‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
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That's because I always watch high-quality educational content and some beautiful comforting and inspiring music. So for me YouTube is a fountain of knowledge, visual and musical aesthetics etc. Every day I get inspiration, healthy kind of fun and learn something cool, useful and healthy.
But people who watch stupid and destructive stuff (even once) are doomed because they are going to get the same and worse kind of content recommended over and over. This is a particularly underestimated social problem indeed.
That's why I recommend to avoid signing-in into YouTube. Better watch anonymously so you can always clean the cookies and get out of the pit.
Youtube recommends stupid crap based on what other people like.
If I watch one stupid video not in incognito, ALL of the recommendations become stupid videos because those videos have better metrics. Youtube actively guides me away from educational content.
Even within educational videos, if I click on a click-baity channel once, that channel dominates things I've watched MANY more time. It seems to all be about click-through metrics.
I've never had Youtube recommend really upscale educational content like Zach Star before. It's quality stuff, but you gotta find it yourself.
Back when I was not particularly into YouTube and hadn't had many great recommendations YouTube insisted I should watch Sapolsky's Harvard lectures - these probably had particularly good metrics. Once I started to watch them (and was very satisfied) more and more great recommendations started to appear.
> It's quality stuff, but you gotta find it yourself.
People should start sharing curated lists of high-quality no-bullish YouTube videos/channels. Kind of like those awesome-everything on GitHub.
If all else fails, create a new Google account for separate exclusive use should do the trick.
And isn't that terrifying, in the Parable of the Paperclip Maximizer kinda way?
We can make the well-its-your-individual-responsibility bootstraps argument, but that kinda works only if you believe in the supremacy of an individual's autonomy and that the mind can't be hacked or hijacked. Everything from addictive products to the marketing industry shows that isn't the case. The youtube paperclip maximizer is maximizing for your mind's engagement.
We can say "well, it's just feeding people what they want!" But you can say the same thing about airdropping crates of opium onto the streets.
In which case (if you truly believe that), we are all fucked anyway. Then who cares? Is youtube really your biggest problem?
> is maximizing for your mind's engagement.
So has media been doing for a long time, also all writers and poets, etc. Mind's engagement is not the only meaning of life, and most people act out this deep knowledge. I don't see a problem.
What's new and disturbing is 1) the degree of algorithmic personalization, and 2) that personalization goes to the highest bidder. Put together, we've built a marketplace for population-scale behavioral nudges, and the people who play that game have war-chests, not human-sized wallets.
The Facebook/Myanmar genocide is the Godwin's Law reference of the social media debate, but you don't need to look any further than the politicization of what should be neutral medical facts being fueled by recommendation-hole conspiracy theories to see the danger of all this.
I don't believe people are mindless spiritless bots, but I do believe our industry thrives on engineering ways to hack people's attention circuits. And what's terrifying is we've put a paperclip maximizing machine at the helm of all this.
Watching one calming video is unlikely to lead you to become addicted to calming videos. YouTube is optimized for the hook, and calming videos aren’t hooky.
The much more salient videos tend to be the sensational ones, and people who don’t have the understanding of that fact are much more easily hooked.
So while it can be a fountain of knowledge for one group of people, the insidious nature of the hooking algorithms still lurk beneath that surface.
My Watch Later has hundreds of hours of content from things that I definitely want to watch but I'm either not yet in the mood for or too long to get to now.
Seriously, youtube for all its flaws is an incredible human achievement on par with wikipedia.
Example: https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
If it's already saved, it'll do a new snapshot, but I believe the archive is smart enough not to duplicate saved youtube videos.
Additionally, there are the vague and ever-changing terms of service.
Also, people sometimes take stuff down themselves. Take the JRE, for a recent and rather prominent example.
I ask because this seems like a great idea. I've already written a script to read from a list and download and now I'm wondering if I don't just use use that instead of "watch later" going forward. Curious if you do anything beyond adding them one at a time I should consider before changing my approach.
I try to be careful and always use private browsing when opening "suspicious" videos, but every now and then, one slips and taints my recommendation.
OTOH, with a clean history, I barely subscribe to channels, since new videos usually end up in the recommendations, anyway.
You can individually remove videos by clicking on Delete (at least on desktop).
You can also pause your watch history (eg. for some guest browsing) or clear it entirely (if you want to start from scratch).
For those that, like me, hadn't seen this one before ^_^
This is a recurring grief I have with Google products: poor UI and a seeming inability to receive and/or act upon feedback from power users.
Indeed. It's a bad enough problem that one wonders whether the company is liable for its effects upon society.
It's not from watching "stupid destructive stuff", in the least. Plenty of full music albums often link to it, and amateur stuff.
Eh, you can always remove a video from your history. I just don't watch certain things, or watch them in a throwaway firefox container. Being able to maintain playlists and subscriptions is worthwhile.
Like you I get amazing music recommendations and educational content. It took concerted effort but my recommendations spot on for the most part.
I binged Nilered once and felt pretty terrible, I can't imagine how I would feel after a day of "peppa pig plays minecraft."
The ones based on my views are pretty good recommendations, the other type is usually extremist ragebait.
When you sign in, you can view your history and remove things you don't want the algo to work on.
