poor job of branching out compared to other services, including Google Music.
But now that I have my personalized "bubble", I'm utterly disappointed. At least from my observation, it mainly uses three strategies: 1) repeating what I've seen, 2) offering video from the same channels I've watched from, and 3) suggesting really popular videos.
The repeat is the worst, especially since it seems to favor interviews, funny clips, etc. which are not really re-watch worthy, even if they were a good watch for the first time.
Then, since I haven't subscribed to a lot of channels, 2) is melding into 1).
At this point, I don't even look at the "Home" tab anymore. I do a refresh on my subscribed list, and if nothing is there, I just move on.
They recommendations are fixated on YOU as in the last search or viewing instead of the sum of the content viewed. So a day of just looking at Cat videos equates to I want all Cat videos now and forever until I search for something else.
Also, there is not degree of separation for showing new / thought of content. Or simply put, a meson to walk through the bookstore and see something you never though of looking for and become interested.
This seems to help me. Also I will mark videos as not interested.
But yeah I notice I watch one video and then I get a lot of recommendations related to it. Sometimes I like it and sometimes I don't.
This article from Mozilla's is even worse, burying the link in the third paragraph instead of the first: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/step-inside-someone-e...
But at least it goes to https://their.tube. Engadget links to http://their-tube.com instead.
That said, I see how this is a problem, but what is the solution? Do away with recommendations altogether?
- [1]: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/how-tiktok-recommends-vide...
* https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/03/tiktok-ow...
* https://www.altpress.com/news/tiktok-censorship-black-lives-...
* https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-l...
Youtube may allow 99.9%, but its algorithm is biased toward what the user has recently watched.
I didn't know about this though. Thanks for mentioning it.
I also don't know if it's because of other users behaviors or maybe channels pay for the exposure, but I've seen certain channels or topics take over the recommendation list more than other topics. Or there's the issue where the recommendation list beside a video is all "recommended for you" and not even related to the video. On mobile they had to add a button for showing videos actually related to the video you're watching, but it feels like sometimes even that's hit or miss.
I'm okay with a recommendation engine when it doesnt get stuck in this loop of recommending the same videos over and over. For now, I just delete my YouTube history about once a month to get new recommended videos.
Part of this may be youtubes fight to subvert people leaving keywords in the descriptions of videos so instead they're analyzing different things trying to build the heuristic. I know there's a lot that goes into the engine so it could be any number of things.
Worse is when they wipe that red bar. It's amnesiac, just like Google Search and Chrome, those too forget older things. I personally find it very annoying.
This may surprise you, but if I like a video I'll watch it a few dozen times. I say this might surprise you since it certainly surprises my friends who make this complaint.
The accommodations the algorithms make for people like me is probably making it worse for people like you.
I'm the kind of person that can never watch a film twice within the same year (normally longer), same with series
More enjoyment than anything else I can think to watch? All the time.
Funnily, for feature length films I can only watch them once every few years as well.
People intentionally bubble themselves, Twitter with it's much weaker suggestion algorithm has netted the same result, it really takes a special type of person to fight that.
Would I get videos about how bikes suck?
What people who complain about "filter bubbles" mean is that they're sad that traditional media's hold over what people watch is weakening but that's a good thing. I don't need more people telling me that "orange man bad".
All the cool stuff that isn't related to IT stuff or retro computing I've found through comments on hn or elsewhere. Like that guy that restores matchbox cars, or the other one who builds dioramas.
I'd really like to know how their recommendations even work for starters. It currently just seems some simple "more of the same" stuff. Could they not just look at the last 100 videos I watched, then find 1000 users who watched as many of those as possible and look for common videos in their history that I haven't seen yet. Maybe even make sure those videos have as few tags in common with my 100 videos as possible to help discover really new content. Really I have so many ideas I'd try if I had such a huge source of information available, instead YouTube feels like the dumbest "more of the same" algorithm they could come up with.