Here's what to do instead: Sign in, and use your account to curate what you want to see. As you say, music, education, and for me, it's cookingtube, some non-toxic video game people for sim games and the like, etc.
And my algo recommendations are wonderful. The biggest issue is it forgetting about cool channels and hiding them, and I don't use the bell because I hate notifications, but generally speaking it does a great job.
But if you want to watch something that you DO NOT want the algo matching on: Open a private tab (or clean out your history).
It's actually not bad to keep it under control.
Oh, and when Youtube drops a redpill propaganda video in, or something similar, (it always will try to indoctrinate you into a radical ideology, no matter what), make sure to use the menu and tell it to fuck off and never show it again.
I've got it trained now. No politics! No radicalism! Just good, relaxing, well-made content.
You have to actively click "not I don't like this" when you see something low quality.
This means that the average joe will be spammed by low quality shite, where as the power user will get decent recommendation.
I do have a container tab just for youtube, to avoid polluting my recommends with embedded shite.
The others watch stupid, destructive, worse kind of content.
I guess everyone can claim the same because all these properties of what someone watch are highly subjective and a matter of taste, preferences and pure opinion.
For the record, YouTube is full of amazing German-language TV documentaries, and since many of them are posted by unofficial accounts (read: not the broadcaster's channel), it's the algorithm that surfaces them, not search.
It's also important to note that a lot of users similar to you never make it to this paragraph. They just assume the reports about the dangers are overblown.
When are companies going to give us more control over what inputs we give their recommendation algorithms? There should be a button that says "hey, I'm going to watch this because I'm only human, but please, don't show this junk to me". Or, "hey, I understand this content creator has thousands of videos and uploads content daily, but, I'm only interested in this one video, not in their daily vblog from today"
I literally watch 1/3 - 1/2 of all my videos now in incognito mode on YouTube, just because their algorithm is so aggressive when it comes to recommending junk / 'content creator' noise.
My guess is that they'll never do this, because they want you to go bad and watch as much of that junk as possible.
There definitely needs to be a "reset" button on these services, or at least a better way for your to actively monitor your algorithmically-determined interests and give feedback (I swear, you watch one SNL video...).
Another poster in the thread said you can do this by editing your watch history, which frankly would have never occurred to me as a way to influence the algorithm. It should be a more explicit feature for any sort of recommendation engine.
Overall the algo is very very recency-influenced. You can watch videos from a niche interest for a year straight, but if you then spend a week watching nascar, you'll never see anything but nascar videos for months unless you say "not interested".
I imagine they have found that for the average user, having a longer history doesn't improve G's metrics.
Really, why? (I'm curious.)
> There definitely needs to be a "reset" button on these services
The reset button already exists in this context: Google and YouTube have options to automatically purge your various histories at the 1/3/6 month marks.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/2/20895183/youtube-history-...
I would love to be NOT have any video recommended to me that contains certain keywords in it's metadata. I simply don't care what I would miss out on if all videos with the word "Trump" anywhere in their metadata, for example, would simply never be served up for my perusal.
Even better would be some type of "whitelist" feature which only shows me stuff from my subscribed channels and their associated channels.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
I don't think you should avoid signing in, when you see something you don't like just mark it as such and the algorithm seems to be pretty good at filtering in the future.
Since I am not as good with ignoring stupid stuff, I just open stuff I don't want to see in my recommendations in a private window. Works great!
To get rid of the annoying stuff, I added this to my uBlock Origin filters:
www.youtube.com###comments
www.youtube.com###related
www.youtube.com##.ytp-show-tiles.videowall-endscreen.ytp-player-content.html5-endscreen
This of course also eliminates ads.
The algorithm doesn't seem to be able to learn what interests me. My suspicion is that this is so because I have a lot of diverging interests that change from month to month. Still, this does not explain why Youtube keeps recommending channels and topics even when I never watch them.
The problem is that the algorithm seems biased so that one or two visits to shit causes you to fall down into a spiral of shit. That's probably because statistically when averaged across the entire YouTube user-base, shit leads to more time on the site. Shit is usually more divisive, inflammatory, etc., and negative emotions are the easiest path to engagement.
Virtually everything wrong with social media can be summarized by "negative emotions are the easiest path to engagement." Want to keep people on your site? Anger, offend, or scare them.
after months of having a fairly normal youtube experience basically only playing music I clicked on one Jordan Peterson video that was in a news article, and for the next few weeks all I got was alt-right content in my feed. I even tried to get rid of it by explicitly saying I don't want it recommended to me, which gets rid of the individual channels but similar stuff just keeps popping up.
Youtube overfits what people click on so badly, I have no idea how this isn't fixable by honstly just turning the recommendation system off and just giving me random crap, even that would be an improvement.
Not really my experience. I'm not sure but I have the impression that the recommendation heuristic is very time-sensitive. Let say I watch sailing videos for a few days, it tends to forget I was interested in guitars the previous week.
The flip side is, I somehow appear to have accidentally clicked subscribe on some insane Trumpist 'news' channel I probably stumbled on via a forum link, and it very quickly took over the push notifications on my phone. That might be subscribe functionality working as intended, but it took more effort to identify the source of nonsense spam and unsubscribe from it...