For how long though? In a short session it does make sense but having that trail you along for weeks to months is not only annoying but misguided as well, it diminishes the richness and the variety of the content and kills exploration.
This should come with a reset button or simply be based on your last search or something like that.
And there should be a way to block channels that you don't find interesting. There are some channels that I am not interested into their content that keep on showing on my recommednation list no matter what I am searching for. I want that to go away and without a plugin or some hacks that is not possible on youtube.
Lately, most/all of the recommendations are based globally on every video i've ever watched, so the recommendations are almost the same no matter what video i watch, so it's tougher to discover new things. For some reason, it insists on constantly recommending videos i have watched before, which is annoying. Maybe it's because i use youtube as a music player often and i do repeat videos. It is amazing for video game OSTs, which i enjoy and are hard to find anywhere else.
I could certainly see how this could lead people into isolated thought bubbles, especially with how the algorithm is lately compared to a few years ago, it has happened with myself to some extent.
This has all the hallmarks of one of those changes driven by single-minded metric chasing (engagement!) instead of principled reasoning on what the product should do and feel like to use.
That said, i also think production value in popular channels has really skyrocked the last few years. We've entered kind of a golden age for user generated content, for better or worse. It is very entertaining but very much more addicting.
For example, i watched a guy for years who reviewed classic synthesizers and made silly songs. He has recently made an entire 2hr documentary on the history of ARP synthesizers with engineer interviews and everything! It is like some Ken Burns level stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l31RXiVSI9s Nothing on youtube existed like this a few years ago. It is an amazing world we live in now.
I can't imagine trying to administrate / police all of the people / content on youtube. It's an impossible task. There are hundreds of millions of users with thousands of hours of content being generated every second of every day. It also cost more to run than it generates, so it's practically a public service. I wish there were more customization for recommendations though.
The insanity is deeper than that:
1) YouTube recommends videos they _know_ you watched before (they're marked as watched).
2) YouTube forgets which videos you've watched after a few months. Google, of all companies, forgets what I've watched. WTF?
3) So even if YouTube didn't recommend videos you've watched before, they'll forget in a few months anyway and recommend it again.
4) And you can't mark videos as watched. Say you watched a video elsewhere. YouTube recommends it to you. But you've already seen it. Can't mark it as watched. Can't make Google not recommend it. Even if you could, they'll just forget in a few months.
5) Watched a video, but skipped the last 5 minutes because it's sponsorship content? YouTube: Better not mark that as watched and instead recommend that you finish it for the next few months.
YouTube likely isn’t forgetting that you’ve watched it. It is probably suggesting it again because it thinks it has been enough time you’d want to watch it again.
No, they do. Videos that you've watched are marked as such. They have a red bar at the bottom of the video thumbnail that shows how much of the video you've watched. For ones you've watched all the way through, it's just a solid red bar.
After a few months, YouTube just forgets. I can go to, say, Chubbyemu's channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/ChubbyemuGames/videos), which I've watched most videos on, and it only shows that I've watched videos 6 months or newer. YouTube forgets everything past that.
The point of my post was multi-fold. YouTube will recommend a video they _know_ you've watched; it's got the red bar at the bottom. But even if they didn't do that, they'll forget in six months anyway and recommend it anyway.
> Some people, like me, will watch the same video multiple times, if not dozens.
Hmmm, yeah, you're right. I do the same. Must be that their AI has learned that behavior, but hasn't quite figured out what makes a video "rewatchable" yet.
For whatever reason I was fixated on the word 'forgetting' meaning that /all/ records where lost or deleted and that it couldn't mean they just get rid of the visual indicator after some time in order to trick you.
Upon reflection, that's a bit silly of me. Sorry.
But yeah, it's possible that Google does keep the records around, but don't surface it in the UI after six months for some reason. Could be an optimization, to keep the edge databases lean. Or it could be a weird dark pattern.
I consume a lot of video content and I've learned to curate my watch history (what to watch/search for in incognito versus watch logged in; what to delete from my history etc) so that my youtube homepage actually consistently has a lot of high quality discovery.
One thing I systematically do is avoid videos that are anywhere between 10m00s and 10m20s in length: those are almost always videos that have been arbitrarily lengthened to meet some ad length milestones. I've even seen videos slowed down by some percentage just to fucking get to 10 mins.
Also apparently youtube's changing the milestone to 8 minutes soon, so I'm going to watch out for those too…
The second category covers topics with lots of content so It would overwhelm the other interests.
YouTube some times asks me how do I feel about my recommendations and some times all of them are interesting. But I can't watch them all (maybe I should add them to watch later, to tell the algorithm that I care)
The turning point was when they allowed us to tell the algorithm which videos were not relevant.
Interesting that it seems to suggest that preppers aren't /truly/ prepping for these scenarios, or that the scenarios aren't real. If anything, it seems like Covid-19 has proved a surprising number of preppers right in some sense.
It may not be a zombie situation where people need large stores of ammo, but the modern world can fall apart to such a degree that the ability to survive outside of dependence on normal systems is an advantage.
A pandemic was consistently predicted as one of the biggest risks to the world by people like Bill Gates. But the preppers were not super interested.
Also, prepping channels seems to be a bit obsessed with things as opposed to skills.
You need to prep by having the skills, and having the materials. It may be a good idea to know how to make the materials, but that assumes time which means you need a supply
The real life pandemic scenario is 'solved' (in the same sense) by listening to Government advice, being considerate of others and staying at home and watching TV.
I beg to differ. The CDC insisted masks don't work until April, the WHO until June.
We had the whole 'masks don't work' song and dance too and by all accounts England is one of the worst countries for mask adoption rates despite a decent majority of the country thinking that they work, adoption rates might change a little when masks become mandatory in shops in a little over a week but for most people it's after the strict lockdown has ended and well past the point of being necessary. So I'd agree with you here, it has been very hard to take the official advice seriously and it's a real shame that a government is muddying the waters for political reasons.
https://twitter.com/10DowningStreet/status/12467792104101437...
https://twitter.com/10DowningStreet/status/12468073039756206...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1114375/wearing-a-face-m...
The Scandinavian results are interesting but they do seem to be outliers, Sweden is definitely an outlier but maybe if you look at all the Nordic countries and include Iceland the results won't be too interesting.
The real preppers are Mormon families who follow LDS guidelines for keeping their pantry stocked with one-year's supply of food to provide for their family.
How they survive the end of civilization is something I've never understood. If the world population is in the thousands odds are you are dead.
If you want to be sustainable, get a crossbow instead.
A crossbow is a terrible idea as well. You need specialized machines in order to re-string it let alone if any other part fails. If your plans require zero reliability to civilization then traditional archery or an ~100lbs recurve bow modified with a trigger and a compound aim is your best bet.
Most preppers I've run into are preparing for scenarios in which they finally get to shoot people that they don't like, and expect that people who don't like them will try to take their stuff and kill them, too. A lot of them are preparing for fantasy situations that they're strangely excited about. Through that lens, prepping isn't very different than live action role-playing.
Right in some senses, wrong in others. The world went a little crazy, but there wasn't a total collapse of society. Grocery stores still have food in them, the world still turns.
I guess I have to stop browsing Engadget.
But it's mostly just blogspam. Here's the real project
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkWmiNRPU-c
I suspect that "sticky content" like conspiracy videos is just as difficult for Google as it is for us -- certain content is just magnetic, for one psychological reason or another.
The big takeaway from that interview for me was that "time watched" is the biggest metric, not likes, clicks, subscriptions, etc. I guess that makes sense, given that time is a bit like currency. But sometimes what people think they like doesn't line up 1:1 with what they actually like.
There are some channels that I used to watch that I no longer see as a result of this, but then there are others I wasn't aware of that I now see.
I'm careful now to not watch what I consider junk, and if I want to watch anything I don't want my suggestions to be influenced by, I do so in a private browsing window.