Second, it’s trivial to re-adjust recommendations: go to history and delete everything you didn’t like, and recommendations instantly will become much better.
Lifetime engagement is a function of watch time, right?
Turn off watch history, then only the videos you explicitly like will affect your recommendations.
Bonus Points: Use extension to turn off recommended panel on side of videos, then you only see recommendations when you go to home screen.
You must never be curious about things outside of your passions.
I play Fortnite with my kids casually. I looked up a howto a few weeks ago, and my recommendations are still 25% Fortnite related content, even though I only watched one video one time.
It's been happening for years. I looked up one old Norm Macdonald standup bit, and my recos changed immediately to Joe Rogan and adjacent talking heads. I watch one MKBHD video, and I'm overwhelmed with recos for unboxing and tech reviews.
The stuff I genuinely care about, music theory, is impossible to keep in my home page because YouTube doesn't value that engagement.
In general I've noticed that YouTube favors your "newest outliers" (let's call them) over stuff you've historically looked at. Probably the rationale (optimization metric?) is trying to capture you into content that might add to your total watch time on the platform.
Studies have shown how the prospect of an unknown reward riles up users of social media platforms. Is this a bad thing? It might depend on who you ask. For someone like me, who has been through multiple addictions (cigarattes, drugs), I know that abusing dopamine affects quality of life, productivity and happiness in general.
In that way, I think recommendation systems which optimize for higher engagement is toxic. I think there's value in having an AI do the heavy-lifting of choosing the right content for us. But, the AI's rewards should align with what I need, which is quality content tailored for me (whether or not it increases my engagement on that platform).
For media I grew up in the 70s and had the TV Guide. I'd look through to see what I wanted to watch, circle some things and then watch. No spying what-so-ever.
So, I like for example HN where AFAIK I'm not tracked so much and I choose what I want from the top of the list.
Conversely I mostly hate Amazon, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, and all the ad services and any other service that uses some algorithm to decide what to put in my face.
It's to the point that 3 out 4 time I'll open videos in private windows so they don't get added to my profile and used for recommendations.
I don't mind going to a tech sight and seeing ads for tech or a car site and seeing ads for cars. Do mind visiting an apartment listing site and then going around the net and having every other sight shove ads for apartments in my face.
Sadly, it’s largely your own history that clogs the recommendations. The less you use a recommendation engine the more relevant it becomes.
The search function recommends results that match your query. It's part of the same system!
-One of my managers
This is what I hear every time someone optimizes engagement.
I feel like I am in the minority in how I use YouTube. If someone shows me a video I'll watch it, but I don't browse YouTube.
The top of the list is the product of some recommendation algorithm. Clicking through https://news.ycombinator.com/newest, there were some 900 submissions in the past 24h; you probably chose from a small subset of that.
On Facebook "avoiding the algorithm" entails creating a friends list of all your friends, then using the link to that list as a portal into facebook. Posts and shares are listed in chronological order without anything missing (which is absolutely NOT true for the normal news feed, even when "chronological order" is selected). No "so-and-so commented on this" or "so-and-so liked that". Just posts and shares. Scroll through the feed until you recognize something, and you're done.
On youtube, you really should be going straight to subscriptions first. If you want to look for recommendations that's perfectly fine, you can go to the home page... but don't go there by default.
On reddit, I recommend using /r/all as a portal with some of the more obnoxious subreddits blocked.
I'm aware that what you see is still influenced by the algorithm in these examples, but the impact is reduced by a lot.
Browse with intention. Make deliberate choices. Don't just let the algorithm lead you around.
Remember, "the algorithm"s on these sites aren't designed for your benefit. They're designed to increase the site's metrics. More clicks. More time on that website.
But the website of all these site feels useless and slow to me. Recommendations were good on yt, but I think they stopped it during the election. So, I defaulted to newpipe and freetube.
You have to mainly keep to your subscriptions, and use recommendations occasionally.
Back when Netflix was a DVD delivery service, its personal recommendation system was fantastic. Rate things by stars, it would estimate how you'd rank movies based on users with similar tastes to you, so rather than trying to give the same ratings to all movies and push the same things to everyone, it gave me a ton of very useful recommendations. I had a 500 movie long queue on it for awhile, so each movie I got was like a surprise from my past self.
Then one day they failed to deliver a DVD to my place because my mailbox was full or something, and they closed my account and my queue was gone. I never bothered trying to open another one after that.
It's a completely different site depending on what you initially search for when you start using it.
The problem is, 80% of youtube userbase never really typed a search query for anything in the first place, and as a result the stuff they get recommended and watch is pure shit.
There is great content on YouTube, but what I consider great is completely different from the next person, which is why trending makes no sense...
I don't think it's possible to draw conclusions from one's own experience with youtube recommendations and extrapolate it to others or to any sort of judgement about the quality of the algorithms. We are simply not privy to what, exactly, youtube is doing.
I think it's wise to heed Guillaume Chaslot's warnings. In the same way that youtube exploited (inadvertently or not) glitches in the brains of preschoolers (remember "Spiderman and Heidi" videos? if not, don't look it up). There's reason to believe these things can fly under our radar and influence adults in ways that are not perceptible and not something we would approve of in advance.