More seriously, I wonder if one could determine the "strength" of a bubble's wall and then check that against the expected time spent online by a group.
If you want to see a "default" youtube homepage for your IP's location, incognito is enough.
Google isn't brazen enough to show you recommendations without cookies, despite them being capable of tying your sessions together.
I don't use the app on iOS. If you need higher than 720p playback for a video you can request desktop site.
Amazon is. I see pages show up in my products-viewed history (logged in) after viewing them incognito.
I personally find that unpersonalized homepage rather offensive. It often considers small countries near a large one as a part of it as the borders are unclear for its algorithms. The same happens with things like Google Play.
You can achieve the same effect by logging out Google account in your browser.
There is a limited time, and within that limited time you will be in an informational bubble because of the opportunity cost of new information
Otherwise it always seems to ultimately lead to conspiracy style videos. I may start with some DIY videos, archeology, history, physics or even MMA...then a couple recommendations in its Basically “fail videos” and conspiracy videos. As of late I’m also loaded up with pizza reviews which is ironic because I’m generally following low carb or keto regimens.
Their focus is ads. Top videos mean ads are watched more often so that's what they promote. Everything is geared that way and creating bigger, less heterogeneous groups means there are less "niche" videos. I'm sure their AI has worked out the smallest number of groups that spans the biggest amount of users and drives views upwards that way.
If you don't want to get caught in the pooptube loop, don't subscribe, don't create an account and get recommendations offsite. They are more likely more diverse. In fact, if you want new stuff, don't go on youtube, go to vimeo, peertube, dtube, or whatever else has tube appended to its name.
This is in contrast to when I use YouTube as a library of videos that I walk up to in order to look something up in that I want to know about.
Now even when it's some guy's hand made animation they did in college, I feel kind of guilty that the only reason I cared to see it was because YouTube gave it to me, and also that I didn't know what I was looking for to begin with so I essentially went "well, that will have to do."
Maybe that will work for keeping me off YouTube until I start believing that I have absolutely nothing better to do with my time again.
I have kind of weird tastes that go from old country to happy hardcore to synthwave to many different genres and it's just weird how I get songs in the youtube mixes that are extremely unrelated to one another. I could be wrong, but it seems like it used to be much better than it is now.
"The means of filter bubbles must be in the hands of the users!" as the latest rallying cry.
I can think of a few other examples off the top of my head where their services could be improved easily but no one seems to care.
Like for example the youtube autoplay algorithm, which is often useless. Here's a crazy idea Youtube, why not check which other videos are in the recent queue and play content based on all of them? Instead of just the last one.
Usually when Autoplay takes over I've already queued up a few videos on my own, I've literally spoon fed them.
The YT Music UI is pretty bad too but that's a new product so it might improve. As a long time Google play music user I complacently migrated my playlists over and decided to give YT Music a go.
First week I only use it to play my Electro Work playlist, basically EDM and Psy/Goa.
Every time I start the app I begin at the Home screen with their recommendations to me, and not one single time do they recommend anything from or related to that playlist.
And every single time I browse away from the Home screen and start that same playlist.
The recommendations of YT Music seem to be based on my YT history, not my MUSIC history.
I sincerely hope they solve the issue of destructive fringe videos.
They appear to "go by the numbers" and effectively bucket all users together.
So children, who almost all use YouTube and want to watch the same content repeatedly, get categorized the same as say, me.
Then they look for the largest patterns without discriminating or partitioning and just cater to that.
So for search, they'll ignore the focused queries and just return general results. They place amateur and sophisticated computer users in the same giant bag.
This is why the order of the tabs on search (web/products/images/videos) just dance around and are totally inconsistent.
It's also why they axe projects and strip features, replacing them with effectively the bubbly hazy shoppingmall version of the feature.
Image sizes no longer have numbers in the toolbar. It's some amorphous icon, medium, and large.
It doesn't even serve the ends they are looking for. If I was really unsophisticated, I'd look for an "icon" and then be frustrated because, say Apple, requires 1024x1024 icons, which I will absolutely not get with the "icon" size filter. So not only are we worse off, but the newer way doesn't even service the demographic they're targeting.
Another example, same pattern: Recently all my android devices seem to have a much smaller dictionary on their gboard keyboard. Less common words are impossible to swype and perfectly valid, correctly spelled words are getting the red squiggly underneath them because apparently, using an uncommon word must have been an error. Almost every day I'm pulling up a dictionary to make sure I'm not making a mistake.
I call this "design by dictator" syndrome: some person or group (called the design group) is given unlimited unilateral authority over all aspects of a product. It's the opposite extreme of "design by committee". Nobody else can question or change things.
When nobody is allowed to say "that idea is stupid" then you end up getting stuff with lots of stupid ideas. There's a reason why the one word critical means "very important", "detailed", and "judgmental". Uncountable empires have fallen when it is ignored.
Back in the 90s/early 2000s when I did windows development, Microsoft was really quite good at bucketing users. There were "channels of usage" available which facilitated many kinds of needs and many kinds of users.
By ignoring the variation of sentiment, Google has lost its magic and in their quest to please everyone while assuming everyone is fundamentally the same, they end up leaving the majority minority dissatisfied.
https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_...
which tracks you transparently, my router is blocking it so I got "Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site." DNS resolution error in Firefox
Secondly, our interests and preferences are temporal in nature. Things I was interested in 6 months ago may not be things I'm interested in now. For example, today I clicked on my YouTube "Watch Later" list and now the engine is suggesting I watch A Garfield Christmas Special.
Finally, some people enjoy variety. I want to know what new music or genres are going on, but musical recommendations seem to loop back to the same things. Google Play also always defaults to 90s alternative for me. While I enjoy the genre, I would never have developed my preferences for artists like Fela Kuti or Baby Metal by listening to a curated list of things an algorithm thinks I'll LIKE. Note, it only wants to suggest things it knows I'll like or things with close approximation to known liked things. There is no incentive to explore UNKNOWN things because of fear the user will UNLIKE it and stop using the product.
I have used YT since 2006 and sure, the recommendations are shit, but thats because they are LESS personalized than they used to be. Sometimes you don't want a video view to count for anything in your personalization, and other times you probably will. Imo. It should be based on your subscriptions and what other who view those generally watch. But it seems like youtube is going away from subscriptions and channels and into a scheme where they pick the content they want to feed you with (Start page prioritizes "random" videos instead of your subscribed channels etc.)
Again I don't understand what the big deal is here, should youtube plaster my start page with pop music and make up tutorials that they know I will never watch?
I wouldn't say that either and the current state of recommendation system research simply does not have an answer yet. Your proposed suggestion of basing suggestions by subscription and similar users is what they are doing. However, while you may not see it, I would argue that does not mean it does not exist, as evident by the article and the discussions people are having in this thread.
> should youtube plaster my start page with pop music and make up tutorials that they know I will never watch?
In my preference, yes, though not to the extreme of pure random. I would enjoy seeing options I only select once in a blue moon or not at all. To me that allows for a sense of exploration. However, that is only my preference and your's may be entirely different. Again, I'd say this highlights issues with recommendation systems that maybe one model does not work well for everyone.
I don't want political mainstream "satire" garbage tonight shows in my media feeds.
I don't want "Muckbang".
I don't want sony music gangster hip hop with autotune and minors rapping about how much p they slay.
I don't want rich kid vbloggers talking about their sneakers.
I use the subscriptions as much as youtube allows for, but they do their best to make that a thing of the past.
If I want to explore I just hit the "Hot right now" section and loose a little faith in humanity. What absolute garbage.
Should there be better ways to explore? Possibly. But I don't see how normalizing start pages across users would accomplish that.
I disagree; however, I believe we have reached a point where we simply disagree with each other on foundational matters and no amount of discussion will sway the other. Please enjoy your content.