BTW I was already aware of all the questionable things AI is used for, but Mickens' analysis is beautiful.
Sure the influencer stuff is pretty stupid, but whatever, it's not harmful.
1. Their aspirational lifestyles perpetuate feelings of inadequacy amongst their viewers, especially when their target market is often predominantly young people. Their audiences grow up with self doubt and anxiety by comparing their lives to that of the influencers they follow.
2. They are in the pockets of their advertisers and sponsors. Any recommendations they make are inherently disingenuous.
3. They’re often just really terrible people. Being the kind of attention-seeker who is able to command a large online following often seems to correlate with being a jerk. Just look at Jake and Logan Paul — two of the biggest stars of today, and both mired in controversy and bad choices.
I also have never met people with "no aspirations at all" and am not sure they exist. Although you seem concerned about diminishing people's ambitions, you also seem to denigrate people who want to have "a regular life", as if there's something wrong with people who want to settle down and raise kids and live a good life. That's never been my path, but I respect it a lot.
Mark Rober is a good example of an influencer who has stayed true to his core values while scaling his brand. He’s the Gen-Z version of Mythbusters.
Potato Jet is the opposite, his brand has become overrun with every cinematography company using him to peddle their wares. It’s hard to take anything he says as an honest review of the product.
Humans aren't farm animals meant to be kept nicely penned up.
An average person, not the average person. They'll at very least target the content by country, and if you have a fixed or rarely varying IP address (which I do at home, and may public wireless APs do in my experience) they can be more fine-grained than that and give recommendations based on what people in your more local area have searched for recently.
I had an Italian friend staying in my spare room for about half a year some time ago (hassles with previous landlord, took her and her fellow a while to save to the point where they could afford a place together). For many months afterwards I would get Italian language recommendations and adverts from youtube and others, even in incognito on a fresh device.
I just tried that and all of the top trending videos were something called "My Best Friends" followed by a long scroll of NBA videos.
I watched one of the NBA videos so, touché, youtube.
Are you a LGBTQ makeup artist rapper who gives money away and plays Minecraft? Straight to #1 Trending video for you. Dont forget the clickbait title and misleading thumbnail image.
Are you producing original and awesome content? No one will ever find your video.
I have no idea who this is, but can confirm that they take up something like 50% of the screen real estate. The other half is a BBQ channel.
What else should they be showing? How does the algorithm determine what are "cool videos and content" to someone who hasn't entered searches? It makes the most sense to put the top Youtube channels/stars on the front page, after all they are the most viewed.
>Are you producing original and awesome content? No one will ever find your video.
This is why TikTok has blown up; an absolute nobody can get a million views on their video overnight.
regarding what the article is talking about ... eh, it seems like they're saying it works fine but sometimes puts up videos whose politics they don't like. Short of going in and removing the stuff you don't like so that other people won't get to see it I don't see how you fix this. It's presumably the same algorithm that's working most of the time that's surfacing the crap.
christ, no kidding. this was my first clue that google has fundamentally changed as a company and it was time for me to leave.
ive been using gmail since it came out and watching YouTube with a signed-in, non adblocked experience for years. the algorithim doest give a SHIT. if i watch one "The Office" clip, thats suddenly 60-80% of my feed despite the fact that i dont particularly like the show. im not sure what theyve doing with all my data theyve been harvesting like gollum, but it sure isnt being used for my benefit. (i dont have kide, no one else uses my account, dont watch youtube through vpn, etc etc)
and dont get me started on the ads. ive never installed an anime girl fighting game, from gplay or anywhere else. stop it.
Now I actively push my normie friends to install uBlock Origin on their devices. And Vanced or NewPipe when it worked.
At least most television ads are placed in a slot designed for ads to be there. Though I still find them jaring for shows that arent up-beat.
To be honest, tv ads are the reason we dont watch a lot of TV anymore. The ad:content ratio is too high, and youtube has definitely as high or higher without an adblocker.
Edit: Also, I think many are jaded by cable where you pay and still get ads. Hulu has an ad-free tier, but I forget the history and if that's existed from the start. I do remember there being a lot of outrage about paying and still getting ads at some point.
One of the weird things tho, is that I didn't see Ads with Ad Blocker. Is there some regional thing that ad blocker doesn't work in the USA but it works elsewhere?
In terms of watch time and retention on site I imagine those binges are gold hence why they've ended up being optimised for.
I do not need to be constantly reminded of a single weird video I have clicked months before.
YouTube recommendations haunted me for life.
Oh, you watched a game streams? How about I show you three of that game on the top of the page until you stop coming back.
The only thing that works to get rid of them is to downvote it. I don't want to give the downvote, but it's the only way to make the algorithm understand I don't care about what they are showing me.
Whats worse is that for videos I haven't watched it recommends the same videos for weeks, even though I never watch it.
I feel like half of the recommendation slots are wasted in one of these ways.
It's quite something.
search for a famous song, and the recommendations are for a zillion cover versions of the same song, or other music by the same artist.
Granted the interaction model is very different, and who knows if I'd ever commit to watching even a 5 minute YouTube video on something I'm not primed to watch, but after Tik Tok, Youtube feels like a stale product of yesteryear.
There was a distinct point in time a couple years ago where this started to happen. Before that, my YouTube feed was always a diverse selection of all the different topics I had ever watched. Now, if I watch one car review my feed is full of car channels. If I watch one political video it fills with politics. Nothing I do seems to affect YouTube's singular focus on whatever topic I've most recently viewed.
I start out listening to a song with 1000 views, I get recommended 10k view songs, then 100k, and before you know it it's back in the mainstream. There's no way to surf a niche, to hunt in a pile of bin ends.
I imagine it's similar for conspiracy stuff. It'll point you in the direction of the most convincing nonsense.
1) CIA is interefering in US elections with evidence-free accuasation of Russia helping candidates who might reign them in to follow the law. Conspiracy? Or something to it?
2) Russia is paying bounties to kill American soldiers. Conspiracy? Or something to it?
3) Hunter Biden might be a bit corrupt. Conspiracy? or something to it?
4) The President has been compromised by Russia. Conspiracy? or something to it?
There will be incendiary stuff on all of the above absolutely full of utter nonsense. There will be reasonable stuff also assessing evidence and may even not come up with a clear and definite conclusion on one or another. Which of these will YT reccomendation push you to? I don't know.
(YT does much more cross-script indexing now than it did when I first started playing around with this, but it still tends to silo by writing system, and if it's relevant search works much better in the original script than relying upon auto-transliteration.)
I remember waaaaaay back in 2009-ish hunting for some new electronic music.
\begin{old_man_better_in_my_day}
First video I went on had about 1000 views. Every "related" video had around the same (sometimes less).
I spent 4 hours finding a bunch of new and relatively unknown artists because, rather than dragging me back to the 100k aggregate, I was allowed to explore the graph of "other people went on to watch this".
These days I'm lucky to see any sidebar suggestions that have fewer than 100k views.
\end{old_man_better_in_my_day}
I think the problem is the "one-size-fits-all" approach can't possibly capture how I would find it useful (music discovery via graph/tree traversal) vs. someone else (e.g. regular sky sports football highlights).
Doesn't this totally contradict the claim that youtube pushes people to the extremes?
By their metrics it probably looks great: lots of watch time! Interaction! But it's basically leaving the possibilities unfulfilled.
Now, I remember early days YT as well. It was much better at getting you circulating through a niche, but it did have the problem of getting stuck in a cycle of the same few videos. Modern YT just gradually moves you towards popular categories. Occasionally it does surprise, as with the months where "Steamed Hams" edits were recommended daily, or more recently, the train station ghost story song with no title. But that's mostly the exception.
Edit: And a big part of why I seem to have this feed is simply because I have "liked and subscribed" to channels in these categories. If you do that, the recommender biases heavily back towards them.
I went to every channel with useful educational content that I like to watch, subscribed to their feed (or even indivial playlists) with my RSS reader of choice (Feedly), and the videos get delivered and displayed inline in the RSS reader. No more YouTube binging because I don't find myself with the urge to visit the site, and so I'm never exposed to the recommendations. On the rare occasion where I want to watch an arbitrary video, I open a private browsing session so that the recommendations are uselessly generic.
IMHO it's better to have an account and configure it. The GDPR-like approach is much better than the do-you-mind-cookies-banners approach.
It only takes a couple of days for interesting stuff to disappear.
YT’s algorithm seemed to think that I needed to keep being exposed to this, so filled my recommendations with more.
Like the parent, it has taken over a year of me choosing ‘not interested’ for YT to stop trying to persuade me that I should hate most of mankind and actively seek to hurt people who are different from me.
I’m not sure how far from ‘Do no evil’ it is possible to get but this seems like it’s the opposite to me.
I refuse to interface with their algorithm, so I've begun hunting down alternative video hosts and the personal sites of the creators I can find and am preparing to leave their platform.
Alternatives are now very viable, with a platform such as BitChute soon to offer functionality such as live streaming [3].
[1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/08/15/youtube-will-end-em...
[2] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/85275454?hl=en
Yeah, I'm jaded and of course there's merit at the bottom of all this, but I really can't be arsed to read another high and mighty essay about how one person in the course of their duty led the entirety of humanity astray by recommending what people are engaged by online.
This guy spent years of his life making the world a worse place to live in, while taking home a fat salary, and now has somehow found his moral compass and wants to let us know. Yeah, no thanks.
Of course I've not worked at Facebook or Google, so maybe it'd be better if we saw a Facebook or Google engineer write that sort of article instead. Would be interesting to hear from someone who loves the company they work for, thinks their work improves humanity and considers their tech the coolest thing in the world.
Also to get a totally clean slate, which is still not perfect as you said, you have to delete subscriptions and likes as well as watch history. I've tried it a few times, but since I keep my subscriptions I always end up back on the same topics.
This makes it tricky to go through the backlog of a channel's content without watching it all in order. Sure, at first any random video will be new to you, but eventually you will start seeing more and more repeats, forcing you to start choosing videos more methodically from the videos page. Even then, it's tricky when the ones you've seen are not always marked consistently.
It doesn't seem like too much data to story for a company that offers gigs of free email.
(And no, I don't have a auto-deletion policy set up, I just double-checked)
This was around the time they changed the mobile progress bar behavior to require dragging to advance, rather than allowing you to jump to the point you select (i.e. away from the model used by the android brightness slider).
Doing that, combined with liberally using incognito mode for one-off video watching, helps keeps suggestions actually reasonable.
I like Youtube's recommendations. They just seem to get too narrow too fast instead of experimenting with showing you videos that it's less confident you might like. Thus resetting history is necessary.
I don't know how Youtube's algorithms work internally, but lately the front page is just so broken that it's baffling. The sidebar recommendations are another discussion -- those are possibly more pernicious but at least not as obviously dysfunctional.
How is it possible to have the largest repository of video content in the world, yet Youtube is only able to recommend me the same videos over and over again (half of which I seen already or quickly clicked out of). There is also a simplistic list of recommended categories, which I would change if I could, and those never change either.
If the front page were just completely random, it would be better than it is now. If I could actually tell Youtube to show me videos with a low-to-moderate view count and a high upvote ratio, then that would be fabulous and I probably would encounter new subjects and ideas rather than getting stuck watching the same garbage over and over. I'll never let my future children spend even a second on Youtube, because the stuff that it recommends to kids is so asinine that it just makes me mad.
I really believe that collectively we are all much dumber because of the Youtube's pathetically bad algorithms.
Someone may say, this would bother others, who saw something interesting but didn't click it this time. For me, it would train me to open those in a new tab or save them to my Watch Later list. Or just make it an opt-in feature, this aggressive renewal of the home page.
And god help you if you watch even one off-topic video - like another comment mentions, YouTube algorithm then concludes you want to see a million more. Reminds me of a Weird Al lyric about TiVo: "I watched Will and Grace one time, one day. Now TiVo thinks I'm gay."
Youtube recommendations 10 years ago was so amazing. Just a refresh or two and you'd get interesting stuff - obscure or popular, new or old. It didn't matter. Now, it's the same corporate, propaganda or popular vids over and over again. You bring up youtube and it's mostly the same exact recommendations from yesterday and the day before. They are literally cycling the same videos over and over again.
Why not make the default search and recommendations "PC" to appease the toxic journalists. But give the users the option to revert back to the "normal" search and recommendations.
Why can't they do it like they do search. "Safe", "Moderate", "The good old days" modes?
www.youtube.com###dismissable:-abp-contains(Recommended for you)
www.youtube.com###dismissable:-abp-contains(M views)
www.youtube.com###dismissable:-abp-contains(LIVE NOW)
There are some very fundamental questions that I don't think we have really good answers to yet.
- Like all social media, Youtube's algo is aimed at maximizing aggregate view time, and people working there are directly rewarded for that so it's difficult to change. You could bring up some obvious criticism, that recommending crap will destroy the value/brand in the long term. But that's extremely hard to measure/proof, especially when all short term KPIs point in the opposite direction. So you need the top leadership (who still has to answer to the Board/shareholders) to take the contrarian position on faith.
- The article/Chaslot claims that Youtube's recommendations are not about "what the viewer wants". The obvious question is then, how do you measure "what the viewer wants"? Youtube / social media's main metrics, engagement minutes does not seem obviously flawed. Even if they were, I have not seen any practical alternative (either in this article, or many other discussions). People often bring up analogies with nicotine and other addictive substances, that engagement is largely involuntary. But the main issue with nicotine is clearly harmful for health. If it weren't, there would probably wouldn't be much legislation around it, even given the adddictiveness. The more apt analog may be soft drugs like cannabis, where the legislative momentum seems to move in the other direction.
- The fundamental issue is not that social media is not giving people "what they want". It's that often people want things can be bad for themselves and/or for society. This is very difficult to resolve without taking a strongly authoritarian/paternalistic standpoint.
PS. Trigger for investigation was the event named “boobacalipse” - when recommender recommended videos with boobs on the first page for couple days.
What is even worse such algorytms force creators to become part of this harmful scheme. Knowledge is the thing that is hurt also. It should be out there. For decades people learned how to explain complex things in an easy way. Because there is no other way we can as people evolve and learn.
But now these algorytms promote the opposite. People who have nothing to say, people who complicate simple stuff beyond imagination are paid for doing so.
On the other hand people who have something to say are bashed because they are not engaging enought, they don't do videos that fit needs of video addicts. So they are not paid.
Such algorytms are the worst thing humand kind invented in last years. The devastating effect of these can be compared to drugs and gambling. It should be banned.
People tend to suggest this is intended behavior, my question is instead: Is the recommendation engine all that good to begin with, given how a lot of people find their recommendations confusing, lackluster, or downright bad?
So I did the following:
- installed a plugin that redirects me from Home to Subscribtins page, effectively disabling the Home page completely
- deleted all history from YouTube
- disabled all possible tracking and data collection
The recommened videos on the left of the video player are a lot better as a result. It sucks that these mostly focus on the author of the video but scrolling down usually reveals new content. It's not as good as what it used to be in the late 2000s but it's far better than the default settings.
Also don’t get me started on getting bombarded and suggested only “sound variations” videos which are noisy, rude and an attack on the senses - pure garbage content. Definitely a huge leap to assume I’ll find this interesting based on my previous choices.
Maybe instead of complaining here I should just go ahead and delete YouTube :)
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer
People are amused to read the story, and then go on their way.
But what happens if you apply a rather less powerful AI to something else even just a little bit less innocuous? (like optimizing to grab people's attention, as is happening here).
I think you can get spectacular results.
And of course even if the AI is low powered, it can still work as an effective amplifier for human activity, both good and bad: (See: Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica, etc)
Unfortunately, I realized that even a simple phase-locked loop -- like what you use to condition an oscillator to be in sync with TAI using GPS -- can actually hit absurdly narrow targets... e.g. two oscillators a continent apart humming away within parts per billion of each other, yet that kind of process isn't particularly dangerous. Even brining millions of oscillators into sync isn't going to cause some great harm.
I'm not sure how to reason about it, but I think people are much too concerned about AGI risks relative to dumb optimization process risks. It's similar to fretting about movie-plot villains when most actual evil in the world comes from indifference and bad incentives or people trying to "help".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape
They're typically used for reasoning about other things, but there's a few useful intuitions you can draw.
Notably, you can't optimize to a point that is not on the fitness landscape in the first place... so the following comic can't happen: http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
Which doesn't mean there can't be any surprises of course!
I suspect if you try and use it as a news source or anything other than entertainment it would be dangerous.
The algorithm delivers far, far less novelty than I want in anything except music. I very,very rarely want to see a dozen nearly identical videos on the same topic.
What is toxic is the viral ideology that infects the mind of many, many humans. We need education and social interaction to counterbalance the anti-truth conspiracy infection that social media is spreading.
The problem is, this will not (ever) work. Most people are mentally and/or physically exhausted after a long day of work, they don't have the mental firewalls to protect themselves against "cheap and easy" proposals (like, for example, to "build a wall").
I see conspiracy crap like cigarettes: even though everyone should know for decades now that smoking kills, the only way to effectively get rid of cigarettes is to ban their marketing and make them expensive. Going after the vendors is what must be done. And if that includes jailing the worst offenders, be it.
I find if you seed it carefully though it can be OK. e.g. Mine is mostly full of tech and trance videos. Hard for that to get toxic.
Politics, news, opinion pieces etc...and you quick get sucked into one of the echo chambers.
I suppose a case could be made that trance is my preferred echo chamber though...
It's the only way to see new videos from creators I care about.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Youtube's "recommended for you" section is a slot machine for whatever will engage you. For me it's novelty, for a lot of people it's an irresistible clickbait title. Nobody is immune to it, although I feel the hacker news crowd might be suspect to clickbait much more specific than whatever youtube chums the waters with on their front page when you're not logged in and have no history (open Youtube in an incognito window to see what I'm talking about, it's terrible).
I always wondered why Youtube never tried to get their algorithm to optimize for quality. For example, one way to do this would be to look at comment lengths and threads. I'd imagine that for more quality videos, you'd have people writing longer comments and responding to each other.
I'd be in favor of regulation enabling users to have some semblance of control over the recommendation algorithm given that it has such an enormous effect on their lives. Ideally you'd have competitors driving improvements like this, but Youtube is effectively a monopoly at this point.
I think it's fair to say that all recommendation engines deployed by for-profit companies have some element of recommending things that drive more revenue for the company. The question is, how much does end user give up, in terms of getting actually interesting recommendations vs being recommended something that is more profitable for the company, in exchange for getting things of interest to their attention.
I've seen enough to be convinced, anecdotally, that YouTube's recommendation engine is heavily skewed towards revenue-driving. For example, how much of what YouTube recommends is influenced by their big-money media customers? What users get is as marginally interesting as necessary to addict viewers.
Netflix is even worse (and they all seem to suffer from this to some degree). When I start it, it's an ad for some random thing. To find what I was watching last I have to either remember whether that miniseries is considered a movie or a TV show or what.. or, I can scroll down to Home, and "continue watching.." will be buried 3 rows deep and 2 columns over. So incredibly strange and unintuitive.
I guess they want their algos to be drive more engagement rather than just take you back to what you almost certainly opened the app to watch?
For sure, Youtube's (bad) impact on current generation children will be felt (in a bad way) for many upcoming generations to come. At this point, it's literally technology gone rogue.
I had thought maybe YouTube Kids wouldn't be as bad as the InstaSnapFaceTwit, but it's just as bad. The content recommendations are so bad that frequently videos will be in Russian or Korean (our native language is English). And YouTube Kids encourages kids to have zero attention span by showing all sorts of recommendations all the time. My youngest can hardly get through a single ten minute YouTube video without clicking something else.
Our new rule is they can have some occasional screen time (though playing with real toys and playing outside are preferred), but when we do have screen time, we can do activities that are creative or imaginative or strategic (like games or making art or writing). If we're using tech as a consumption box, reading is best, followed by good movies that we can watch together.
I'm honestly happy now that YouTube Kids has been banned from my house. I'd commend every parent to do the same.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...
I always use YouTube signed out anyways, but there's also this Privacy Redirect addon that redirects YouTube links to Invidious, Twitter to Nitter, etc:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redir...
Bing video search is by far better. Assuming you use DuckDuckGo type your search and follow it with !bv. The result is an excellent browsable display of videos that match your search well, that can be previewed by hovering over them, and the results aren't biased to just YouTube. You can also add emphasis to words in your search with the +/- operators and quotes.
Also the "up next" YouTube video is rarely as good as going back to the Bing search and choosing another video.
I'm hoping as a paying customer the company/providers will take my needs more seriously than the people who they have to milk for attention. It very likely won't make a bit of difference unless enough people do the same, and I have little hope of that happening. Most people would rather complain about free stuff than pay for anything.
In other words, an implicit contradiction.
1. I have two or three accounts specifically for what i want to view. I have an account where I only see video editing tips/how-to's, and a separate account for real estate, a separate account for personal interests, etc.
2. When I invariably see something interesting outside of my normal account's spectrum, sure I watch it - but I make sure and delete it from my history.
3. I aggressively click "don't recommend this again" for anything that falls outside of the account's focus.
If you watch social commentary, or God forbid anything to do with race or gender you'll be feed the worst parts of the internet.
Watch videos on the X86 instruction set, you'll get more of that. I tend to stick to music and programing.
I did find a gem where someone animated the original Star Wars episode 9 script, but even that was a rare diamond in the rough. For that one video , you have hundreds of people whining about how Disney ruined everything.
Sure, I may miss out on watching a few good videos, but I find at most I'll miss out on a good piece of trivia, at best I am more focused and in control over my attention.
div#secondary .videowall-endscreen .ytp-pause-overlay .iv-promo-video .ytp-cards-teaser .ytp-button
That first one is super-nice -- using that, I no longer need superhuman self-control to prevent my brain from falling into a YouTube black hole powered by millions of iterations of A/B testing targeted at my lizard brain. I just watch one video and then... close the tab.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-youtube-rec...
Not sure if this is the one I use, because I'm on mobile ATM. But it's a similar idea, at least.
www.youtube.com###related
the recommendations for me have been fine if not repetitive, just because I watched one video on a subject doesn't mean I want all the rest
Using scientific unification as a cognitive guide to understand this holistically: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0375714499/
Developers! Startups! Cap tables! Unicorns! Disrupt YC and tune it out.
I just found something similar on twitch, which for some reason didn't give me any ads. I wonder how long that will last...
The YT recommendations are very targeted, not only for local business but culture, and aggregate viewing patterns. Go to Washington DC, and check YT search patterns. Then, go to Seattle, WA, Memphis, TN, Austin, TX and compare these to each other.
It is a fascinating window into what YT thinks about the local population.
I’ve exhausted Netflix and Amazon Prime. I honestly use it so much I’d love like a Reroll button to show me completely fresh algorithm picks.
Yeah they’re toxic whatever don’t care, they’re excellent. Alcohol is bad for me too but I’m not gonna stop doing that either.
Sure, it works fine for "normal" content. That's fine. But for "divisive" stuff it's like having someone trying to push you off road at every moment
ffs
I like stakeboarding but I am 41 and I have not practiced skateboarding in years.
But I am on the left on politics.
I delete the youtube app and put a URL blocker to stop this behavior.
Thanks YouTube
So Google also doesn't necessarily recommend what the user wants.
It works surprisingly well, and well worth the effort.
Search for "Remove YouTube Recommended Videos, Comments"
I felt the "pull" of the alt-right because of YouTube;
It begins innocuously enough, someone shares something that's a thoughtful piece on "googles culture" or something which is left leaning, then in the recommendations there is a response, usually a passionate argument against SJW's or whatever, once you watch one it's basically game over (at least this was the case 1-2 years ago); My entire feed was completely inundated with 'Ben Shapiro owns the libs" or "SJW owned compilation" usually featuring that very loud and aggressive feminist lady with the dyed red hair in the thumbnail.
it was only with concerted effort (IE; clicking "Not interested"... a lot!) that I was able to eventually save my account, but I still get the odd Jordan Peterson and even right now I got a recommendation for "Power&Panic; the last days for Christian nationalism" by "The Thinking Atheist".
What's worse is YouTube used to require me to give a predefined reason to not recommend something; and "too political" was not one of those choices.
I'm absolutely certain that the same thing happens for others too towards the left. It's incredibly radicalising.
I just do not give a fuck about politics, my YouTube watch history is all music and conference talks.
I was not aware that this was possible back then.
Good advice though, I would suspect it works, I would hope it would. :)
The entirety of my recommendations are Jordan Peterson.
Wtf
another interesting example from the past, I watched a few science/nature focused videos on Antarctica. Then youtube decided I wanted to see Antarctica conspiracy videos about aliens, secret buried worlds, and Nazi holdouts.
That being said, I think the recs have become much cleaner lately. i.e. no more Russia Today videos in my feed.
In my experience both accounts do not try to push me to extremes. They DO try to keep me in a bubble, and both are very happy to lead me away from politics in general.
I fought with Youtube algorithm, and it's really really lame. I don't get any new creators or quality content. Even the education content it tends to suggest is absolute garbage.